Thomas Birmingham

The first time I remember hearing it was in fifth grade. “Those poor kids in Africa.” When the Student Council leaders at my Catholic school said those words, they were presenting the latest school-wide service project to my class: raising $1,000 to send food provisions to a small town in Uganda. The town was marked by a dot on a blank map of Africa, and I doubt anyone involved would be able to recall that town’s name. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter.

They drilled a hole in his back. They put metal tubes in his body. He came to school with a cane. Then, under KHS’s revised attendance policy, he got detention. Aaron De Marco, senior, has cystinuria, a rare and aggressive condition which causes him to produce kidney stones every single day. Symptoms include anything from sharp, intense pain in the lower back to constant stomach pain and blood in the urine. Not long after he was diagnosed in the fall of 2017, he found out he needed surgery.