In recent weeks, the Out of Eden Walk project has been circling an overcrowded children’s hospital in Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia.
On Friday, I posted a dispatch on the National Geographic site about an infant who is fighting for his life in the hospital’s intensive care unit. Alex was born with multiple heart and lung defects. He is five months old, with strong pink hands, and a week ago he was dying. He is the nephew of my next walking partner in the Caucasus, a woman named Eka, who along with the baby’s mother, Liza, have been teaching me the meaning of fortitude.
Alex wasn’t expected to outlive an operation on his aorta. But on Friday he did, confounding everyone, including the doctors. (“Go out and buy Liza some ice cream!” the surgeon ordered, almost dancing out of the operating room.) Such private trials, such intimate agonies, occur all over the world. They happen by the millions, to all sorts of people. Yet for now, one boy’s journey continues.
The medical team says the infant still faces multiple operations to correct deformations of his right lung, heart, and thoracic blood vessels. While Georgia’s medical system is socialized, not all of these complex procedures are free. Readers wishing to contribute to Alex’s medical fund can donate to a French crowd-funding campaign launched by global friends of this family in need:
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