These South African medical students aren’t waiting until they graduate to save lives

It made no sense to him. As a doctor in training he was learning how to save lives and sitting in front of him was a woman who seemed doomed to die, possibly unnecessarily. 

In his first year of medical studies Jonty Wright was horrified when a patient at Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town told him that because of an inherited condition her kidneys were slowly failing. Her younger sister had died of the same thing two years earlier because a donor couldn’t be found in time and now it seemed the same fate awaited her. 

“It was almost like she was waiting to die,” Jonty (20) tells us. “There’s nothing that medicine can do for the condition other than her getting a transplant.”