Today I am grieving for an 18 year old girl who has now been with us for nearly 2 months. She agreed for me to tell her story when she was still well, and now she is in great need of your prayers…
This story began 4 years ago when a 14 year old girl from the north of Kenya was married off to an older man. He got her pregnant immediately, and at age 15 she went into labour with their first child. As you would expect, she went into obstructed labour, and after several days her husband finally agreed to take her to the local hospital. The baby was already dead, and the doctor there did a caesarean section to deliver it. After the delivery she ended up with a vesicovaginal fistula and a rectovaginal fistula (a connection between the bladder and vagina and one between the rectum and vagina – leaving her permanently leaking urine and stool).
Two years ago she attended hospital and they attempted to repair her fistulae. The RVF was repaired successfully, but the VVF repair failed after she went home. She has continued to have urinary incontinence, and though she no longer had stool coming through the vagina, she was troubled by increasingly severe watery diarrhoea which became impossible to control consistently. During those years her husband divorced her and her family kicked her out. She ended up in Nairobi living with her brother's family, but he got fed up with her because of the smell and refused to feed her.
This January she ended up with a severe bout of pneumonia and was brought again to Kijabe, and on admission it was discovered that her loving husband had left her with another gift besides incontinence - HIV. So she was admitted and treated for pneumonia with good response. Her CD4 count (repeated now 3 times) has consistently been >500 (this means her immune system is not very compromised yet) so she has not been started on anti-HIV medicines.

After getting better from the pneumonia I was asked to review her fistula. I was pretty worried about her malnutrition and anaemia, and wanted her to be fed up before we operated on her, so when her brother refused to take her back we kept her in hospital to feed her up before surgery. Well, we did take her to theatre for her fistula repair, (which went quite nicely) but post-operatively we were troubled to find that no urine was coming through the catheter, though she still had urine coming through the vagina and this terrible watery stool. I assumed that the repair must have failed – but when we tested the site by putting dye in the bladder – the fistula repair was still intact. So then came my next panic – had I somehow damaged her ureters (the tubes draining the kidneys)? – but when we did ultrasound scans there was no evidence of that.
Well I won’t bore you with all the details, but suffice it to say that she has been very perplexing, but I think we are finally seeing the light. Here is a summary of her problems:
1) Watery diarrhoea and leaking through the anus, begun after her obstructed labour. Our infectious disease team decided after careful investigation that her diarrhoea was not related to an infective process.
2) Chronic renal failure (exacerbated by dehydration), and moderate bilateral hydronephrosis with cortical thinning (i.e. the kidneys are not working well, and probably haven’t been for quite some time)
3) Recurrent episodes of sepsis (infection affecting the whole body) – but not attributable to her opportunistic infections due to the HIV as her CD4 count is still high.
4) Leaking urine through the vagina – despite a successful repair of the fistula through the bladder and vagina.
Eventually we improved her kidney function enough to do a dye test to try and identify where her ureters went, and our results showed something I had never seen before – dilated ureters filled with air, and dye in her rectum.
Last week she was doing pretty well, and so we took advantage of the presence of a visiting urologist and borrowed some portable imaging equipment from our orthopaedic colleagues. We did a cystoscopy and identified both ureters – and saw no urine at all coming from either of them. We passed small tubes into the ureters and they both came to a dead stop 8 cm away from the bladder – and when we injected dye and took pictures that provided confirmation of complete obstruction of both ureteters 8 cm from the bladder (too high up for it to have been caused by my surgery, the urologist reassured me).
Right now we think she has one ureter that is communicating with the bowel (thus causing her diarrhoea) and one that is communicating with the uterus (which might explain why we didn’t see urine coming through the cervix during the fistula operation – we had her tilted very far back and the urine was apparently flowing from the uterus through the fallopian tubes and into the abdomen – on ultrasound scan during the post-op work up we did find free fluid behind the uterus which had not been there pre-operatively). This trauma almost certainly occurred at the time of her original delivery - I wonder what they were doing at her caesarean section.
We were hoping to open her abdomen this week and repair the ureters, but several day after the cystoscopy she got another episode of severe infection – and this time she doesn’t seem able to fight it. Her pneumonia is back with a vengeance and she is barely conscious, responding only by flickering her eyes when we speak to her. This morning she began coughing up blood, and our medical colleagues are afraid that she may well have TB. Clearly a major abdominal operation is not an option for this week, and I am becoming increasingly afraid that she will not survive to discharge.

All of us on the ward have become very fond of this young woman – during her months of feeding up she became friends with many of the nurses, and used to help the cleaners with their work just to help pass the time. As she has been deteriorating we are all anxious and grieving, though glad that at least she is here where there are people who treat her with kindness. And she has appreciated the love that she has been shown.
During all of her struggles here I have been praying with her almost every day, and our chaplains and nurses have been meeting with her to encourage her. And as she listened to talk on the ward and took heart from our concern and prayers for her, she decided that she too wanted to become a follower of Jesus. She has clung to Jesus during the weeks of hope leading up to the surgery, and the crushing disappointment as she realized she was still leaking, then the hope again as we told her that we may have finally figured out what is wrong, and then her realization that she is getting sicker and sicker. And now, when she can hardly respond, she has a stream of visitors who come to sit with her, tell her stories about Jesus and pray with her – and I hope and pray that while she can hear and understand, she knows that she is not alone.