Ali Chandra is a pediatric nurse on the Africa Mercy. We first met in the crew galley while the ship was docked in Liberia in the crew. She's an amazing young women and I'd like you to read this post:
"One of my favourite things that we do on D Ward is the complicated process of rebuilding faces ravaged by noma. I've written about it a lot before, telling stories of patients like Aissa and Toyi, but I just can't get over what we're able to do here. Over 140,000 new cases are reported to the WHO every year, and they estimate that over half a million people are living with the effects of it on a daily basis. Half a million people missing parts of their faces, missing noses and cheeks and lips, jaws fused shut by the inexorable devastation of this disease.
Here the numbers have faces, damaged though they may be. They have stories and names and little brothers who shriek with laughter and sleep under their beds with mama, and we are the ones who get to change their futures.
I've been overwhelmed with such a sense of putting things right down in D Ward recently. I stand with the nurses at shift change and announce the day's victories and I my face hurts from smiling. It's not that everything is perfect; it never is in this fallen world. Little Moukaela, the boy who's been waiting since 2010 for his surgery, has a troubling spot on his new lower lip that needs a miraculous intervention if it's going to heal properly. Ama, a woman who had a large tumour removed from the side of her face, is waiting to find out if it's cancer or not. Togan is still here, a month after his first surgery, the open wound on his rebuilt jaw healing millimeter by millimeter.
But through it all is the knowledge that people are going to walk out of here changed. Papakey is in the bed next to Toyi and had the exact same surgery yesterday. He didn't lose his nose to noma; it was cut off by robbers with a machete, but he's suffered the stares and the shame just the same. He came in with a hole in the middle of his face, a face that now sports a brand-new nose. Despite the slowness of his healing, Togan is getting better. Last week we were planning more surgery to graft skin over the open area. Yesterday we realized that we didn't need to. Today he called me to his bedside in the middle of my charting just to remind me how handsome he thought he was.
As I sit here pregnant with our first baby, it's suddenly become so much more than just surgery to replace missing parts. It's hard to explain, but I think of this baby and I know in the deepest part of me that I would go to the ends of the earth to put right anything that was wrong with him or her. I understand now, in some small measure, the aching desire for everything to be okay, for this child to look the same as everyone else.
Just below my cabin is a ward full of patients who have been denied that right, some for decades of their lives, and what we do for them is more than just cutting and suturing. It's putting to rights something that went horribly wrong, whether it was a disease or a maniac with a machete. It's giving them back what Dr. Gary calls the right to look human."
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