Thembela

I picked her out because she looked like a child. Propped up in the bed, hospital gown slipping off her shoulders, the oxygen mask smothering her face, I thought she couldn’t be more than fifteen-years-old. I flipped through the paper chart and my American brain struggled to comprehend what I was reading. She was actually thirty-two – an HIV-positive South African woman who was also epileptic and dying from progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, a disease that eats away the white matter...