The Life of one Patient - Memories of Dr. Paul Farmer (1959-2022)

Abstract

Doctor Paul Edward Farmer passed away on 21 February, 2022 of an acute cardiac event in his sleep at University of Global Health Equity in Butaro, Rwanda, a medical institution which he helped found. Launched in September 2015, UGHE is a new kind of university focused on delivering the highest quality of health care by addressing the critical social and systemic forces causing inequities and inefficiencies in health care delivery. That week, Paul had been teaching and treating sick patients, one of which passed away from complications of late-stage AIDS, a young man in his mid-thirty’s whom Paul had cancelled a trip to Sierra Leone for. He was devastated when he lost the patient, after trying out different life-saving therapies, interventions, and possible hospital transfers to save the life of one patient. A few days later, exhausted and in bed to rest for only a few hours, the man who had the world’s biggest heart, himself died away of a cardiac event. Part of me thinks that Paul internalized the pain his one patient was suffering.