Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [14]
When the doctors came back to see him that afternoon, they told him they couldn’t operate and remove the tumor. It was too large and they didn’t have the right equipment for the procedure. They asked if he had any family or friends abroad. He said that both his son and his brother, my father, were living in New York. The doctor gave him a copy of his medical file and wrote a letter for him to take to the American consulate requesting a visa to travel for the surgery.
When my uncle returned home to Bel Air and, in a hoarser voice than he’d left with, tried to explain his diagnosis to his wife, his congregation, and even on the telephone to my father and Maxo, with whom he was planning to stay in New York, no one quite understood it. None of our relatives knew what a radical laryngectomy was. We didn’t even know anyone who’d had cancer. As for permanently losing one’s voice, the possibility seemed so remote that it almost appeared to be a curse that, as some of the members of my uncle’s congregation declared, only American doctors could cross an ocean to put on you. People were either born mute or not. They did not become mute, except temporarily if they were struck with a bad case of shock. Usually those cases could be easily cured with herbal remedies. Why not my uncle’s?
To put everyone at ease, my uncle said that maybe the doctors in New York would know more. Maybe he would discover other options, other solutions. Nevertheless, he gathered all his papers—land titles, everyone’s birth certificates—made out a will, and turned everything over to the daughter of his friend, then twenty-six-year-old Marie Micheline, whom he’d adopted and made his own. He wanted desperately to take Tante Denise to New York with him, but there were two problems. First, she was deathly afraid of flying. Then, because the likelihood of his returning to Haiti increased with his having a wife there to return to, her visa request was denied by the American consulate. Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise hadn’t spent much time apart since he’d broken her calabash thirty-two years before. However, time was of the essence, so he had no choice but to travel without her, even though he feared that he might die and never see her again.
In New York, Uncle Joseph had been at his son Maxo’s apartment for barely twenty-four hours when he woke up in the middle of the night with a sharp, throbbing pain in his neck.
Maxo was out with a friend. Uncle Joseph somehow managed to stumble out of bed and over to the only phone in the apartment, which was in the kitchen. He dialed my father’s number. My father was living in East Flatbush, three subway stops, a thirty-minute walk and a fifteen-minute drive from Maxo’s place on Ocean Avenue. My uncle heard a crackling as my father’s phone was picked up.
“Hello,” my father said, his voice creaking anxiously. No good news could ever come at this hour of the night, he told himself.
My uncle pressed his lips as close as he could to the mouthpiece to whisper these three words: “Frè, map mouri.” Brother, I’m dying.
“What’s wrong?” my father asked.
“Gòj,” he replied. Throat.
My father told him to open the front door to the apartment and wait. Then he hung up and called an ambulance. When he called back, Uncle Joseph didn’t answer, so my father got dressed, jumped into his car and sped toward the apartment building where my uncle was staying.
The paramedics made it there before he did. When they arrived, they found Uncle Joseph lying on the floor near the front door, barely conscious, clutching his neck, gasping for breath. They tried to put a breathing tube down his throat, but the tumor was blocking his airway. So while racing toward Kings County Hospital, they performed a tracheotomy, drilling a hole in my uncle’s neck to insert a tube there so he could breathe.
My uncle had his radical laryngectomy the next day. When he came out, he was never able to