She saw my concern and laughed. “It’s not a patient. I think she said she’s from a foundation or something?”
Could it be the Ray Tye Medical Aid Foundation? Already?
“Yes, yes, please transfer it,” I said. My pulse, already quick from being startled and then worrying about a patient emergency, continued to rise.
The phone rang.
I took a deep breath and focused.
The phone rang again, and I answered. “Hello?”
“Dr. Berkowitz?” a woman’s voice asked excitedly, as if she was about to tell me I had won the lottery.
“Yes?” I replied tentatively.
“Oh my Goddddd!” she cried out. “This is Terri from the Ray Tye Medical Aid Foundation. Oh my goodness, we have to help this poor boy!! Can we get him here? Will surgery save him? Tell me how we can get him taken care of here! This is ex-aaaaac-tly what we do!”
“Thank you,” I managed to stammer out in disbelief. “Thank you so much—”
“I can’t wait to meet him!” Terri exclaimed. “We’ve helped out with soooo many cases from Haiti for PIH. They are amazing! Do you know Dr. Paul Farmer?”
“Well, of course I know of him, but I don’t really know him personally . . . I mean, I’ve read all his books. Well, actually, I guess I shook hands with him after a talk he gave once, but I don’t think he’d remember me.” I tried to laugh, but it came out as more of a cough. I noticed my hand beginning to cramp from a white-knuckled grip on the phone, and I tried to relax it.
“Paul Farmer is a-maaaa-zing!” she nearly sang. “I can’t wait to meet this patient! Wait—how do you say his name?”
“It’s the French j, so more of a zh sound: Zha-nel,” I said.
“When are you going to bring Zha-nel here to get his brain tumor out?” she asked.
“Well, to be honest, I didn’t expect to have the financial piece solved so quickly.” I chuckled nervously. “So we have to see if Brigham will agree and then work on a visa for him.”
“I’ve worked with Brigham many times. They are wonderful! Oh, this poor boy!! Will he be coming with his parents?”
I paused. I had left out the abandonment piece in our aid request letter. Given her excitement, it didn’t seem like she was going to change her mind no matter what I told her, and this would have to come out eventually. “Unfortunately, we’ve learned he was abandoned,” I said. “He lives with members of his church—”
“Oh my God, this poor boy,” she moaned sincerely. She said she’d talk with the Brigham administration about the costs and logistics. Just as we were about to hang up, I realized I should ask for her email address so we could be in touch—and to make sure I hadn’t daydreamed the conversation.
“Well, you’re going to laugh,” she said, spelling out the address, which concluded @unitedliquors.com. “Mr. Tye made his fortune in the liquor business, working his way up from carrying the cases to running the company.”
“Wow,” I said, still in shock about the surreal nature of the call.
“So we’ll be in touch,” she said. “You guys are amazing! PIH, Brigham, all of you do amazing work! And I can’t wait to meet Janel!”
“Thank you so much again,” I said.
We hung up.
I sat and stared blankly at my computer screen. Was it really this easy—write a letter one day, get $200,000 the next? Slowly my shock and nervous excitement gave way to amazement, to joy, and then finally to curiosity: What was this story of the liquor business?
I Googled “Ray Tye.” A World War II veteran, he had risen through the ranks at United Liquors from warehouse worker to president. As his fortune accumulated, he became a philanthropist, stating, “My philosophy is what you take out of this world you put back in.” His charitable contributions ranged from paying for individual surgeries of patients in poor and war-torn areas to paying for funerals of local individuals in Boston. “This is not philanthropy. It is a moral responsibility,” he was known to say.
Later that day, I received an email that simply said, “Can you help with this?” It was from one of the Brigham administrative leaders, a person I’d never met, though I recognized the name from hospital-wide emails announcing new protocols and policies. Scrolling down, I found a forwarded message sent by the administrators Michelle and I had been speaking with about Janel’s case. The email was addressed to all of the hospital’s leadership—medical, nursing, social work, care coordination, and executives—and included our free-care request letter and a brief note stating that the Ray Tye Medical Aid Foundation had committed funding. Another member of the administrative leadership team had responded, asking what the plan would be after the patient was discharged from the hospital and whether he would need rehabilitation. It was this set of concerns the person who had emailed me referred to when asking if I could “help with this.”
The idea of a young student needing brain surgery tugged on our humanitarian heartstrings. But the hospital administration needed to also consider the perspectives of cost and liability. Thanks to the Ray Tye Medical Aid Foundation, we had solved the cost piece. I presumed the administration’s main concern was the possibility of our patient somehow getting stuck in the hospital if there was a prolonged recovery from surgery or a complication causing disability and requiring rehabilitation. Brigham doesn’t have an inpatient rehabilitation service, and a recent newspaper article had highlighted the complicated story of a patient who had been brought from Haiti to Boston after the earthquake and was still in a local rehabilitation facility four years later.
I wrote back to the hospital leadership to try to reassure them. I explained that since Janel could walk, presuming the surgery was uncomplicated, there was no reason to believe he wouldn’t walk out of the hospital just as he would walk in. In the worst-case scenario, if he required a prolonged postoperative recovery period, I had already secured a commitment from the rehabilitation center at HUM, and they were willing and ready to care for him. We could simply fly him back to Haiti and transport him to HUM. I assured them that if Janel didn’t need rehabilitation but needed to stay in Boston for a few months of chemotherapy and radiation therapy, we would be able to arrange local housing for him. Michelle had told me that PIH had coordinated this many times in the past for other patients who came to the US for medical care from one of the countries where PIH worked.
The reply from the administrator moments later was one line:
We really need housing and transport on paper guaranteed before.
I hadn’t expected the finances to be solved so quickly and easily. This seemed like a major victory, but we still had a long way to go to get Janel to Brigham. We needed to figure out housing for him, plus he would need a visa. Now it seemed that these were linked. To get a medical visa, we needed Brigham to commit to Janel’s care, and to get Brigham to commit to his care, we needed a plan for housing after he was discharged from the hospital.
I asked Michelle for ideas the next time I saw her. “Do you and Nina have an extra room?” she asked, smiling. I couldn’t tell if she was joking. Nina and I had just recently gotten married, and were renting a small apartment not far from the hospital. We discussed whether we could have Janel stay with us, but with our work schedules and since we had only one car between us, we worried we might not be best suited to take care of him and get him to and from his medical appointments. I also thought it would be ideal to find someone from the local Haitian American community to house Janel to at least address the language-barrier aspect of what was sure to be a difficult period for him. Michelle sent out emails through her organization to look for volunteers. Nothing came through. It was a lot to ask of someone to house a patient coming alone from Haiti, undergoing major brain surgery, and staying in the US for a period of up to two months if he ended up needing chemotherapy and radiation as we suspected he would.