Ebola: The Boy Who Drew to Recovery (Doctors Without Borders)

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Physician Daniel Lucey ’77, MED ’81, who recently spent more than a month helping Ebola patients in Monrovia, Liberia, at a Doctors Without Borders Ebola management center, writes on the Doctors Without Borders website about a 10-year-old artist who came down with Ebola and survived the virus. The boy was a patient of Lucey’s at the treatment center.

Lucey says that when the boy, whom he calls Momodu, arrived at the clinic, he was terribly ill. “He couldn’t even sit up in bed by himself. He had to rely on the nurses and stronger patients who were already recovering to help him drink and eat.”

But gradually, he began to get better.

“During his recovery, Momodu spent much of his time drawing pictures,” Lucey says.

“Each day he did a new picture–he showed me at least 10 drawings he had done. Of course, you can’t take anything out of the high-risk zone, not even paper, and so we took photographs of the pictures, and had them enlarged and laminated.

“Today we gave them to him as a leaving present,” he writes.

Read the full story, published Nov. 14 on the Doctors Without Borders website.

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