A film-maker’s tryst with tuberculosis

It is a myth that tuberculosis (TB) hits only the poor, says 30-year-old journalist and film-maker Rhea Lobo. Mumbai-based Lobo is a survivor of TB. Not many survivors of TB, especially women, come out in open and talk about it. “People say that TB is just a poor person’s disease. That is not true. The rich are just hiding it. After I started talking about TB, every second person I interacted with told me that they had TB, including my best friend and my neighbour,” she says.

In February 2008, Lobo was hit by bone TB. “I experienced excruciating pain in the leg. So I went to see my orthopaedic doctor. A biopsy was done in my leg and the tissues were sent to two labs. The first report from the private clinic came out with a false negative. I was thrilled because I thought I didn’t have TB, and started consuming regular antibiotics without realising that I actually had TB,” said Lobo.

As luck would have it, the other lab report file was misplaced by the hospital and everyone forgot about it. “After one and a half months, I suddenly realised that I had not received the second lab report. After a duplicate report was issued, it threw up a positive TB diagnosis,” she says.

To make matters worse, six months into treatment and three surgeries later, a doctor pointed out to her that she’s been given the wrong dosage of drugs with respect to her body weight.

It took four years and extreme courage for Lobo to speak up. In 2012, while she was working as a journalist, she went ahead to make a five-minute film on TB, that won a second place in NGO Reach’s TB Tales Short Film Competition. “I was searching for a woman with TB to tell her story, and nobody was ready to show their face on the camera. It took me four years to come out and speak about it. But I felt it was time to start the dialogue and end the stigma.”

While she was interviewing community workers, she realised that a lot of women collect their TB medicines at night from the outreach clinics. “They do not tell their own families or neighbours for fear of being ostracised,” she said. 

 “I still had people come up and tell me, ‘Who will marry you now?’ and ‘Now you will never be able to have kids’”, says Lobo, who is now a mother of two kids.

She traverses the globe to spread awareness about TB. “If TB has left any scars on you, I want to tell you that you look more beautiful with those scars. Fight TB and stay beautiful!” she says as a parting shot.

Rare facts of Tuberculosis 

TB is the third leading cause of death in females aged between 15 to 44 years
TB can strike other parts of the body. It can hit your bones, intestines or brain
This kind of TB is non-infectious, unlike lung TB which easily spreads through coughing