A surgeon at the
hospital severed the blood vessels that fed the ulcer in my father’s stomach.
It was a new
procedure, an experimental method the tall young doctor devised to interrupt
the life source of and starve the ulcer.
My father had endured
the discomfort and pain of gastric ulcer for more than three decades, visiting
the Princess Margaret Hospital from time to time to get some medical
relief. Suddenly, my father wanted permanent relief. The doctor was ready to give it to him.
“It might work,”
the doctor said confidently, trying to allay the fears of my father, my youngest
sister and my middle brother.
The experimental
surgery triggered a blood flood. Blood
oozed out of all open venues on my father’s body. Blood gushed from my father’s anus and nose
as quickly as nurses pumped it into my father’s blood vessel. My father wreathed in pain. His bloody eyes rolled uncontrollably.
“Doctor, nurse,”
he panted between convulsions. “Give me some
aspirin. Give me something. Too much
pain.”
They gave him
something to ease his pain. He asked
for more. They gave him more.
“Doctor, nurse,”
he cried again and again.
“What do you
want?” asked the weary nurse that night.
“Help me,” he
whispered through tortured lips. “Too much pain.”
“The doctor said
no more painkillers.” The nurse told him, “You are too troublesome. You are
complaining too much.”
My two siblings
held aluminum pans to my father’s mouth to collect the blood blurting out. They
burned with despair when their pleas for help failed. As they patted my father’s drenched forehead
with cool pieces of cloth, he asked God for help and death for relief.
Then my father pleaded
out the names of his children who were in Antigua, St. Thomas, England and New
York: “Solomon. Frances. Timothy. Esther. Help me! Help me!”
My father called
for his wife, our mother. She was with
me.
In New York City, I felt trapped, trapped by
my father’s anguish, trapped by my inability to ease my father’s pain and end
his sorrow.
I longed to board
a plane and rush to my father’s side. But,
I could not. I would not be able to
return to my three children, my husband, the new life I was beginning to build and
the new future I was trying to
carve. My passport would be stamped with
the last place I had visited, the last time I had entered that place, and the
last date I had departed from it. My
passport would have shown that I had left New York later, months later than the
time immigration had given me to stay.
My passport would
have shown that I was an illegal immigrant.
.
