Mountains Beyond Mountains (Adapted for Young People) by Tracy Kidder

Author:Tracy Kidder [Kidder, Tracy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-98088-5
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2013-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

Slowly, the MDR project in Carabayllo, due to Jim Kim’s and Jaime Bayona’s dogged determination, was making progress with the fifty patients. Farmer and Jim continued to share results with the Peruvian TB doctors, who began to acknowledge Socios en Salud’s successes. No one referred to Farmer as a médico aventurero anymore. Cynicism had been replaced with respect. One day I accompanied Farmer on a consulting appointment at the Children’s Hospital in downtown Lima. He wore a rumpled black suit and a tie. Though traffic delayed his arrival by an hour, the hospital staff and doctors greeted him without being annoyed. If anything, they treated him as someone special, even a hero.

Inside the hospital, marching purposefully down a concrete-walled corridor of the TB wing, his stethoscope draped over his neck as he prepared to see patients, Farmer suddenly stopped. A family of three stood just ahead of him: a five-year-old boy, his mother, and his father. The slender mother, wearing a skirt and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, shyly hung back, but the father approached Farmer. The men gave each other a fierce bear hug. The boy, slightly chubby, healthy-looking, also ran toward the American doctor, though with an odd, waddle-like gait. Farmer crouched down and wrapped his arms around the child. “Christian! Look at you!” he exclaimed, his face bright red. Farmer had the wild-looking grin with which he greeted old friends. He turned to me. “This was a terrible case,” he said in a low voice, in English.

Nearly two years ago, a doctor from the Children’s Hospital had called Socios en Salud and told Bayona, “We have a child here you have to help us with.” Christian had already been there for months, weighing only about twenty-two pounds, his lungs filled with TB bacilli and an oxygen mask continually strapped over his mouth. The bacilli had now begun eating his spine and fracturing the long bones of his legs. The Peruvian doctors were following WHO protocol, retreating Christian with standard firstline antibiotics that had failed to stop the TB in the first place. The three-year-old was only getting sicker, wasting away before everyone’s eyes, as the mutant germs flourished. When Farmer and his team intervened, proposing a very aggressive combination of MDR drugs—based largely on Farmer’s guesswork—they needed official approval from the Peruvian doctors before the drugs could be administered. Farmer confidently told them he had consulted world-renowned experts and read all the literature. All that was true. What he didn’t say was that there was nothing concrete in the pediatric literature about treating MDR, and he was basing the dosing only on the drug manufacturer’s recommendations, which had nothing to say about children.

The Peruvian doctors gave their consent. The young boy was clearly dying and in agony. Why not try it? Through email, Farmer dutifully kept track of Christian’s progress and eventual recovery, but he hadn’t seen him or his family until this moment. Despite the damage to his legs from MDR, Christian could actually run! As he

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