Bruises, Miracles and a Borrowed Hematologist

By Fabiana del Valle

HAVANA TIMES – Everyone says being a mother is the most beautiful thing in the world, and I have no doubt that’s true.  However, if you’re a mother in Cuba, things change, and it becomes as exciting as playing Russian roulette with a rusty revolver. And if you’re not born into luxury, a private business owner, or have family abroad to help you, you become a magician, doctor, therapist, nutritionist, witch, and expert at holding back tears.

My daughter studies at one of those schools that on paper sounds elite, but in reality is a boarding school where her dorm has cockroaches, and stray dogs come in and lie down to sleep on the students’ beds.

This year, instead of advancing in physics or chemistry, she learned to survive on rice and weevils, one egg a week, and minced meat of suspicious origin. Every weekend, I found her thinner with more pronounced bags under her eyes. But since she’s a strong girl, she smiled, told me jokes, and everything seemed fine.

Until one afternoon she called me crying. Her body ached, she had a fever, she was exhausted, and she had bruises on her limbs. And that’s when everything collapsed for me, as if a blackout had just occurred inside me.

I called my mother, a cousin’s niece, the doorman at the polyclinic, anyone that could help me with this. And thanks to my neighbor who works at the San Cristobal hospital, I managed to get her seen by a hematologist, without having to sell a kidney in the process. She ordered the ingredients for the lab test, plus the ultrasound and the syringes.

The results confirmed severe iron deficiency anemia. I sat before the list of medications like someone perusing a work of science fiction. Folic acid, ferrous sulfate, vitamin C, and other things that are more difficult to obtain, because they are only available in dollars or outside of Cuba.

The doctor told me that the girl needed to eat better. Red meat, liver, and green vegetables. At that moment, all I could think about was whether chlorophyll powder and protein-scented air would cure this disease.

But anyway, you can always “hold on” a little longer, and as the saying goes, “the rope tightens but doesn’t strangle.” Here we are with a reinforced diet as required by the patient. A little liver that my cousin bought, some lentils that my father-in-law had given me a week earlier, some beefsteak that “someone” brought me, and the medicines that my aunt “from outside” sent me.

My daughter is improving – slowly, but the change is noticeable. The tests also show this, although there’s still a ways to go.

I watch her as she makes plans for the future – at her age everything seems easier. At least she now has her laptop and an iPad, presents that arrived thanks to the kindness of two people I’m grateful to every day. Their gesture saved me from the crucial moment when I would have had to open her eyes and tell her that – despite having asked for little for her sweet fifteen – her mother couldn’t make it happen, no matter how much she tried.

I’m going to continue fighting for her. I’m not one of those who gives up, or is used to seeing the glass half-empty. I have my relapses sometimes, of course – circumstances put me in a place where powerlessness burns worse than the midday sun. But still, as much as it has tried, this Island, hasn’t yet carried off all the strength of my being.

Read more from the diary of Fabiana del Valle here.