"Take that, Aetna!"

Dr. Rick Hodes joined us tonight for dinner. A smallish guy that looks like Woody Allen, he came to Ethiopia twenty years ago for a year's foreign service and never left. A resourceful man, he found creative ways to finance the surgical treatment of kids with heart deformities, tuberculosis of the spine, and goiters the size of cantaloupes. He sends patients to other parts of Africa, India, and anywhere else that he finds surgeons skilled in treating the kinds of diagnoses that are rarities for us. The students get a chance to see conditions that they will hopefully never see again, and to see a truly gifted physician in action. He finds bargains for the most needy -- heart valve replacement for $2400 in India, spinal surgery for $1200 in South Africa. He adopted two twins with massive spine deformities in order to get them on his health insurance. "Take that, Aetna," he said, with a jab in the air. He ended up with five kids as a result. All are healed and successfully being educated in the U.S. One wants to become a pharmacist. I tugged on his sleeve on that one. "We have one great pharmacy school, " I told him. He promises to check us out. Tomorrow we are up and out to Project Mercy, which will take most of the day. I hear it's a beautiful drive; stay tuned.