I never thought much about my health until a couple years ago when I began waking up to find my left leg numb and slow to move. The sensation traveled to my arms and hands and the blood vessels in my neck began throbbing furiously without warning. Wikipedia provided me a number of possible diagnoses, all alarming. I decided to seek medical attention.

One cold December night, not knowing what would happen next, I packed the first letter my girlfriend had ever written me into an overnight bag and got someone to drive me to the ER. I was aware that no insurance plan would cover my visit but figured I had better do something. After an hour or so, the triage doctor listened to my symptoms, took my vitals, checked my reflexes with a rubberized hammer and sent me home. He suggested I ought to see a neurologist but said there was nothing he could do. It dawned on me then that I had come to the hospital bearing none of the entry tickets – a gunshot wound, cardiac arrest or valid medical coverage.
When I explained my condition to a doctor friend the next day she said I should have tried to look sicker so I could have gotten the workup I needed. My symptoms continued and I increasingly saw getting admitted to the hospital as a pursuit in itself.

I began to feel an odd sort of estrangement. Thinking of it now, I can best relate it to the instruction a nun gave me during catechism: to be denied communion is the worst fate to befall one on earth, she said. Much has been written about how medicine in American culture has replaced religion. If so, then without health insurance I felt like an apostate.

And it wasn’t until a year later, after exploring a very different place and culture, that my petitions would be heard.

*

The outside world has largely characterized Haiti by the nearly 30-year period when the father and son dictators Papa Doc and Baby Doc terrorized the country with their black-garbed, sunglasses-clad death squads of secret police who operated as the Tonton Macoutes, Haitian folklore’s bogeymen. Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier himself went out of his way to incorporate Vodou imagery into his persona by dressing as Baron Samedi – a loa, or spirit of the dead – and speaking during radio addresses in the associated nasally tone.

The American-educated doctor was elected president in 1957 and consolidated power through force and by appealing to the country’s religious tradition that meshes Christianity with Vodou. Duvalier began a personality cult that famously used a propaganda image of Jesus’ right hand on his shoulder captioned, “I have chosen him.” Apparently, the doctor believed strongly in the supernatural forces whose icons he manipulated. When a rival was threatening to stage a coup and had gone incognito, Papa Doc followed a rumor that he had transformed himself into a black dog and rounded up and slaughtered scores of black dogs. The doctor was known to have his henchmen bring him the severed heads of political assasinees so he could “speak” to the dead.

But aside from any devotion Papa Doc may have held, he clearly realized Vodou is a potent force in Haitian society. An oft-repeated adage says the Haitian populace is “90 percent Catholic, 10 percent Protestant and 100 percent Voudoou.” By placing himself within Vodou’s pantheon, Duvalier raised his political fortunes and entered every part of Haitians’ lives.

I traveled to Haiti’s capital, Port au Prince, to meet up with a friend from New York who was doing translation at a medical conference addressing what, in terms of the Western model, is a lackluster health system whose standards of sanitation, availability of care and facilities lag behind any country in the hemisphere.

Afterwards, the two of us headed down the Gulf of Gonâve to the town of Jacmel, which had become an artists’ refuge by the 1950s. Lining the ocean with gingerbread houses and a few faded hotels, it had once dreamed of being Haiti’s Montego Bay before violence in the capital scared tourists away from the country.

Soon we noticed Vodou’s marks. Walking in the hills nearby we saw the house of a Vodou priest painted blue and bearing the red epigraphs of loas to denote association with the divine. We passed mango groves where pieces of cloth were tied to branches as signs of the deadly hex that would befall a mango thief.

At Cyvadier du Plage, a beachfront hotel harkening back to more aspirational times, I met a Swiss man who vacations there every year in order to bring donations to a family he has adopted. During lunch he recalled an instance of arriving to find one of the family’s daughters at death’s door. She looked ghastly ill and was alternately pulling off her clothes for comfort and piling on blankets for warmth. He tried to rush her to the hospital but the family refused to move her. He gave them money for a doctor and returned in the evening to check in.

Upon asking if the doctor was on his way he found they had summoned a Vodou priest instead. The ceremony began by sacrificing a chicken and proceeded to the priest dousing the sick with boiling water. The Swiss left, certain the woman would be dead by morning. But the next day he awoke to find her free of whatever had ailed her, learning there are some things in which outsiders should not interfere.

One night I found myself and my friend from New York slouching in the backseat of a battered 1980s gas-guzzler. The driver was a hefty, one-legged fellow named Jackson. In the passenger seat writhed a wiry-thin man with a milky cataract covering one eye name Babout. He was a reputed procurer of all things – and everyone around town seemed to know him well – but this night we had sent him instead in search of Vodou. The four of us had tanked up on Prestige beer and now were driving around town from one porch to the next, following word of mouth to determine the location of tonight’s ceremony.

