The bug first bit Mary Jo Frawley 10 years ago, when the Long Beach Memorial Medical Center nurse fell in with some local doctors and wound up caring for sick children in remote areas of Guatemala.
Diagnosis: A severe case of wanderlust with a purpose, an affliction that over the last two years has taken Frawley from the war zones of Sri Lanka to Ebola-ravaged northern Uganda.
Now she's in Sierra Leone, where a brutal eight-year civil war has ended but regional upheavals have left shifting masses of refugees with little medical help.
For this, Frawley, 46, has quit her job, taken on a roommate to help with the rent on her oceanside bungalow in Sunset Beach, left her boyfriend for months on end and exposed herself to risks that could curdle a brave heart.
And she's having the time of her life.
"It just feels like I'm doing the right kind of medicine," Frawley said earlier this month before leaving for Sierra Leone, her fifth stint as a volunteer with the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Doctors Without Borders.
Frawley is part of a pool of international health care workers from which the 30-year-old medical-relief group sends about 3,000 volunteers a year to 90 countries in which war, natural disaster or isolation have limited access to health care.
Those missions have taken volunteers like Frawley to the fringes of human existence, where they have endured bombing raids, been forced to decamp ahead of military advances and waded into the midst of fatal epidemics.
But they also have helped establish life-saving treatment centers in remote regions, conducted immunization programs in Third World countries and raised international awareness of war atrocities and the plight of refugees.
Frawley's first stint two years ago was a nine-month stay at a hospital in Mallavi, Sri Lanka, in territory held by Tamil separatists.
It was an eye-opening experience that exceeded anything Frawley encountered in American emergency rooms and pediatric intensive care units. Among other skills, she learned to discern the subtle differences in sound between an outgoing rebel shell and an incoming government-fired shell.
"I remember standing outside with a friend in our nightdresses at 2 in the morning and we're looking at each other and saying, 'Is this the time to get into the bomb shelter?' " Frawley said, perched on the edge of a chaise lounge overlooking the nearly deserted beach in front of her bungalow. "We kept going back to that line from 'Pulp Fiction': 'Are we in trouble yet?' "
