Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [46]
Treating sickness as a business opportunity has just about killed the joy of healing, the very reason most doctors and nurses wanted to go into it in the first place. Part of what was so attractive about the Honduran trip was that none of us would be making a dime on it; our care was to be free to the patients. We would be tending to the sick because they were sick and for no other reason. The problem with trying to comply with quality-improvement initiatives and worrying about lawsuits and coding guidelines and all the other stuff we have to do is that doing the right thing for the patient gets buried in all the muck. It’s like trying to be an Olympic high jumper with ankle weights. The Honduras trip would be free of all that other stuff. There would be nothing for us to do but the right thing.
At our last organizational meeting, just before we left, it was announced that we would be staying in a coastal resort, Hotel Villas Telamar, rather than being put up by native Hondurans and sleeping in hammocks. The first two trips had been strictly dental, with less than half as many people involved. Because this was a much bigger expedition, finding enough natives to put us all up in hammocks had turned into a logistical nightmare. Villas Telamar was an all-inclusive beach resort, formerly owned by United Fruit and used as a resort and housing for its executives and their families. They gave us a really good deal. I still wasn’t the world’s greatest sleeper and was frankly relieved by the prospect of a bed in a hotel instead of a hammock in a hut.
We had two hundred volunteers: nurses, doctors, dentists, optometrists, pharmacists, translators, and all-purpose helpers. There were more than a hundred crates of donated supplies and medicines. We were each paying most of our own travel expenses, with local fund-raising and charities covering the rest. A couple of drug companies were chipping in. We were all giving ten days of our time to help the poorest people of one of the poorest nations in the hemisphere.
Short time here, long time gone. The reason to try to be good, smart, kind, and on the side of angels is because it’s more fun and because there really aren’t any angels.
It took us eighteen hours, on three flights and a long bus ride, to get to where we were going: Tela, Honduras. Gavin Archibald, a dentist from Texas who had recently married his office manager, was in charge of the mission. On the longest leg of the flight, from Houston to San Pedro Sula, I fell asleep and dreamed I was back in junior high. I had no clothes on. Everyone else was dressed. I had a baseball glove. No one else had a baseball glove. It wouldn’t be fair to have figuring out dreams be important to mental health.
There was a physical therapist named Crystal who might have been flirting with me. She gave me a neck rub during the layover in Chicago, and I would have followed her anywhere. Even with my marriage going poorly I hadn’t dared to even so much as flirt with anyone else prior to this.
By coincidence the prime minister of Honduras was with us on the flight from Houston to San Pedro Sula. He and the dentists from Texas were chatting, sipping drinks, in the front of the cabin like they had gone to Andover together. The prime minister made an impromptu speech to us about how important and significant and needed our mission was and how grateful he was and how grateful the people we helped would be. He mentioned that the Haitians manipulated the data when they claimed to be