Fiona Waithera is a Kenyan woman who lives with a disease where her body unknowingly fights itself.
Speaking during an interview with NTV's Grace Msalame, Waithera stated that after a series of misdiagnosis, she finally discovered that she has lupus - an autoimmune disease.
Lupus is a long-term disease in which the body's immune system becomes hyperactive and attacks normal, healthy tissue. Symptoms include inflammation, swelling, and damage to the joints, skin, kidneys, blood, heart, and lungs.
Initially, she was diagnosed with rheumatic heart disease at the age of 12 and was put on penicillin injection which had to be discontinued after side effects.
After more tests were conducted, she was put on drugs to combat rheumatoid arthritis. An endoscopy also revealed that she had peptic ulcers and more drugs were prescribed.
Later in life, she developed extreme auditory sensitivity and any kind of noise was too loud for her. Before doctors could explain, she also started having uncontrollable jerks.
"I remember one day I got off a matatu at Odeon in Nairobi and instead of walking towards the campus, I walked towards Afya Centre. I was so disoriented that I had to call my sister to give me directions," she recalled in a separate interview with The Standard.
In 2015, doctors finally got to the bottom of what was ailing her and she was diagnosed with Lupus, the auto-immune disease and given drugs to manage the condition.
Waithera was able to brave through moments where she thought she wouldn't survive. She had gone ahead to even write her will, obituary and eulogy in preparations for the worst.
She narrated that sometimes she would be in so much pain that she would sweat profusely ad blackout. One time when she came to, Fiona found her mother weeping because she thought her daughter had passed on.
Auto-immune diseases make the body's immune system view organs as foreign objects and start to attack them. Hence, often doctors treat the symptoms that show after the body starts attacking itself, without realising the underlying problem.
An individual living with an auto-immune condition who spoke to Kenyans.co.ke stated that he was also misdiagnosed on two occasions.
"For me, I just went to a local clinic for some urine test but after saying the issue had persisted for a year, I was sent to Kenyatta to see a specialist," he stated in confidence.
Fiona now runs an NGO where she creates awareness of the different auto-immune conditions and how to manage them.
