Empower Lisa

This is my sister, Lisa Muthoni. She's a young mum who never thought

that borrowing a friends makeup brush would be the beginning of a fight

for her life.

Lisa, a young single mum to 3 year old Tommy,

contracted MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant form of golden staph. This

infection invaded her body and eventually attacked her spine, leaving

her paralysed from the waist and wheelchair-bound as a T1 paraplegic.

At 1am on the 22nd of August 2015, she was air lifted by Red Cross

Careflight from Tigoni Hospital to Kenyatta National Hospital in

Nairobi, to under go life saving surgery to remove an CA-MRSA epidural

abscess that was strangling her spinal cord from T3-T10. After the

surgery, her doctors informed her that due to the extensive damage all

they way down her spinal cord and swelling, she was now a T1 paraplegic

and will be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. Surgeons had to do

a lumbar laminectomy to remove 5 bones in her spine because the abscess

had turned them septic. She was told due to the severity of the

infection, had it been left roughly 1 hour longer her spinal cord would

have been severed at T6 and 2 hours longer and she wouldn't have

survived.

Lisa spent 4 months undergoing a gruelling

rehabilitation program in the spinal ward of Kenyatta National Hospital

in Nairobi, but the hardest part was being away from her little boy

Tommy.

Initially told she would never walk again, her best-case

outlook is she may one day be able to walk an hour or two a day. She

will never again have control of her bowel or bladder. Never again will

she be able to chase her little boy around the yard.

Being the

remarkable sister she is, with so much strength, courage and

determination, Lisa has learnt to walk again slowly and for only 1-2

hours a day - an accomplishment that doctors told her may never be

possible. However, still faces the reality of being wheelchair-bound for

the rest of her life.

Her journey has not ended, after she

left spinal ward of the PA hospital, on 29/01/2016. She has on-going

rehabilitation and medical costs for the rest of her life. She needs to

keep up physiotherapy sessions and care for her young son while making

sure her health is not affected and being able to find funding for all

the extra costs involved in this drastic life change.

Our aim

is to raise some much needed funds for Lisa and Tommy to help ease the

worries they are faced with and provide Lisa with vital financial

support for her on going medical and recovery expenses.