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Public Healthcare Policies, And Inadequate Health Awareness

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Growing up a lower income community of Atlanta, Georgia allowed me to see 1st hand the perpetual cycle of absent public healthcare policies, and inadequate health awareness. My mother and aunts were results of this neglect and misguidance, consuming unhealthy diets, and sedentary lifestyles not realizing the damages they were causing to their bodies. Their actions quickly turned into day to day complications from high blood pressure, heart disease and other health disparities that ran ramped within the African American community. Just like many other people, they were within the grips of illness that could have been avoided, or even treated with preventative health services, and quality risk reduction strategies.
Not only was I exposed to the ineffectiveness of “equal healthcare”, I also got to see their consequences or the lack thereof. My senior year of high school, before my 1st year of college my mother became ill with what the family thought was just a simple stomach virus; but in all actuality her kidneys were failing. Summer of 2006 my mother was diagnosed with End Stage Renal Disease. Over the years her uncontrolled high blood pressure, which could have been prevented , had destroyed the arteries with in her kidneys leaving them functioning at 10%, leaving her needing dialysis for the rest of her life. Listening to her diagnoses left me with questions of how this could have been avoided, what could have been done, what I could have done? The only way I knew to get

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