Last October, Christina Assi, a 28-year-old photojournalist for Agence France-Presse, took a selfie against the sunset and WhatsApped it to her mother. “Be careful,” her mother replied.Listen to this article, read by Emily Woo ZellerAssi and some colleagues had driven to the border in southern Lebanon to cover artillery clashes between Israel and Hezbollah. Wearing protective helmets and blue flak jackets that said “PRESS” in large white letters, they set up on an exposed hill a good distance away from the smears of smoke on the horizon. Drones buzzed overhead. Suddenly, a tank shell struck right next to Assi’s position, killing her friend and colleague Issam Abdallah, a 37-year-old videographer for Reuters. The force of the impact slammed Assi into the dirt and pelted her with shrapnel.“What happened?” she screamed. “What happened? I can’t feel my legs.” Nearly all of her right calf and half of her left calf had been blown off. Within a minute, another shell struck the Al-Jazeera car, and it erupted in gassy, billowing flames.By the time Assi arrived at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, it was past midnight, and doctors assessed her chance of survival at 50 percent. A hospital near the border had already staked a fixator, a long metal rod with steel prongs on either end, into her leg to stabilize the bone and help control the bleeding.Fady Haddad, the university’s head of vascular surgery, and his team painstakingly repaired and reconnected the damaged blood vessels, but 48 hours later, they had inexplicably clotted and failed. Haddad performed three more operations, but again and again the vessels failed. The reason became clear: Microbes were feasting on Assi’s necrotic flesh. Despite aggressive debridement — daily surgical scrapings of her wounds to clean out the infection — and expensive medications, the tissues in her leg grayed at the edges. The hospital’s microbiology lab identified three possible culprits: two bacteria and a fungus, a mucormycete mold. But as the infections kept worsening in spite of medication, one of Assi’s infectious-disease doctors, Souha Kanj, suspected there might be yet another fungal pathogen at play.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Before we begin, would you repeat these three words? Apple, penny, table. I had my dad do something like this, too.The evening before he was supposed to catch a cross-country flight to me, in Providence, R.I., my 72-year-old father said he didn’t need to set an alarm because he always wakes up at 6 or 7, a statement I knew to be untrue — or, at the very least, unreliable. He lives near Half Moon Bay, Calif., and now that he is retired, he usually rests in bed until 10:30 or 11. I suspected he no longer remembered how to set an alarm, and I couldn’t stop myself from asking him.“I don’t need an alarm!” he bellowed. And so I set mine for 10:30 a.m. my time, 7:30 a.m. his, to allow him a fat hour and a half to get ready. When the bells startled the silence of my office the next day, I called him, and he sent me to voice mail. I dialed again.“I’m up!” he snapped, panicked. Then he hung up. Ten minutes later, he phoned: “Why didn’t you give me any information? I don’t know the flight number or anything. I’m flying blind here.”I had texted and emailed him his itinerary several times and discovered, with surprise, that he had lost the ability to open emails and text messages on the phone he’d had for years. He lives alone. His wife, my mom, was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 7 and died when I was 10, and he never remarried. I have no siblings. He has no nearby friends on whom I felt comfortable imposing to help him. I decided that I should just instruct him to check in at the ticket counter. The only thing he really needed was his passport and a credit card.“We have a problem,” he said, calling me again. “My passport is expired.”“We only applied for your passport in 2018,” I said. It would be good until 2028, I told him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.