The bottle hanging on the wall beside Ma Xiumei's bed acted as a medical drip, but it has been dry for a week.
Ms Ma, a 53-year-old who lives in a remote village in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region's Xiji county, can no longer afford daily transfusions to control her hepatitis B infection.
She was diagnosed with the disease in July last year and has since spent more than 10,000 yuan on treatment. Her husband died more than 10 years ago, and some of her seven children have not yet reached adulthood.
Her family savings have been exhausted and she is thousands of yuan in debt. One of her daughters pays for some of her medicine, but the younger woman can barely cover the cost with her monthly income of 1,800 yuan.
Another daughter, Wang Caixia , just finished junior secondary school, but there is not enough money to send her to senior secondary school. 'I was jealous watching others go to school. But I don't have the money to go,' Caixia said.
When she realised the extent of her family's financial woes, Caixia wanted to leave home in search of paid work. But her mother stopped her. 'If you go, nobody will cook at home,' Ms Ma said to her daughter.
Caixia's brother still has one year left in junior secondary school, but dropped out to work in the fields previously tended by his mother. The teenager was also diagnosed with hepatitis B shortly after his mother was told she had the condition, but the family is too poor to pay for treatment.