Haitian cancer patient gets help from region

Like her battered, impoverished island nation, Lina Supris endures.

The 37-year-old Haitian woman has withstood many setbacks and dashed hopes in her battle with cervical cancer. Yet she keeps believing there's a possibility she can prevail in the end.

The care she's received from Jessica Patti, a registered nurse from New London who began a nonprofit medical mission to Haiti, along with the other southeastern Connecticut nurses, doctors and other health professionals who have joined Raising Haiti, has helped sustain Supris over the past two months, despite advanced-stage cancer.

That's what has given Supris reason not to give up, even as she and her three sons, her husband, sister, brother and other family members deal with her illness on top of the damage from the January earthquake. Like many other Port-au-Prince residents, the family sleeps outdoors because their home was badly damaged in the earthquake, and food supplies are sporadic.

"I'm really grateful for Jessica working with me," Supris said Saturday through a translator, connected by phone, as she took in the afternoon sun in a lounge chair on the front lawn of the nurse's home, swaddled in a down comforter and fleece blanket against the cool wind.

On Monday, Supris was at at a New York hospital with nurse Annie Piascik of Groton, Patti's friend and also a Raising Haiti volunteer. Piascik took her there to get an initial evaluation and, if all goes well, to begin radiation treatments she would need before surgery to remove the painful cancerous tumor. That afternoon, Supris was being examined by a doctor in preparation for admission, Piascik said by phone.

"I hope to be free from the cancer, to be healed from it, and I'm praying for that to happen," Supris said Saturday through the phone translator, Giscarb Borgard of Florida. He said he met Patti and other Raising Haiti volunteers in Haiti during a recent trip he took there, also as a volunteer, and provided translation services at the hospital where they worked.

Supris met Patti and other Raising Haiti volunteers about two months ago, when she and her sister went to the Haitian Community Hospital outside Port-au-Prince.

"She held up a paper that said 'cervical cancer' and 'abdominal pain,'" Patti recalled Saturday, as Supris relaxed on the couch in Patti's home where she had been staying for the past few days. "She was hemorrhaging. We gave her a blood transfusion and IV antibiotics."

Lina's sister, Patti recalled, helped take care of Lina after she was admitted to the hospital, as well as a man in the next bed she didn't know. During Supris' first hours in the hospital, Patti and Dr. Matt Spates, a volunteer from Norwich, found that Supris had a 10-centimeter tumor that would need to be shrunk with radiation before she could have the surgery to remove it. But there was no radiation equipment anywhere in Haiti.

Patti and her fellow volunteers began to work on trying to get Supris to this country for surgery, no simple task given Haiti's fractured infrastructure and bureaucracy, cumbersome even in the best of times, and the fact that Supris had no passport. The Haitian hospital agreed to keep Supris there while Patti returned to New London and continued to try to obtain a medical visa through the U.S. State Department's humanitarian parole policy.

Weeks went by without a breakthrough. Patti returned to Haiti, only to find Supris was no longer at the hospital but living in a tent with her family outside their partially damaged home. No one in the family had eaten for two days.

"She was septic, 80 pounds. She couldn't walk," Patti said.

After supplying the family with food, Patti and the volunteers took Supris back to the hospital. After stabilizing her, they took her to the rented house where they were staying.

Many days and frustrations later, Patti finally got permission to bring Supris to this country for medical care, which required that they have a hospital and a doctor willing to provide care. Last week, Patti flew with her from Haiti to New York, then brought Supris to her house to stay until her appointment. The New York hospital asked not to be identified for this story.

Plans are for Supris to return to Patti's home after the hospital stay, until she's able to return to Haiti.

Volunteers return to Haiti

Supris has been asked repeatedly throughout the last two months whether she still wanted to go through with traveling to the United States for treatment and surgery, and never hesitated to say yes, Patti said.

"A lot of my colleagues have really rallied, helped with her care," she said. "A ton of people helped me."

Conditions in Haiti, Patti said, are terrible, with scant evidence of the massive outpouring of aid that occurred in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake.

"All the rubble is still there, people aren't eating, and the help is gone," she said. "A lot of people are still living under sheets and the rainy season's approaching."

Raising Haiti volunteers will return to Haiti in about two weeks to administer about 200 doses of typhoid vaccine they received as a donation for an orphanage, Patti said. A photo she took of the orphanage shows dozens of children lined up in an alleyway between two buildings with a tarp between them for a roof. The former orphanage building was destroyed in the earthquake, Patti explained.

Instead of returning to the same hospital in Haiti, Raising Haiti volunteers are planning to spend their next trip running mobile clinics in areas without access to medical care, Patti said. This brings the group back to the original mission it had when it formed just a few weeks before the earthquake.

"We've developed good relationships with hospitals, so we're confident that we could get people admitted who are really sick, if they come to one of our clinics," she said.

But with such overwhelming need in Haiti, why have Patti and her team become so determined that this one patient, Lina Supris, get the medical care she needs? Part of the answer is that none of them can leave a patient without the medical care she needs, when they know the resources are available in the United States. The other part of the answer lies in Lina herself.

"We love her," Patti said. "We took care of her for a week in the hospital. She's this quiet, graceful and beautiful presence. We just focus on whoever we're taking care of."

She looked across the room to Supris, looking weak but serene on the couch.

"This is our Lina," Patti said. "We're going to get her better."

www.raisinghaiti.com