Image Credit: www.nytimes.comA screenshot of the New York Times website featuring Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff’s article “The Worst Atrocity You’ve Never Heard Of,” which chronicles Dr. Catena’s work in the Nuba Mountains.
The lives of academic hospitalists are fraught with pitfalls and perils that can lead the unsuspecting far afield of their original intentions. It was in the murky depths of such professional perplexity that I recently found myself, lying in bed and attempting repose in vain. Thoughts of living a life underpaid, underresourced, and overworked buzzed in my psyche. After some tossing and turning, I slipped out of bed and into my home office and began watching cooking videos, which tend to have a calming effect on me, on The New York Times website.
The title of the first video in the queue, however, caught my eye: “The Worst Atrocity You’ve Never Heard Of,” by Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. To be honest, I try to avoid reading about the multitude of human disasters in Africa—the sheer numbers, size, scope, and hopelessness of human suffering make reading about them an exercise in despair and futility. Yet I clicked the link and began to see and hear about the plight of the people living in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan.
The Nuba Mountains, in the southern region of Sudan, lie north of a new border recently established between Sudan and the new country of South Sudan, for whose independence the Sudan People’s Liberation Army rebels fought in a war that ended in 2005. The rebels, however, continue to fight the Sudanese government in the Nuba Mountain region, with the Sudanese Air Force escalating a bombing campaign against the rebels in 2011. Since 2012, 3,740 bombs have been dropped on civilian targets in the Nuba Mountain region, resulting in countless deaths, shrapnel injuries, and burns.
In the midst of this mayhem, few medical providers have stood their ground. On January 20, a fighter jet dropped a cluster of 13 bombs into a hospital operated by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in the Nuba Mountains village of Frandala—the second time the hospital had been bombed. MSF suspended its operations in Sudan soon thereafter. That left exactly one hospital operating in an area of the Nuba Mountains the size of Switzerland, with a population of 750,000. And, since 2008, there has been only one physician, Tom Catena, MD, at Mother of Mercy Hospital.
Dr. Catena, who received his medical degree from Duke University after being an all-Ivy League nose guard and Rhodes Scholar candidate at Brown, came to Mother of Mercy Hospital after missionary medicine work elsewhere in Africa and Latin America. Since his arrival at the 435-bed hospital, he has been the only physician there other than the occasional visitor. He is on call 24-7 and leaves only rarely. The hospital runs off the electrical grid, has no running water, subsists on scarce medical supplies, and has nary an X-ray machine to aid in diagnosing more trauma in one year than an average ED physician would see in an entire career. Trained in family medicine, he performs more than 1,000 operations yearly on patients suffering from the most egregious trauma and burns imaginable, with only the most basic support staff.
“He is Jesus Christ,” asserted a local Muslim chief in The New York Times video, with any difference in religious background—Dr. Catena is a devout Catholic—fading into irrelevance in the face of such heroic care. From repairing orthopedic injuries, delivering babies, and treating horrific trauma and burns, to handling measles and malaria outbreaks, Dr. Catena ministers to the ill and dying without regard to religion or reimbursement.