Victory!
On Easter Sunday, my patient shared a meal at my home — and this was the day after a wonderful reviving party, I would say, organized in his honor by his family and friends at the hotel.
How did I achieve this?
« As a Creole proverb says. »
“You have to know where you’re starting from to know where you’re going.”
My patient, who only saw the deceased, I took a radical decision with regard to him when he confided to me that he had seen the owner’s brother who was at the hotel not too long ago, because he had come especially for the funeral and the mass organized for her deceased sister .
He had stayed for some time perhaps to mourn.
Even though the latter had just returned to the United States, where he lived.
For the first time since his collapse, he told me about a living person; I thought we were finally out of the woods.
I wanted to get him to talk to the gentleman whose name he had just mentioned—to get him to have a brief conversation with him. The phone rang without answer; I came across voicemail. I called back two more times, at regular intervals, and the result was the same. So I called a close friend of this gentleman — who lived in Washington — knowing that he called him every day and followed his whereabouts. To my great surprise, he told me that he too had not received a response from him for two days. As a result, acting in concert, we resolved to call 911 to find out what was going on. I explained to him how my patient—who “saw only dead people”—had seen this gentleman come to bring him vitamins, a habit he faithfully observed on each of his visits.
But to my surprise, like a cleaver, the news fell: The gentleman in question had been found dead in his home where he was living alone— and this, apparently, had been for three days.
At that moment, I said to myself: if he could see a person *recently* deceased, he was on the verge of recovery. So I decided to give him 100 milligrams of the drug — whereas I had only given him 25 milligrams — ignoring the psychiatrist’s instructions. In cahoots with my improvised nurse, I explained to her what I planned to do and why; We agreed on the way forward, as I expected him to sleep for at least two days. His role was to turn him over from time to time, change his diaper, ensure his basic hygiene, and give him Ensure (a multivitamin milk) every time he yawned—a supply that, by the way, I had in abundance.
Success !
My patient had slept for two days without waking up; Good Friday was the great day.
At eight o’clock in the morning, I arrived at work and headed straight to the breakfast kitchen; I asked for a coffee-pot of hot coffee with milk sweetened to perfection, accompanied by a large cup. I entered the room, where he was still fast asleep; I woke him up — not without great difficulty — and helped him sit on the bed, asking the nurse to support his back so that he would not fall backwards. I handed him a cup of coffee, which he drank and—as if by magic—he opened his eyes wide and said in his beautiful voice, “This coffee is good, Dad. Could I have another cup? I replied, “With pleasure,” and I served it again at once.
He then asked the young woman, “Why do you detain me like this?”
And so we struck up the conversation—a more or less coherent and lucid conversation. He no longer spoke to me of the “ghosts” that had tormented him. Such as his mother who served him food and his father who wanted to beat him and many other stories that the cleverest would watch on the account of hallucination,
My young nurse and I were absolutely overjoyed.
He wanted to go to the bathroom, but he was too weak for such an undertaking—although the toilet was only a few steps away, there, in the room itself.
He began to ask questions about what had happened to him and why he was wearing a diaper.
I promised to explain everything to him later that day, because I had to go to my office , happy with my achievement.
Later I had a light meal prepared for him a bowl of soup for I did not want to overload his system with anything too heavy or too complex for the moment.
Before leaving that evening, I came back to give him some explanations, but I noticed that he still showed faint traces of his nightmares. He told me that a little girl was still playing the piano.
I asked him, “Can you hear the music?” He replied, “No.” I breathed a sigh of relief, because in his case, hearing the “music of the spheres” would have been dangerous. He said to me: “Be careful! There’s a man with a knife behind you who wants to stab you. I replied, “Don’t worry; he can’t do anything to me. This kind of answer I gave him every time he told me about his escapes into the invisible world.
It seemed that this was his last glimmer of delirium. Then we began to talk normally. His eyes met mine with a natural clarity that I hadn’t seen for a long time.
The same thing that Autism children do oftentimes. How parents understand this? Why do they have such vague look ?
my answer is that ; they are in a somnambulism state. A chapter that is covered in my book.
The next day, holy water Saturday, I brought him a homemade pumpkin soup. He was delighted, and at that very moment I saw the man I knew return.
During our conversation, he asked me who had been most affected by his illness. I explained to him that his family and friends—those who had come to visit him at the very beginning, but who could not bear to witness his descent into hell—had stopped coming. This suited me quite well, because they had all left deeply upset and did not make it easy for me because I had to know who allows or does not allow to see him.
