'Make sure she works hard - I want her to follow in my footsteps': Dying words of loving sister who succumbed to Covid
Kazeema Afzal has been through more in the last five years than anyone should go through in a lifetime.
She saw her sister Areema Nasreen die in April 2020 after contracting Covid-19. The 36-year-old was one of the youngest medical staff to die in the outbreak; she was a staff nurse at an acute medical unit at Walsall Manor Hospital where she had worked for 17 years.
The two were inseparable - both had got married in Pakistan on the same day to brothers, lived together for six months and had three children each, at similar times.
Whilst Areema would go on to train as a nurse and work at the acute medical unit at the Manor Hospital, Kazeema would start as a housekeeper then, after her sister's death, train to become a healthcare assistant and eventually achieve a qualification to work at a mental health unit in West Bromwich.
But in 2023 tragedy almost struck again when she was attacked and nearly strangled to death by patient Kieffer Sutton who was jailed for life for her attempted murder and a string of other offences.
Kazeema lives with that, but more than that the pain of her sister's death every day and believes she will never get over what happened to her.
She said: "She had been working there for three months when she began complaining of back ache but we just thought she'd overdone it.
