My name is Phumeza Tisile, I am 23-years-old and live in Cape Town. In 2010, I was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was forced to stop my studies at Cape Peninsula University of Technology to go for treatment. Despite this my condition did not improve, and after about five months of treatment, first for “normal” TB and then for multi-drug-resistant TB (MDR-TB), I was finally diagnosed with extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB), the deadliest form of the disease.
Being misdiagnosed twice meant I received the wrong medication for many months, an oversight that cost me my hearing. Hearing loss is a known side-effect of the painful daily kanamycin injections that I took as part of my MDR-TB treatment.
The XDR-TB treatment was extremely difficult too – I had many setbacks and was in and out of the hospital. The medicines made me feel even sicker than I already was and I would dread seeing the medicine trolly coming down the hospital aisle. I even had surgery to remove TB from my lung, resulting in a broken rib and a collapsed lung.
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