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Tabitha is a 43 year old woman, the youngest of nine siblings. She has never married but has two children. Her daughter of 20 yrs trained in tailoring after her primary school education. Tabitha had no money to take her to high school. Her 15 year old son is in primary school and stays with his grandmother up-country.
Tabitha works as a bar maid and earns KSh 2,500 per month. Her daughter makes KSh 2000 from tailoring monthly. They use the total earnings (KSh 4,500) to pay for house rent – KSh 2500 which doesn’t have electricity or piped water. They also support the grandmother and the son upcountry.
Tabitha developed abdominal pains that caused her to stop working in August last year. As this continued, she got worried and decided to come to the clinic for medical attention because she was getting dizzy and started vomiting.

After her examination, we realized in spite of her abdominal swelling she had been losing weight steadily and we considered a diagnosis of tuberculosis. Abdominal TB is hard to diagnose in the setting of other tropical diseases seen in our country. Most of the TB screening tests available for free in Kenya are those of pulmonary TB. These are done routinely in most government clinics. However, in cases where someone develops extra-pulmonary TB, the diagnosis is usually delayed because they need special testing.

The Tumaini fund is available for our patients and we were able to send her for an abdominal ultrasound scan. This showed the disease process in the abdomen and enabled us to start her on TB therapy which she has been taking for 4 months and has continued to show steady improvement. She has also started Anti-retroviral therapy this month from our clinic.

She now shows marked improvement and although she is still taking medicines, she has no job. Thanks to “Tumaini” Tabitha has regained hope of going on with her life.