by Lytrice Adams
Raquel gazes out into the distant mountains as she ponders the answer to my question: “how do you spend your day?’” For the average seventeen year-old girl, this is an irrelevant question. There’s life with all its action and promise ready to be discovered, ready to be lived. But for Raquel here in a little village on the slopes of the mountains in Grenada, the question requires some thinking. Some gathering of her thoughts. She turns her large brown eyes and dimpled cheeks shyly towards me, and her smile betrays a wisdom far beyond her years. “I try to keep my mind busy, but it’s sometimes very hard,” she quietly responds.
For the last two years, Raquel has been stricken with a severe form of vasculitis affecting her extremities, with her left foot taking the full brunt of the illness. She lost her mobility. She had to drop out of school, enduring excruciating pain. Her mother, a single parent with two other younger children, appears to be the only functional adult in an intergenerational dwelling. She has been known to lift Raquel on her back, carrying her down the village road to catch the bus to the city to visit the doctor.
The villagers and area churches helped in their limited way to defray the cost of an expensive trip to the neighbouring island of Trinidad where her condition could be diagnosed and treated. But nothing worked. The break-outs in her foot healed only to re-appear threatening her entire limb. Her youth seemed cruelly snatched away as she struggled to survive.
“I used to lie on the couch and watch my friends from the window on their way to school,” she almost muses to herself as if I were not there, her great-grandfather hovering over us like an ancient Hindu deity. “I don’t think they know how lucky they are to be able to walk – to go wherever they want,” she quietly added.
After more than a year of pain and frustration, Raquel was able to re-connect with the medical training facility at the St.George’s University, here in Grenada. The doctor who first treated her was glad to see her again. Her indomitable spirit and youthful resilience made quite an impression on the university clinic staff. Finally, there was a diagnosis and treatment. Some routine, others unorthodox. “They gave Viagara, you know,” she bravely informed me.
Measures to save the entire left leg were now considered. Late last year, her toes were amputated, and affected tissues removed from underneath her heel. So far, the surgery has healed well; she is now able to walk again, developing a new sense of balance to compensate for her missing toes.
While her condition is being monitored requiring expensive lab tests, Raquel’s thoughts are turning towards the future. Completing school. She wants to train to be a nurse. There’s a lot of catching up to do. But she is bright and resourceful. “I help my sister and brother with their homework, and I read their school books. I get my friends in the village to share their school assignments with me,” she explains, a gleam of pride lighting up her young face. “It’s just that I would feel embarrassed among all those school children. They will look at me funny. Tease me.”
Raquel is just being realistic. In a society where sensitivity and respect for differences are sometimes in short supply, you have to be tough to survive. When I offered to do some tutoring with her, I thought I would focus on her academic needs. I soon found out that counselling and confidence building were just as important. Living in a small community where people tend to know each other, rumours and whispers about her disability would in all probability precede her in her new school environment. Her resolve to finish high school would be sorely tested. Lack of social service support would place an added burden on her family to meet her medical and personal expenses.
The coming months will be crucial for Raquel. But she has survived a major crisis. She might just reach the top of her mountain.
© Lytrice Adams 2010
This entry was posted by Lytrice Hood on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under As I was Saying.
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An inspiring story, Lytrice, told with sensitivity.