Against All Odds

by R. A. Lang

  After another twenty minutes, she received a missed call from her mobile. Without saying a word, she rushed out of the front door, jumped into her friend’s car, and left.

  Fantastic, I thought. For the first time, I was home alone and feeling so good about the sudden silence that I didn’t know what to do next.

  The following day, I drove into the town to pick up some more Cohiba cigars. I met the same island salesman who had sold me the little listening device.

  I started talking to him about having security cameras fitted around my house to deter thieves passing by. He claimed to specialise in security cameras and said he’d come over to show me what he had available.

  I’d already received a quote from a professional security company, but it was rather high. My hesitation gave the salesman an excuse to sell me his cameras, which later didn’t work. He also sold me a computer and said it was necessary for the cameras to record to. Of course, there were no guarantees or refunds on the island, so I lost again.

  The time came when I really needed to use the workshop. It was still full of Haitian’s junk, so I began to call her from Nigeria several times a week demanding that she remove it. Every time I called, she promised to have it collected, but I knew she had no intention of losing her free storage space. Several more weeks passed before I told her that if it had not been removed by the Friday, I would have it all taken to the dump.

  The Chinese bar owner, who had evicted Haitian from her bar just down the road, said she’d be happy to help me because she knew all I had been through with Haitian. She had experienced so many problems with her previously.

  Early that Friday morning, she arrived with her father and one of his Chinese friends who brought his lorry. In no time at all, they had emptied my workshop of everything and even swept the floor clean.

  When the bar owner saw the bar stools, she said that they were hers; Haitian had stolen them from her bar when she had been evicted. She left very pleased to have her stools back.

  That day was bright and sunny, like most days on the island, with a gentle breeze that took the edge off the thirty-four degree heat. I packed some ice in my cooler bottle and drove down to a nearby beach, which was just twenty minutes away.

  Content that I had finally trashed all Haitian’s junk and could finally start making use of my workshop, I lay on the beach for the first time in months. I rented a sun lounger. It was so nice to just soak up the sunshine and drink a couple of cold drinks.

  This is why I bought a house so far from Europe, I thought. I wondered whether a little bit of sunshine had been worth all the pain, stress and murder attempts.

  I drew the conclusion that nothing could be worth all I’d gone through, and I began thinking about what to do with the place. After I’d taken in enough sunlight for the day, I made my way back to a peaceful, quiet house to try to begin enjoying it for the first time. That was what I hoped would be the case, but sadly, I was wrong again.

  I had just finished watching a movie and gone to bed when I heard a police siren very close by. It only sounded for a second or two, and then it stopped. A couple of minutes later, it sounded again.

  I got out of bed and peered through a gap in my front window blinds. I saw the flashing lights from a police car parked right outside my house.

  Opening the front door to see what was going on, I heard the sound of Haitian’s voice screaming, “There he is, there he is! He’s the one who gave all my things away!” What the hell is this all about, I thought and went to unlock my drive gates to meet the police.

  Haitian was screaming for the entire street to hear, “This is the man who gave all my things away! Arrest him now! He’s got to pay for what he’s done!” She continued on and on that I needed to compensate her six thousand dollars.

  The police asked me why I’d removed all the woman’s things from my store, to which I replied, “Because, after months and months of ordering her to remove it, and after telling her that if she didn’t remove her junk from my property I would do it for her, I finally did just that.”

  The police told me I had no right to remove her things. I replied, “My house, my land, my store. I have every right to remove what doesn’t belong there, especially considering the space isn’t even rented.”

  To that, she started screaming yet again. Even Ronnie came forward and pointed his finger at me. He said, “You’re in big trouble now, Andy. Real big trouble.” I asked him to explain exactly what ‘big trouble’ I was in.

  I knew what he wanted to say, but he couldn’t explain to me in front of the police officers. I said it for him: “Voodoo? Is that what you’re threatening me with?”

  The police looked at them at that point, but she said, “What voodoo? I don’t know anything about voodoo.” I just started laughing in her face and turned to the police officers and said, “It is because of voodoo and interfering in my life that I kicked his and her ass out of my house and out of my life!”

  Haitian freaked again and denied knowing anything about voodoo, so I asked Haitian if she wanted me to show the police officers the photos of her performing a voodoo ceremony for Antonina in my living room.

  She looked horrified and said she didn’t know what I was talking about. I repeated to the police that I had called her every day since arriving back on the island, including the day before I removed her things, but she still chose to do nothing about it.

  Again, she started screaming that I was a liar and had never called her. She was holding her mobile phone in her hand, so I asked her in front of everyone if it was her mobile phone. She admitted that it was, so I asked her how long she had owned the phone. She answered, “You know I’ve had it since last year. Why do you want to know?”

  That was what I was waiting for. I snatched her phone out of her hand, opened her call register, opened ‘received calls’, and showed the police.

  My name was recorded every day for the previous two weeks, and then two to three times per week from Nigeria. “Now do you believe me?” I asked the police. I asked again whether they’d like to see some photos of her performing voodoo in my house, dressed in her white gown and wearing a red sash over her shoulders.

