Читать книгу Blaming No One - Dan Inc. Whitman - Страница 12

February 29, 2004, Jean Bertrand Aristide fled Haiti as rebels advanced on Port-au-Prince. The same day in Washington, I came down with a nasty fever. A week later I was one hundred percent blind, with a fifteen percent chance of recovery in the right eye only. Coincidence, you might say.

Disclosure: early in 2001, as spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, I contradicted Aristide on Haitian radio as instructed and permitted by my bosses. It had to do with rectifying a point of fact. The night of March 5, Molotov cocktails came over the wall to my quarters in the Turgeot neighborhood of the capital. I guess it was meant as a lesson, but with these things I am a slow learner.

The day of Aristide’s departure in 2004, I watched with Haitian ex-pat friends in Washington as the drama unraveled leading to his ouster. That same night I knew something was off. Monday morning I made it to work, but took the rest of the day in bed. Wednesday things began to look cloudy, and by Friday I had no sight at all. The fever wouldn’t break. Doctors didn’t want to lower the temperature with meds, as that would introduce a variable and make it harder to get a real diagnosis. My eyes burned in their sockets, and something called angle collapse resulted. Imagine a romantic evening with chestnuts in the fire, but consider it from the point of view of the chestnut.

In the unlikely event this should ever happen to you, have a Princess phone in the room: after a week in bed I felt my way around the buttons on the phone, and dialed 411 for a taxi to the emergency ward. Imagine the thirst if you should ever, pardon the expression, burn in hell. And imagine Satan himself telling you, “No water, it might lead to a false thermometer reading.”

If the ophthalmologist ever looks in your eye and says, “Oh wow,” this is not likely to bring good news. If he calls all the residents on duty to come over and have a look, you can count yourself cooked. The docs all along K Street puzzled over the anomaly, and sent me to the parasitologist, the rheumatologist, the immunologist, the cardiologist, the oncologist. I think they had support group meetings to keep up their own morale in the case. CT scanners whirred and blood labs spun. Medical doctors become very disconcerted if they cannot even name the condition they’re dealing with.

I had out-of-range Westergren — whatever that is — and absolute Monocytes. The Neutrophils didn’t look proper, and iron, at 20, was perilously low. The good news was that my mediastinal structures appeared normal, and there was no pleural effusion. Hey, take gifts wherever you can find them. Three weeks later, I received a statement in the mail. I couldn’t read it at the time, but it said, “Blood culture positive for Alpha Hemolytic Strep,” something I was told could lead to, well, death. No hard feelings at this late date for the late delivery.

Months later, the rheumatologist admitted that after he’d seen me, he was creeped out and wanted to wash his hands many times. He had said to me at the time, “We think it’s a virus.” I countered, “We both know that you say ‘virus’ when you have no idea of what’s going on.” He admitted this and we had a good laugh.

You can learn from adversity, it yields useful information. First, you find out quickly who your real friends are. Second, pain trumps despair, and may actually be a remedy for it. Third, if nature’s toolbox of intimidation does not overtake you at a time like this, then other forms of it are not likely to do so later in life.

The optic nerve had a field day, trying to pull in data but bringing only trash – graffiti passing by at the speed of an uptown express train, the rose window of Chartres, fish doing backwards cartwheels. Gorgeous images, if false. I now want to thank my optic nerve, publicly, for its valiant efforts those first few days.

People found out about my predicament, and called from different continents to say they would “pray” for me. I didn’t know exactly what this meant, but I accepted all offers. Laser treatments pierced the iris so the liquids could find their proper balance in that squishy organ. Well, both of them. Haitian friends asked my permission to look into the causes of this clearly Vodou-caused incident. Russian friends said, “Eat blueberries.”

One cold day I was wandering on K Street with my starter sunglasses and cane, trying to find a medical lab. I couldn’t see a damn thing. I walked into a wall. A kind soul came out of nowhere and said, “So where did you really want to go?” He directed me to a door. I thought, “Kindness on K Street! This must be what it’s like to be a pretty girl!”

What was the meaning of all this, if any? My Haitian friends told me the healing “Right Hand” of Vodou was hard at work, in combat against the harming “Left Hand.” They said they had identified the perpetrator, a foreigner living in Port-au-Prince at the time. What do I know?

The rheumatologist said, “OK, we give up. What do you think you’ve got?”

“Vodou?” I said, and he admitted that all the sages of K Street had come up with no better explanation.

Gradually I got better. One afternoon in late May I entered the National Cathedral as instructed by my praying friends, and saw the actual colors from the stained glass windows. You can’t imagine such richness. And so, there goes the still unsolved mystery of a touch of blindness. Haitians, they say, are 70 percent Catholic – and 100 percent Vodou. After a decade of debate, the editors of the Associated Press decided that Vodou was not a superstition but a religion, and gave it the correct spelling and a capital “V” in their style book.

Read into this what you will. The whole adventure might have been a matter of blueberry deficiency. On the powers and perceptions of Haitians, and their extreme kindness, more later.