Help Ruchi get back a normal and healthy life

In 2011, our sister, Ruchi, had been diagnosed with a severe case of Tuberculosis Meningitis. The inflammation of the membranes and high brain pressure almost led to losing her eyesight. As an immediate and only medical intervention, she underwent a surgery (TP shunting) in which a hollow tube was inserted in her spine to drain out the cerebrospinal fluid from her brain. After the surgery, she had a slow recovery but nonetheless was doing well.

She started getting minor headaches post surgery that turned persistent and severe in the last two years. She made hospital visits and ran through all of the medical tests (mainly MRI and X-rays), only to be diagnosed by doctors as “just a stress headache or migraine”. With every hospital visit, we failed to come to a concrete understanding of the cause.

Around the first week of August this year, she started to get fever with chills and rigors, and started complaining about stiff neck, severe headache, back pain coupled with some instances of vomiting. Having identified all of her symptoms as meningitis, we rushed her to the ER at Nepal Mediciti hospital on August 14. After going through her past medical history of meningitis and ongoing symptoms, the doctors suggested to have her admitted for observation. On the same night, she continued to have severe pain and had multiple episodes of vomiting. The doctors then performed Lumber Puncture to diagnose whether it was a case of meningitis. Due to the acute brain pressure, she also had double vision and a sign of sixth nerve palsy (causing problems with eye movement). The consulting neurologist and neurosurgeon suspected of a blockage in the tube that had been inserted the first time she was diagnosed with meningitis and suggested for a revision surgery to get the tube out and put in a new one.

However, when they conducted the surgery they found a lot of infection around her spine and pus in the tube, thus it wasn’t a completely successful surgery. The neurosurgeon claimed this to be a very unusual case, as they were unable to determine the actual cause of the infection. In the meantime, the doctors have suggested her to be hospitalized for another 6 weeks for observation and multiple other tests before performing another surgery.

Currently, she is under a lot of medications to control the infection and brain pressure. She still has double vision, and if all of this is not controlled in time, the probability of losing her eyesight and of her condition deteriorating is extremely high. She has been in the hospital for 12 days as of today and the hospital bills keep adding up. As mentioned above, she still needs to be admitted until her infection rates are stable enough to perform the surgery. Also, she will still be expected to receive post-surgery medications and treatment, which eventually means that she will have to be admitted in the hospital for days exceeding our expectation.  

She has constantly shown her willpower to persevere and fight through this battle for a second time. This unexpected hit, has taken a huge mental toll on all of us, but maybe more so to her.

With the ongoing pandemic and our own concerns of Ruchi’s health, we as a family have been struggling financially to keep up with the medical bills that has been calculated so far, and we cannot even think about how this will go from hereon. As we are trying our best to navigate through this difficult and unexpected situation, we would appreciate any kind of help from you.