At this day and age, Green argues that injustice is the root cause of TB cases and deaths, and that we can collectively choose to cure that injustice and smell the deadly disease in the end.
Connected: ‘We have to fight for a better end’: Author John Green on how USAID is threatened, efforts worldwide to eliminate tuberculosis
At that time, I knew almost nothing about TB. For me, it was a disease in history-something that killed the poets of the 19th century, not the present-fledged humans. But as a friend once told me, “Nothing is so privileged as thinking history is of the past.”
When we reached Lakka, we were immediately congratulated by a child who introduced ourselves as Henry. “This is my son’s name,” I told him, and he smiled. Most of the Sierra Leonians are multilingual, but Henry specifically good English dialect, especially for a child for her age, made it possible for us to have a conversation that could be beyond some of my halt phrases of my Krio. I asked him how he was doing, and he said, “I am happy, sir. I have been encouraged.” He loved that word. who would not? Encouraged, something like courage we include ourselves and others.
My son Henry was 9 years old, and this Henry saw the same age – a little boy with a spindle legs and a big, mindless smile. He wore shorts and an oversized rugby shirt that reached his knees. Henry grabbed my T-shirt and started walking in the hospital. He showed me the laboratory where a technician was watching through a microscope. Henry looked at the microscope and then asked me, as a lab tech, a young woman from Freetown explained that this sample had tuberculosis, even though the patient was treated for several months with standard therapy. Lab Tech started telling me about this “standard therapy”, but Henry was again pulling on my shirt. He walked me through wards, a complex of poorly ventilated buildings with a hospital rooms with forbidden windows, thin mattresses and toilets. There was no electricity in the wards, and there was no consistent flowing water. For me, the rooms were similar to gel cells. Before it was a TB hospital, Lakka was a leprosy isolation feature – and it felt like one.
Inside each room, one or two patients lie on the cot, usually on their side or back. Some sat on the edges of their bed, leaning forward. All these men (women were in a separate ward) were thin. Some were so weak that their skin was tightly wrapped around the bone. When we went down from a hallway between the buildings, Henry and I saw a young man drinking water from a plastic bottle, and then immediately vomited bile and blood mixture. I spontaneously got away, but Henry continued to stare at the man.
I thought Henry was someone’s child – a doctor, or one of a nurse, or one of the cooking or sanitation workers. Everyone knew him, and everyone stopped his work and rub his head or squeeze his hand. I was immediately mesmerized by Henry – he had some ways of my son, which was the same contradictory mixture of shame and enthusiastic desire for connections.
Henry eventually brought me back to a group of doctors and nurses, meeting in a small room near the hospital entrance, and then one of the nurses lovingly and laughed at him.
“Who is that child?” I asked
“Henry?” Answer a nurse. “The most cute boy.”
“He is one of the patients about whom we are worried about,” a doctor said that Dr. Went by Mitchell.
“He is a patient?” I asked
“Yes.”
“He is such a cute little child,” I said. “I hope he is going to recover.”
Dr. Mitchell told me that Henry was not a little boy. He was seventeen years old. He was so small only because he was malnourished, and then TB further reduced his body.
“He is fixing,” I said. “A lot of energy. He walked me around the hospital.”
“This is because antibiotics are working,” Dr. Mitchell explained. “But we know they are not working well. We are almost certain that they will fail, and this is a big problem.” He shrunk, became tight.
There was a lot that I did not understand.
I met Henry for the first time, I asked one of the nurses if he would be fine. “Oh, we love our Henry!” He said. He told me that he had already done a lot in his young life. Thank God, he said that Henry had a lot of love with his mother, Isatu, who had gone regularly to meet her and whenever she could, brought her extra food. Most of the patients of Lakka had no visitor. Many were released by their families; A tuberculosis case in the family was a tremendous mark of shame. But Henry had Isatu.
I realized that there was no answer from whether it would be fine.
He is such a happy child, he told me. He makes everyone happy. When he was able to go to school, other children called him a pastor, as he was always offering him prayer and help.
Nevertheless, this was no answer.
“We will fight for him,” he told me in the end.
Note the editor: This fraction from chapter 1 of “everything tuberculosis” is shortened for the purpose of this reprint.
