Happiness

 

Heurese

I examined Heurese for the first time in 1999 when she was quite ill. Six months later in 2000, we brought her to Peoria and she was operated at OSF-SFMC in Peoria and she did quite well and returned to Haiti. 

This was my first post on Heurese. ( I have lightly edited this post and corrected some of the typos. ) The date was December 2005 and this post would be the first of many on Heurese and her medical saga. 

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December 2005--

A few years ago a Christian missionary brought a 24-year-old Haitian lady to me. The lady's name is Heurese. She was suffering from a leaky aortic valve for many years. Her home was Bainet, a small village on Haiti's southern coast. Her father is dead and her mother would cry over her as Heurese laid in bed swollen with fluid and listening to tapes made by her sister Evita. Evita's tapes encouraged Heurese to stay alive and not let Haiti steal her away. 

My exam of her heart revealed her valve to be severely incompetent keeping her in congestive heart failure and barely able to function. (Her blood pressure was 150/0 due to the abnormal backflow of blood from her sick aortic valve.) 

Six months later we were able to get her visa and needed to get Heureuse on the plane for the States. Evita traveled all night 5 hours through the Haitian mountains in the dark to retrieve Heureuse from Bainet and brought her to Port-au-Prince. Evita refused to let Heureuse die.

Her surgery went well in Peoria and she began to smile and wear jeans and look quite chic. She underwent some dental work and learned some English. We then ended her dream and took her back to Haiti.

During the last few years, she has been unable to find work. Evita went to the Dominican Republic and never returned. None of her family has ever heard from her again. Maybe she lives in a battey and is the slave of a buscanero. No one will ever know.

Heurese lives in a slum in the capital and had a baby. Heurese showed me a picture of the baby's young father who died shortly after vomiting blood. Heurese's baby had her assortment of diseases of the poor including impetigo and malnutrition. How Heureuse and her baby survive here is something that I cannot understand. Maybe Heurese still hears Evita's voice...

Several months ago a feverish Heurese found us again and said she was about to deliver another baby. Her heart sounded leaky again but I decided not to get an echocardiogram. If she survived her pregnancy, I would order another echo. She delivered naturally in the General Hospital in Port-au-Prince and both she and the baby survived. I don't know how.

Medicines from Peoria have helped her but she needs surgery again. OSF will probably refuse her redo surgery that will be identified by the echo we ordered today. 

So Heurese lives in a city where kidnappings, beheadings, carjackings, and rape are daily events. She has her two babies and Evita is gone. When Heurese is gone, her two babies will be alone or with many other homeless Haitian street children.

Heurese still smiles a lot in spite of her life in the hell of Haiti. Heurese means "happiness".

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Comments--

• Years later, I asked Heurese what it was like to return to Haiti in the early 2000s. She replied that no one was there to meet her when she arrived at the Port au Prince airport and that she took a small crowded tap tap back to Bainet. She also said that when she arrived at her mom's shack in Bainet, her mom wanted nothing to do with her because Heurese had returned to Haiti from the promised land. 

• I felt so sorry for Heurese as I imagined how she must have felt after surviving major heart surgery in the US only to be rejected by her mother for returning to Haiti. She was no "conquering hero".

• In 2005, when Heurese is sick as described in this post, I knew that OSF would not accept her back for repeat heart surgery. OSF's lawyer sent me a certified letter in 2003 stating that OSF would perform no more surgeries on my patients. And this medical abandonment of Heurese would make my job much more challenging than it already was. Other medical centers in the United States are not keen on accepting international patients--especially ones like Heurese who have already been treated by another medical center.

• Years later I would find out from Heurese how her husband had died. 

• Heurese taught me so much on persistence and tenacity and her will to stay alive. And in the early 2000s, this was just the beginning of her saga that no one could have predicted.