Only one member of the family—the husband of one of her nieces—called me regularly to check on her condition.
He asked me to call him to give him a little chat. I complied, handing him the phone without saying a word myself. When the gentleman on the other end of the line heard his voice, he was astonished; Apparently, no one in the family had held out any hope that he would recover. He said to him, “Could you pass Mr. Rimpel to me?” He was a politician of high rank, a distinguished gentleman, who knew how to observe the rules of propriety.
He then said to me: “Mr. Rimpel… Don’t tell me that I’m really talking to *him*? I replied, “Yes, it is he.” I handed the phone back to my patient, who thanked the caller for being there for him. They chatted about everything and nothing, and the organization of a “return to life” party was scheduled for the same afternoon; Friends and family flocked to me, also showing their gratitude.
He asked me, even the beautiful doctor who did the massage sessions for me had also dumped me? I told him that it was my fault, it was to preserve his privacy.
He asked me to pass it to him on the phone, which I did, Do you remember that I told you that he was frivolous? He began his conversation like this: How are you, honey?
The geriatrician, astonished to hear a familiar voice, but caught off guard, she asked, with whom do I have the honor to speak? He gave his name. The young woman couldn’t believe her ears before she started talking to him, so she did exactly what the first person had done, she said to him: Can I talk to Mr. Rimpel please, he passed the phone back to me, only to hear me say: Mr. Rimpel, don’t tell me that I’m talking to Doctor So-and-so that I’m talking here? I confirmed to her that it was indeed that, without thinking she told me: Mr. Rimpel, I have a lot of similar cases, can you help me with it. I told him that this healing is the result of a sincere love that has developed over time. That only relatives, friends and families can manage to do in collaboration with you. She understood very well, that’s what my book also suggests.
Had it not been for the earthquake of January 12, 2010 — which ultimately cost him his life — my patient would probably still be with us today, because he was a man of robust constitution.
This commentary serves as a sequel to the story—a series of events that had, until then, eluded me.
On this Easter Sunday,
after savoring a hearty dinner—a meal he had enlivened with his customary zest—my patient and I settled in together. It was a choice feast, though the guest list was most exclusive: it consisted solely of him, my wife, and myself. We had deliberately chosen not to invite anyone else, wishing to put him further at ease so that we might continue his therapy.
To ensure his comfort even more fully—particularly at dessert time, a moment he cherished and for which we had prepared a special treat—I suggested we retire to the living room.
This seemed a timely move, for our conversation was beginning to take a political turn—a subject on which he was absolutely adamant about remaining perfectly informed.
As if guided by an invisible force, I felt inspired to hand him a book detailing the major achievements of the Magloire presidency. To our utter astonishment, he proved unable to read; when I pressed him to try—going so far as to help him decipher a single sentence—his head suddenly slumped to the side, and he began to snore.
My wife, accompanied by Chantale—my nurse, who had just finished her own meal in the pantry—then joined me in a small adjoining room that served as our family living area.
Together, we strove to make sense of the revelation we had just witnessed.
For while our patient had, until that moment, shown himself incapable of walking—requiring the combined aid of a cane and an attendant to support his weight—
another great surprise now awaited us. We watched him approach us—completely unassisted and without the slightest hesitation—simply asking where he might find a restroom.
I rushed to his side to offer my assistance, for he had already traversed a considerable distance, from the living room to the spot where we stood.
Once he reached the restroom, he managed to undress completely without any help; I then discreetly withdrew to afford him his privacy.
I waited for him in my bedroom, which happened to be the room adjacent to the restroom he was using. I then heard him call out to me jovially: “Rim”—the nickname he typically used when addressing me. He said, “Hand me some underwear so I can take off this baby getup.” I complied, for I could see that he had regained control of the situation.
When he reappeared, he came to sit with us and asked me to give him a full report—from start to finish—regarding his condition, step by step. I provided him with a comprehensive summary and recounted how he had lost the ability to read—adding, however, that we would make another attempt once we were back at his home later that day.
Fortunately, after a few attempts, his memory returned; he then read an entire page of a book without the slightest sign of fatigue.
I left that day at eleven o’clock that night.
Some time later, Professor Wesner Désir—representing the National Radio and Television network—approached him. Wishing to produce a program dedicated to the writer Jacques Roumain (author of *Gouverneurs de la Rosée*) in order to commemorate a special anniversary, he asked him to grant a televised interview, pointing out that he had known Jacques personally and had remained close to his family.
And there it was: a resounding success.