They shared Charlotte’s home — one room, eight feet by eight feet, with rough concrete walls, a tin roof and a dirt floor. Elina’s operation was being moved up, because another patient had become too ill for surgery. After almost four hours of dragging herself around the hospital — barely able to catch her breath — Elina joined three other Team Heart patients in a room. The mother of another patient, seeing Elina’s distress, had summoned them and called Charlotte back to the hospital. Worse, she had missed a week’s worth of her heart medications, which had run out ahead of her scheduled hospital appointment.

Source: New York Times September 16, 2018 07:00 UTC