Instaperil

(In the picture above, Henry is at the far right, along with other survivors of MDR-TB and me, author and unpaid coffee company intern.)

Greetings from Sierra Leone. In 2019, I visited a tuberculosis hospital here and met a kid named Henry. He was very sick but also full of joy. He’d already been at the hospital for months, and his TB was not responding to treatment. He was 16, but looked no older than my nine-year-old son Henry.

Lakka Government Hospital is the best place in SL to receive treatment for drug resistant TB, but it is still dramatically underfunded. Especially back then, the newest and best treatments were simply unavailable, and many patients died as a result. 

Over the next three years, Henry got so sick. Standard second-line treatment failed. He was a patient at the hospital for over THREE YEARS. He was such a special kid–one of his doctors referred to him “as the one who helps others”–and the staff was heartbroken as they watched him get sicker.

But then, through support from Partners in Health and Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Health, Henry became the first person in Sierra Leone to be treated with the newest and best combination of drugs for his TB.

He survived. He is cured. 

I saw him today. I wept. He is in his first semester of university now. When I asked him how he was doing, he said, “So great.”  

People ask me why I am so fixated upon TB and furious about it.