  The older of the two police officers said that he didn’t believe a crime had been committed, that it was more of a civil problem. He turned to Haitian and advised her to get a lawyer to deal with her things because it wasn’t really a police matter.

  When the police left, I was again in need of relaxation. After all that commotion, however, I was awake for almost the rest of the night.

  No longer thinking I’d ever have any peace on the damn island I began thinking positively about cutting my losses and selling the house and moving on.

  The next morning, I was outside washing down my paved drive to freshen it up and remove all the dust that always got blown in, when Haitian had the nerve to pull up outside my entrance in the car I’d bought. She shouted, “I’m walking on your name. I was up all night burning candles in your ass. Soon, you’ll be sorry, soon you’ll regret trashing my junk, soon you’ll be in so much pain you’ll want to die. No doctor will be able to save you. I’m going to make sure you die!” She drove off after that.

  I arrived at the house one afternoon a couple of days later and noticed that someone had drawn a strange kind of sign on the white wall adjacent to my entrance. I walked back from my car and noticed someone had also cut three little chunks out of the rendering on the corner of the opposite wall.

  I went to open my front door and noticed three deep hammer marks just under my lock. Someone must have hit my door very hard because my doors were new and made of very hard wood. I began to clean and grabbed a bowl of warm, soapy water to wash the sign off my front wall.

  After removing the drawing, which had been created using a stick of charcoal, I inspected the rest of my front wall. I found a small piece of folded cardboard that someone had taken the trouble to wedge in between the top of my wall and my white aluminium railings. It had my name written inside
it three times.

  Later that day, I decided to remove some of the weeds outside my front window because I hadn’t done any gardening for a few weeks. Hidden amongst the weeds, I found half a chicken’s eggshell that contained a piece of folded paper with my name also written three times.

  There was no doubting who had done everything. It was clear that Haitian was continuing with her vindictive, sick, pathetic ways because she was not being allowed to live for free any more.

  I called my Colombian handyman and asked him to do a really thorough cleaning around my house. I also asked if his wife wanted to clean the inside.

  They spent the whole of the next day cleaning, and they found several more items outside my house that were well hidden. Haitian had also gone to the trouble of planting several items inside the house before she’d left.

  I knew I would never be left alone to live a peaceful life, so I called a real estate agent to put my house on the market. On Monday, the sign was erected and photos were taken, but the real estate agent was hardly professional. He never bothered to upload the photos to his website.

  Two months later, the sign was collected without warning or explanation, not an email or anything. I called another real estate agent who also erected his sign. He prepared a contract and uploaded the photos onto his website.

  Okay, I thought, I’m finally making a move in the right direction. I felt quietly confident that there was at least a glimmer of hope that I’d be rid of the place and never need to return to the damn island again.

  I continued rotating back and forth between Nigeria and the island until an increasing pain in my abdomen finally stopped me in my tracks. It had started soon after arriving in Nigeria in December, but on the 4th March 2012, I contracted chronic pancreatitis. Pancreatitis is known to be the most painful condition a bodily organ can hand out.

  The deep, nagging pain I was suffering from since December 2011 suddenly hit an all-time high, delivering the most incredible agony I could ever have imagined possible.

  I can best describe it as having a sword being pushed deep into my pancreas before it was twisted ferociously. At the same time, it felt like a strong hand was squeezing and crushing my pancreas.

  I called one of my workers to call the camp doctor because I didn’t have his number. In just three minutes, the Nigerian doctor and his nurse arrived at my room. He quickly assessed the amount of pain I was in, and helped me to his clinic where he could take better care of me. I couldn’t straighten up and was curled up as I slowly managed to walk to his clinic. It was a short walk but still took me ten minutes. Both the doctor and nurse helped to support me while we gradually made the short trip.

  He began by inserting a needle into my vein and connected a paracetamol drip to help reduce my pain. He continued to make several other checks to diagnose my problem. He said I needed to go to Port Harcourt where they had a better equipped clinic, so arrangements were made for a driver and an armed escort to take me there in the morning.

  The next day, my armed escort, together with a mobile police escort, arrived to safely move me to Port Harcourt. Upon arrival, I was met by a South African doctor and taken directly to a bed where they changed my intravenous needle and connected me to a new paracetamol drip. I never found out why a new doctor insisted on replacing a perfectly positioned intravenous needle to one of their own?

  Nothing by mouth was her first instruction, and that was the way it went for the next three days until I became stable enough to be flown out of Nigeria.

  A Nigerian doctor accompanied me all the way to Paris and administered morphine at regular intervals during the flight. Because the flight tickets arrived very late, we only had an hour to make the two-hour drive to the airport in Port Harcourt.

  While under the influence of morphine, I called Christopher, a Nigerian airport security friend, to inform him I was on my way because I was dying. He was horrified when he heard the ambulance sirens. He ran around the airport informing all his colleagues that his brother was in trouble, and that they should take out all the stops so I could make the flight.

