This past spring, Kate Jackson gave a biology final in Walla Walla, Washington, and the next day, after strapping on her leg braces, she flew to the Republic of Congo. Jackson, a herpetologist, writer, and faculty member at Whitman College who studies the reptiles of Central Africa, was gearing up for her fifth expedition to the region. But this trip was different. It was her first since being diagnosed with transverse myelitis, a neurological condition that had her teaching from a wheelchair as late as a month before her trip.
Slideshow: Monkeypox in the Congo
Prior to this year’s trip, Jackson was last in the Congo in June 2008. “In April 2009, I had trouble walking, and in two weeks, I couldn’t walk at all,” she says. “It took innumerable doctors, but they decided it was a virus ...
