I thought I would never walk again

At 20, Caroline Nyawira has gone through the wringer but thanks to getting the correct diagnosis, she is finally putting her life back on track.

I was a happy-go lucky girl going about my life and making plans for my future when disease struck. My woes began with a simple cold in 2015. It then graduated to spells of dizziness and fatigue. There were days I would drag myself out of bed to class. I was in high school at the time. Some days, I just couldn’t get out of bed due to a swollen leg. On many occasions, school nurses gave me medicines that did very little to help. When I couldn’t keep up with others in class, my grandmother came for me in school and took me to her place in Nyahururu where she started tending to me. We went from one health facility to the other and each time walked away with drugs that did not help.

One particular night, at 1am, I woke up with an uncontrollable headache. They became habitual and they would leave me in a daze. That is when my parents took me to Mathari Consolata Hospital in Nyeri where I was admitted for two months without getting tested. A later diagnosis revealed that I was suffering from systemic lupus, a condition in which the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks healthy organs. It may attack the skin, kidneys, the brain and any other organ. A Second Former then, I had never heard of lupus and I struggled to understand what the doctors were saying. I was later traumatised when, after googling the disease, I found out that it couldn’t be treated but only needed to be managed.