The End of the Julio's Story

If you're confused what this is continuing, click here to read the beginning of the story.  


To bring you all up to date, Julio’s immediate problems were resolved by a short hospital stay, but the urologist never came to see him (although he did come to the hospital) and none of the prescribed lab tests were even run: several blood tests, a urine culture, and an ultrasound.   Instead he went home with mysterious white pills and a course of antibiotics to deal with the lingering infection. 

About a week later, after dinner in the evening, we found Julio had silently curled himself into a fetal position in the laundry pile.  With considerable effort we were able to get out of him that it hurt.  A lot.  It looked like he was passing another stone.  It was at this point I went on a quest through the unreliable and slow internet to identify the white pills they sent home with him – wanting to know what exactly they were before dosing him with other painkillers.  Turns out I was glad I took the trouble, since they WERE painkillers.  So we let him huddle in the corner for a while with a hot compress on his back while the other kids went up to bed, until eventually he fell asleep.  This launched me on a several day crusade to figure out home treatment for kidney stones - ultimately a futile quest.  One website described it quiet well, noting that one treatment "doesn't actually seem to do anything, but will give your loved ones something to do besides handing you the ibuprofen."  Watching some one, especially a child (even this stoic child), pass a kidney stones is an exercise is feeling useless.  We sat there with him, holding the hot compress, as he lay down and ignored us entirely.  But watching the crisis was a strong reminder that we weren't sure all the loose ends were tied up - was this just about managing kidney stones, or was there something more still wrong?   He was still complaining about back and side pain. . . 

So we went on a an adventure to a urologist in Pètionville – a wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince.  We frequent Pètionville for shopping and nice lunch breaks from the kids.  It’s relatively easy to get down there and there are lots of things available to buy.  Expatriates of all kinds frequent the area, hearing French and English is not uncommon and foreign faces are a staple of the restaurant businesses.  So.  We set off at 8:30, a mere half hour later than I asked the driver to come get us, but still with plenty of time to wind our way down the single road to the town in the inevitable stop and go traffic.  The driver managed to find us the right street, but we ran into a little trouble with the numbering.  First we stopped outside 75 – we’re looking for 57.  Then we drove along looking for it, and the numbers were going down so I thought we were fine.  But no, the driver spotted a nice-looking clinic on the other side of the street and insisted that was it.  It didn’t appear to have a number, and after all I know nothing about street numbering here so it might well be that things are organized some funny way that 57 is across the street.  But I doubt it, so then he asks someone.  I didn’t understand the whole conversation, but I gathered that he got some directions.  Following these, we blaze down the next block, barely catching a glimpse that there’s another clinic on the corner, and turn around, coming back to the nice-looking place.  The driver stops and encourages us to get out and ask.  So I do, Julio silently following, but it quickly becomes clear that’s not the place we’re looking for so back into the car we go (were I properly Haitian I suppose I would have waited for the front desk attendant to come back to actually ask.  But waiting for things like that can be a long business, just to confirm what I was already confident of).  There was more, but eventually I insisted the driver continue down to the next block, to that clinic we flashed by so quickly, which he did over vocal objections.  Of course that was it.  

The actual medical visit didn't accomplish much of anything - we spoke with the urologist, who couldn't help us without imaging, which he didn't do in his office.  It was comforting, in a way, to talk through the management of the problem with him  - drink lots of water, giving pain killers at a crisis.  But really left us no further ahead.  I then embarked on a several weeks long effort of deciding how, where, and if to get this imaging done. All the phone numbers for the labs were out of date, so each time I wanted to call and get a sense of whether the lab could do the work, and if so, for how much, it was a multiple step process.  Each time I thought I had a plan, I'd talk to some one about it and several reasonable objections would occur, destroying said plan.  Hindering all of this was the fact that the power went out for four days, leaving me with no way to charge the phone I was using.  After much searching, it became clear that the only option was to go all the way down into Port-au-Prince (a much longer and trickier business than sticking to Petionville) to the lab the doc had originally recommended to us (read: we went back to plan #1).

I'll stop there for today - this is getting long.  Check back this weekend for the ending, and a healthy helping of my introspection of my time in Haiti.