Of all the birthdays he’d celebrated in his life, Emmanuel’s 43rd would turn out to be something truly extraordinary. Just a few days after turning the page to a new year of life, a new chapter began. Emmanuel was wheeled into an operating room on board the Global Mercy™ hospital ship, where he became the very first patient to receive surgery during the field service in Freetown, Sierra Leone. There, in a surgery that took just 48 minutes, Emmanuel was freed from the tumor that had been growing on his neck for 4 years.