I asked Jackson about his missing leg. He said he had been in a car accident near Port au Prince some years ago. His friend took him to the hospital but they found the staff on strike in protest of the government. His leg had not been badly injured, but by the time the hospital resumed functioning it needed amputation.
We had stashed bottles of Barbancourt rum at the floorboards as Babout had instructed and passed one back and forth as we continued in the darkness. Hours later we had driven deep into the countryside amid a growing fog that rendered the grassy path before us barely visible. Jackson heard a noise and switched off the engine to hear the faint sound of singing. Babout turned around with a big drunken smile, knowing he had come through. The car resumed along the path until we saw other vehicles cluttering a grassy clearing. Teems of people seemed to emerge from the bush and we disembarked to follow them along a muddy trail. The singing grew louder and eventually rhythmic hand claps penetrated the dense overgrowth.

We came upon a shelter of four wooden posts and a corrugated metal roof. Babout led the way through the circle of maybe a hundred people crowding around a priest performing the rites of a weekly gathering. Babout passed one of our bottles of rum around and took another bottle to the priest. The man dressed in a white gown drew the symbols of different loas in the dirt with a stick, invoking divine favor. He poured the rum onto the earth beside several uncracked eggs. The women surrounding him, who all wore red bandanas, kissed the ground as the crowd swayed back and forth clapping and chanting. As I drank and undulated I watched Jackson who had rested his crutches and propped himself up against one of the support beams, clapping and singing songs he knew by heart.

I realized in that moment that for all that Haiti lacks in terms of infrastructure the people retain access to a participatory religion whose rituals fortify them. This was the very thing that my society had denied me – a health of heart that comes with performing sacred rites and feeling in conduit with any kind of god – whether the rites offered up be slitting the neck of a chicken or swallowing a pill daily. After all, there is no more reliable drug than the placebo, which is named after a Latin word from Psalm 114, 1-9: “I have loved because the Lord will hear the voice of my prayer. Because he hath inclined his ear unto me: and in my days I will call upon him….I will please the Lord in the land of the living.”
Whether god is he of the Old Testament, the American Board of Medicine or the Yoruba, when the listening stops one might as well be dead.

*

Two days after landing back in New York I was taking a shower when I noticed my body was covered in red spots. Soon I had a fever, aches and fatigue.

I took the subway to 168th and tromped through the snow to Columbia Medical Center’s ER. I walked up to the admitting nurse, reticent after my last ER experience. But no sooner had I uttered “Haiti” and “spots all over my body” had she put down her clipboard and reached for a face mask. Fear of the other would work to my advantage now and it would be the entry ticket I had been searching for.

Minutes later I was in a private quarantine room with a comfortable gurney, a warm blanket and an IV. I had come to the hospital feeling as terrible as I ever, but upon arriving there and receiving what I had so longed for I was secretly fulfilled.
Soon a nurse came to take my temperature and four viles of blood.

Under those gleaming fluorescent tubes and in that hermetically sealed room, I would have entrusted her with it all. When a young intern arrived in his white coat and said I needed a spinal tap, I nodded like a child finally acknowledged by a cold and distant father. The doctor verbally prepared me for what he said was an uncomfortable procedure. I saw only a hand on his right shoulder, the message floating in the air, “I have chosen him.” I assumed the requisite fetal position as he readied the needle to be inserted between my vertebrae.

Hours later I awoke in a hospital room with the roofs of Washington Heights’s snow-covered row houses gleaming outside the window. I was attached to a machine feeding me life via a magic liquid and another monitor just there to make sure I was OK.

A comely, fleece-haired doctor appeared from behind a white curtain, greeting me with a pill in a small plastic cup. She told me I had had an allergic reaction to Meflaquin, the anti-malarial drug I had taken in Haiti. Call in a few days for test results, she said, and return in a month for a check-up.

After all of this time of not knowing the meaning of any of the symptoms I had experienced over the past year I felt somehow relieved just to hear a proper diagnosis of these unrelated ones, like I had returned to the religion I had prayed to but whose responses I had been denied. This doctor had done what I so needed – divined the origin of my woes, prescribed me restorative rites and allowed me into my faith’s sacred realm.

Brought into this world with cold latex covered hands, promised by the miracle of Western medicine a long life and a painless, anesthetized death and then abandoned, finally, I knew, I was in communion again.

Copyright Last Exit 2009