Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [34]
The small windowless waiting room in the public hospital’s radiography department was filled with many more patients than it could hold comfortably. More were already interned in the hospital and were lying on gurneys in the narrow hallway. Others were sitting on the few available chairs or on the chipped cement floor, their fractured limbs wrapped in homemade bandages and slings. Others tried to cough discreetly even as they held their chests and hid the bright red spots they’d spat into their handkerchiefs, a sure sign of tuberculosis.
When my turn came, I followed the attendant into a dark room with a giant machine. My uncle and Bob were told to wait outside, leaving me in the dark with the stranger. The spark was like a flash of lightning. The attendant came around again, this time putting me in profile.
My uncle and I waited in the hallway as Bob had his turn. Pacing back and forth, my uncle kept his head down and both his hands in his pockets. Since his surgery, hospitals made him extremely nervous.
A few days later, the doctor sent word for us to return to his office. When we entered the examining room, he was wearing a white surgical mask.
“The X-rays have returned,” he said, looking only at my uncle. His voice was slightly distorted by the mask, so he raised it slightly to make sure my uncle heard him. “There’s a problem.”
He knew that Uncle Joseph couldn’t speak and did not expect a reply.
“These children,” he said, glancing momentarily at Bob and me, “appear to have tuberculosis.”
My uncle raised both his eyebrows to display shock. I too was surprised. After all, we didn’t have a cough that made us spit up blood. Would we now have to be quarantined, be sent to the sanatorium?
One of Liline’s cousins, who was named Melina after Granmè Melina, had gotten full-blown tuberculosis at sixteen. She had visited Liline now and then, and I’d watched as she’d regularly stop whatever she was doing to double over and cough. She was eventually sent to the sanatorium and died a few weeks after her seventeenth birthday.
Sleeping on the top bunk above Liline and her, those few times she’d spent the night, I’d probably caught the tuberculosis from her and passed it on to my brother. Or maybe Bob had caught it from a kid at school, a kid who didn’t even know he had it, and had passed it on to me.
“Fortunately their tuberculosis is not active,” the doctor said, “but we have to treat them immediately to be sure it stays that way. The treatment will last six months.”
Does that mean I’m not going to die? I wanted to ask.
My uncle’s mouth narrowed into a small O. Six months of treatment meant six more months in Haiti. That would mean six more months with our uncle and aunt and our cousin and friends, but also six more months away from our parents and brothers. Just then, sitting in the doctor’s old and prickly wicker chair, I was not concerned about any of that. I simply didn’t want to have tuberculosis and I certainly did not want to die.
I would think back to this moment when, early in my father’s illness, after a weeklong hospitalization following an emergency room visit for shortness of breath, he was quarantined at Coney Island Hospital because his skin test was positive. The doctors had not yet eliminated the possibility of tuberculosis, and all the hospital workers, along with my father’s visitors, were ordered to wear surgical masks before they approached his bed in an isolated section of the ward. Perhaps recalling the horrors of tuberculosis—it was once as deadly as AIDS during the virus’s early years—the specter of mortality it posed, and the fact that in Bel Air the word “tibèkile,” or TB carrier, had often been hurled as an insult, when he was quarantined at Coney Island Hospital, my father asked my brother Karl to tell the doctors that a lot of Haitians test positive on the skin test even though they don’t actually have active tuberculosis.
“I don’t have this disease,” he insisted.