This is just a little excerpt from the first time I came across it. Mods feel free to delete if not allowed. Lala was a diabetic 80 year old next door neighbour.
"Then Lala had a stroke. She was taken to the local clinic and from there transferred to the public hospital in Santiago, which was around an hour away. Every day I would ask her husband, Michael, and her daughter, Chivirico’s stepmother, how she was. Her husband said he had spoken to the doctors who said it could go two ways. She would get better or she would get worse. I couldn’t argue with that.
A week or so after that, I heard screaming and shouting from Lala’s house and assumed she had died. The street was full of people scampering along to her house, and I asked Danilo to go and check what had happened. Within a few minutes he came back.
“Her brain is there, but it no work. She cannot move arms and legs. Hospital send her home to die in house. She die soon. Maybe tomorrow maybe next day.”
“Does she have a nurse with her? Who will take care of her? Has she got a drip? Medicines?”
“The family help. No need for nurse or doctor. She will die soon.”
It all seemed brutal to me, no pain relief, no special care. And Lala surprised them all.
I went to see her every day, three or four times a day. No way was she brain dead. Her little wooden house was always full as her myriad children returned from various parts of the country, and indeed the world, to see her. The men sat outside on the terrace, and the women sat inside in the living area. There was rarely anyone in the bedroom with Lala, unless the priest came, when they all crammed into her little bedroom to pray.
When I went into see her she was lying flat, with no pillow. She was snoring gently, her hair spread out on the pillow around her and with a feeding tube in her nose. She was dressed in the same nightie she always wore and covered with a sheet. It was stifling hot in the room, and the fan she usually had in her bedroom was keeping her children cool in the living room.
I sat next to her on the bed and squeezed her hand. She opened her eyes and seemed to focus on me, so I sat chatting to her as I usually did, telling her about Chivirico’s recent exploits. I asked her to squeeze my hand if she could hear me and I swear she did. I walked back into the living room.
“Listen, I am sure Lala may recover. All you have to do is sit her up a little so her chest doesn’t become congested, and sit and talk to her. Try and exercise her arms and legs as well.” They looked at me as if I was a raving nutter, and went back to their conversation and I heard the words “gringa loca” as they muttered under their breath.
I continued to see her every day, three or four times a day, and each time she was lying flat again, and each time I asked them to sit her up and talk to her. I could tell the family were becoming restless and wanting to return to their homes – almost as if they wanted her to hurry up and die.
It was a Wednesday, around a week after Lala had returned home and I called in to see her on the way to the colmado. She was the same. Flat on her back again. I sat and chatted for a while, holding her hand and stroking her hair. One of her sons who had arrived said he had asked a doctor from the local private clinic to come and see her at 4pm. I went again at 2pm. Her breathing was fine, her pulse was strong, she squeezed my hand.
“I’ll call in and see you later, once the doctor has been,” I said to her as I walked out.
At 4.30pm I was sitting in my house working on my computer and I heard a dreadful wail, and then more and more and more. Screaming and howling. The street was full of people running to Lala’s house. Lala was dead. I couldn’t believe she had died, as a couple of hours earlier she had been fine.
I ran around to the house.
“What on earth happened?” I asked her son from New York. “She was fine a couple of hours ago.”
“The doctor came and gave her an injection,” he replied, calmly.
“What injection? What was in it?”
“No se. I don’t know,” he answered, and turned away to speak to someone else.
Dominicans, on the whole, trust doctors implicitly and never ask what medicines they are being given, nor what injections they are having. Lala’s family just let the doctor inject her without knowing what it was. They said they still didn’t know. Twenty minutes later she was dead.
I will always wonder what was in that injection.Danilo told me it often happened when the family came from Nuevo Yol and only had a couple of days holiday, that if the parent did not die as quickly as expected, they did not believe in prolonging their holiday as they had to get back for work. Therefore the parent was ‘put to sleep’. I was to learn more about this practice as the years passed.
RIP Lala.
Matilda