  He did such a thorough job in fact, that they even prevented the Air France check-in desk from closing. Plus, the air traffic control would not allow the flight to leave until I’d boarded.

  As amazing as it sounds, my Nigerian security friend did quite a spectacular job holding up a fully loaded aircraft until I was on board. At the time, they were building an extension to the airport and the usual entrance was blocked off with traffic cones. Christopher even moved the cones and waited outside to catch the attention of the ambulance and guide it right outside the airports doors.

  He made me give my passport to my doctor to get my boarding card while he personally escorted me straight through passport control without my passport. We went straight through the body and hand luggage scanners, through the departure gate and straight onto the flight, while my boarding pass followed behind with my doctor.

  None of the Nigerians expected to take a dash from me this time out. They were all too worried about my critical condition and didn’t try to ask me for anything! They were absolutely wonderful with their support and understanding.

  I can only assume that the passengers who had been kept waiting had been informed that the delay was due to a medical emergency. When I entered the aircraft, everyone started clapping. My doctor arrived a short time after me, and the Nigerian air traffic control finally gave the all clear to take off.

  Once in the air with the fasten seat belt sign turned off, we started looking for a place to hang my drip. Amie, the Air France flight attendant, rigged up two coat hangers from the overhead lockers which did a fine job.

  Because we were flying business class, the food menu was soon distributed. My wonderful doctor reminded me: “Nil by mouth!” It was my fourth day without food, so I had to put my menu back in the slot in the back of the seat in front of me and continue to endure the intense hunger pains I was having. The hunger pains were one thing, but the intense pains my pancreas was handing out were really something different.

  The flight eventually landed in Paris after a one hour stop at Lagos. My doctor was busy putting all his equipment back in his bags while I struggled to put my jacket on with the needle in my arm. I’d passed my paracetamol bag through my sleeve, but with the intense pain, it was difficult to twist my body around to get into the rest of my jacket.

  Many people stood in a queue watching me struggle until a Nigerian lady asked whether she could help. Wow, I thought, at least there is one person with a heart.

  My accompanying doctor arranged for a wheelchair to meet us at the door of the plane, which had the added advantage of being fast-tracked to the immigration authorities. If it wasn’t for the shorter route, it would have been a very long walk, and another hour spent in a queue.

  An ambulance had also been arranged for my arrival, and it was waiting for me right outside the entrance. It took me to a hospital in the centre of Paris under blue lights and sirens where they confirmed the original Nigerian doctor’s diagnosis that I was suffering from chronic pancreatitis.

  The hospital didn’t specialise in pancreas problems, so later that night after having a CT scan I was driven by taxi to another hospital in the centre of Paris. That hospital had France’s top pancreas surgeon who could better deal with my problem.

  The next day, they gave me an endoscopy and threaded a stent (tube) into my main pancreas duct, as they found it was blocked. They also gave me a CT scan. Once the results were available, the hospital decided that what I needed was beyond their capabilities, and I was discharged after five nights.

  With the stent fitted, my health insurance flew me back to my point of origin, so I ended up back in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, the stent must have moved by the time I arrived on the island, because I was in the most intense agony once again. The next day, I went back to the airport to book a flight to Wales because during all this time, my mother had discovered a facility specialising in pancreas problems
just forty minutes from her house, which was in Morriston Hospital outside Swansea.

  It took seven days to get a seat on a flight out from the island because it was high season and all flights were fully booked. One morning at 4am I was hit with the most intense agony. I called the island conman, who lived just up the road, and thankfully he arrived outside my door in just five minutes, to take me to the new hospital in the village just down the road. I slowly walked to his car doubled up in agony, bent over and clutching my abdomen.

  We arrived at the hospital just ten minutes later. I was crying with the pain. As soon as the Colombian duty doctor was told I had chronic pancreatitis she administered morphine and a paracetamol drip. She told me not to worry as they could carry out an operation right away! I knew that there were very few surgeons in the world who could carry out the Beger procedure, which I needed so I declined her kind offer. Once the morphine and paracetamol had taken effect I returned home with a prescription of oral morphine and tramadol painkilling capsules.

  A few days later I departed the island and had deliberately overdosed on all the medication so I would look fit to fly. I was already flying as I entered the airport, but I knew it was only a temporary relief from what was to come once it had begun to wear off.

  I finally arrived in Amsterdam airport and needed to wait another six hours before taking the one hour flight to Cardiff in Wales. I couldn’t show anyone the intense agony I was enduring, as they wouldn’t have allowed me to board the flight to Wales. I received some concerned looks due to my grey colour as I passed through the usual scanner before entering the departure gate, but I put on a false smile and was allowed to proceed.

  Once in the air, I requested to be met with a wheelchair at Cardiff airport, as I knew I could no longer walk. When I was asked why, I explained that I was no longer capable of walking another step due to having chronic pancreatitis, and I was returning home for an operation. I’d waited long enough before requesting so I knew the flight wouldn’t turn around due to a medical emergency.