Kimberley Wenas
Kimberley is a versatile stylist. She has collaborated with big names such as Winne, Veronica van Hoogdalem, Yellow Claw and Kim Feenstra. She is also committed to helping young adults with a congenital heart defect like herself. Since childhood, Kimberley has been in and out of hospitals for check-ups and open heart operations. She recently had open heart surgery where she received a donor heart valve. Despite the successful operations Kimberley has undergone, she has felt quite insecure. “When you come to the cardiology department as a child, your parents are always allowed to come along. But when you turn eighteen, you go to the adult department and it is assumed that you come alone,” she says. In addition, at the age of eighteen you will also be asked whether you wish to have children. “At that time I was not concerned about this at all, but the doctors wanted to know this so that they knew whether I would need extra guidance.”
Want to have children
Kimberley says that it is not self-evident that as a woman with a congenital heart defect you can have children. “If you want to have children, you will be guided even more intensively, because your heart has to work harder. The doctors will check whether your heart can handle this and additional tests will be done to see whether your heart defect is hereditary.” The stylist believes that you will then visit the hospital even more often than you already did. “That is a personal choice of course, but I found it especially difficult mentally. I had to think about my desire to have children at an early age and had no peers around me with whom I could talk about it,” said Kimberley. “I would have liked to hear the experiences of peers. I missed those stories when I was younger.”
2023-11-18 10:45:52
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