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Instaperil

@instaperil-blog

(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.

It’s because of Henry.

“I like being alone.

Therefore, in order to win me over,

Your presence has to feel better than my solitude.

You’re not competing with another person,

You are competing with my comfort zone.”

Horacio Jones

Can’t wait for the next John Green YA romance novel about the tragic yet hopeful romance between a protagonist who hyperfixates on the history of TB and their love interest who hyperfixates on maternal mortality rates in Sierra Leone

Bwhahaha

Was anyone going to tell me that John Green has rejoined Tumblr? Or was I supposed to learn this from his Vlogbrothers video myself? 

So The YouTube video description above contains a link to his Tumblr. I don’t know exactly how to do that but I might have a link to his Tumblr below if I can, but first I wanna link to the awesome coffee company that sells expensive but very good coffee (from what I’ve heard) that supports healthcare in Sierra Leone. Just in case, you didn’t read my other post about this that appeared right before this one, the infamous post about John Green is a post that makes him sad and he doesn’t like it because he feels like it’s making fun of other people‘s sexualities, and he doesn’t like that. As a gay dude, I think that’s really cool of him. Please don’t spam him with that because it makes him uncomfortable.