Lead image for Rare condition that made a nurse go blind overnight.
Two years ago, on a January morning in 2024, Faith Mwangi woke up to a world that had gone dark on one side. Her right eye had simply stopped seeing.
She rushed to an ophthalmologist, expecting drops or perhaps glasses, hoping her sight would be restored. Instead, the doctor told her that a blood clot had travelled through her body and lodged itself in an artery feeding her eye, cutting off blood flow. The damage was already done and irreversible.
“The ophthalmologist told me that if the blockage had been caught within minutes, my sight might have been saved. It hadn't been. By the time I sat in his office, the window had long closed,” says Faith.
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The eye specialist suspected the clot hadn't formed in the eye itself but had travelled from elsewhere in the body, so he sent Faith to a cardiologist. That doctor ran the standard battery of tests. Nothing showed up. “My heart looked fine on paper,” Faith says.
It was only when she was referred for a CT angiogram, a detailed scan of her blood vessels, that something finally appeared on an image. Her right carotid artery, one of the main vessels supplying blood to the brain, was dangerously narrow. Follow-up blood tests measuring inflammation came back elevated. She was finally diagnosed with Takayasu’s arteritis, three months after her first visit to the doctor.
Takayasu's arteritis is a chronic inflammatory condition that attacks the aorta, the body's largest artery, and the major blood vessels branching off it. Over time, the walls of these vessels thicken, narrow, or weaken. In its advanced stages, the disease is often known as 'pulseless disease' because the arteries in the arms can narrow so severely that a pulse becomes weak or impossible to find.
In retrospect, Faith realises that the early symptoms of the disease manifested a year before her diagnosis, with unending fatigue at the end of every day. She didn't think much of the tiredness at first. She was newly a nurse then, and exhaustion after a long shift felt ordinary.