Morie Abibu, a 56-year-old father of three, lies on a hospital bed in the humid Sierra Leonean heat. He is paralyzed from the neck down. After months of immobility, his soft muscles sag and pool on the bed, barely hanging onto bone. A mass is growing at the base of his skull, pressing against his spinal cord. And as it grows, it obstructs the nerves that control his breathing. He is slowly suffocating to death.

Abibu needs neurosurgery to remove the deadly pressure.

"Without it, he will have a devastating end of life," says Dr. Marco Lee , past president of the Western Neurosurgical Society. "When your breathing starts to go, it's like this constant feeling of drowning."

That would have been Abibu's fate before this year, but today, he is at Connaught Hospital under the care of Dr. Al

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