A boy’s life mended
While he waits for a medical checkup, Lovensky Alexandre, 7, examines the scar left from the surgery that closed a hole in his heart. Doctors at Sutter Medical Center in Sacramento donated their services after a Sacramento fire captain, volunteering in Haiti after the quake, met Lovensky and his mother.
Lovensky Alexandre, a tiny boy with a hole in his heart, came to Sacramento from the devastation of the earthquake in Haiti.
The frail 7-year-old showed up in March with an eager grin and a will to live. In a little more than five weeks, he went from chattering in Creole to speaking in excited bursts of English, playing Wii games on a big-screen TV and devouring pizza.
He gleefully chucked a pitch at a River Cats game, where he was publicly honored as a story of courage and survival.
Now Lovensky and his mother, Roselene Ducelus, are back in Haiti. They returned May 12, 26 days after Lovensky underwent successful heart surgery at the Children's Center of Sacramento's Sutter Medical Center.
In Sacramento, he savored days in a spacious Elk Grove home with elegant furnishings and a wonderland of electronics.
In Haiti, he would move into a tent behind his cousin's single-room cinder-block house.
His experiences in Sacramento changed Lovensky. Going home would not be so easy.
Roselene Ducelus says Lovensky, the youngest of her four children, "was born sick."
He spent much of his early life in Haitian hospitals, put into oxygen chambers for frequent pneumonia. He was so weak, Ducelus said in Creole, she carried him "like a baby" until he was 3.
The boy grew up with a hole in his heart that grew as wide as a quarter. Ill-equipped doctors in Haiti, the poorest land in the Americas, told Ducelus she would need to get out of the country to save him.
There was little hope for that – until Jan. 12, when a powerful earthquake jolted Haiti. It collapsed government buildings, schools and vast shantytowns into rubble and carnage. As many as 250,000 people were killed.
And one boy got a chance at an extended life.
Their house destroyed, Ducelus and her thin, wheezing child made their way to a makeshift clinic set up by Relief International in Carrefour, a hillside neighborhood southwest of Port-au-Prince.
There, they met a Sacramento fire captain with flaming red hair and fiery determination. Sacramento Metropolitan Fire District Capt. Barbie Law arrived at the crowded clinic in January to volunteer as a paramedic.
"I met Barbie and she promised she would do whatever she could," Ducelus said. "When she said that, I knew it was God's will.
"I knew it was going to happen."
• • •
Through her father, a Sacramento physician, Law found Dr. Hessam Fallah, a pediatric cardiologist who works with Sutter Medical Center. Fallah persuaded the medical center and fellow doctors to donate services for Lovensky's surgery.
Law accompanied Lovensky and his mother on an 18-hour flight to Sacramento, ultimately spending nearly $10,000 of her own money on travel, travel papers, passports and clothes for mother and son.
But the boy wasn't physically ready for the operation.
"He looked very thin, very frail," said Sutter heart surgeon Dr. Teimour Nasirov. "He had continued episodes of coughing and bouts of pneumonia. We had to postpone surgery."
During the wait, Lovensky jumped into a new culture.
Sutter Medical Center called on Pierre LaGuerre, its Haitian-born, Creole-speaking emergency room admissions supervisor. He invited the boy and his mother to his five-bedroom Elk Grove home, filled with suburban American comforts.
In little time, Lovensky was holding a Wii controller and blasting away at monsters in Super Smash Brothers on a high-definition TV with LaGuerre's son, Jepsen, 10.
He put on nine pounds, savoring hot dogs, french fries, chicken strips and chocolate milkshakes. He went to Chuck E. Cheese.
LaGuerre's wife, Carmelle, delighted in watching him gain strength.
It was bittersweet.
In Haiti, her cousin, a teacher, died in the quake when his school in Pétionville collapsed.
"After the earthquake, we wondered how we could help," Carmelle said. "When the opportunity came along" with Lovensky, "it was a blessing."
• • •
The surgery took place April 15.
For three hours, surgeons worked to repair a ventricular septal defect that likely would have taken Lovensky's life by his teenage years.
They kept him alive with artificial heart and lung machines – and shut down his damaged, beating heart. They took tissue from the pericardium, a thin membrane that surrounds the heart, and used it as a patch to close the hole.
Lovensky was in good spirits before the surgery and when he awakened afterward.
"He wasn't scared or anything," Nasirov said. "He told his mom he knew he would have a good result."
As word of his surgery spread, the boy was showered with gifts. A backpack and Tyreke Evans bobblehead from the Sacramento Kings. A light-flashing, sirens-blaring toy car from a Sacramento police officer. A SpongeBob SquarePants game and cartoon DVDs.
The once weak little boy recovered with a happy fury. Within two weeks, the fissure on his chest was healing and melding with his skin.
His feel-good story got him invited to Raley Field, where he was to throw out a pregame pitch at a River Cats game. In a post-surgical checkup, Nasirov told him to throw the ball gently – and underhand.
The tiny boy stood at the lip of the pitcher's mound as the stadium announcer said, "We are honoring him for his bravery and courage." And then he heaved the baseball – overhand. It sailed a good 50 feet, kicking up dust in front of home plate.
The media swarmed him.
"Go Cats!" he said in English.
"Thank you very much."
• • •
Barbie Law, a woman not prone to sentimentality, said some moments of Lovensky's journey brought tears to her eyes.
She was moved by "the smile on his face, him playing with Jepsen, eating a peanut butter sandwich, just the little things he never experienced."
She laughed when he showed up at a doctor's visit in tanning goggles.
"He is a different kid, emotionally and physically," Law said.
That presented a problem.
Doctors cleared Lovensky for travel, but he didn't want to go back to Haiti. His mother was even more adamant about remaining in the United States.
Although she had three older sons waiting with relatives in Carrefour, she said she believed Lovensky was better off here.
In Haiti, before the quake, Roselene Ducelus was a street peddler, selling shoes, rice, beans, oils and other necessities. Her earnings fed the family.
After the disaster, she said, "The place is destroyed. Everybody is living on the streets. People are stealing things all over. There's no way I can have a business."
Relatives in Florida suggested she find a way to stay in the United States.
But Law, a legal permanent resident from Canada, said Ducelus and her son needed to obey the terms of their stay, which was granted temporarily for emergency medical care.
Law made the airline reservations. Three days before the flight, she sat down with Ducelus at a coffee table at the LaGuerre house. She handed her a Creole-language brochure from a micro-finance bank in Haiti that works to lift women out of poverty by helping them start small businesses.
With Pierre LaGuerre translating, Law described the flight itinerary. She said it was time to go home.
Ducelus was upset. She said it was too soon.
"It is what it is," Law said.
• • •
The Sacramento chapter of the United Nations Association donated a 16-by-16-foot military tent as the family's new home.
And on May 11, Law and volunteers hauled the 144-pound package to the American Airlines counter at Sacramento International for the first leg of the two-day journey home.
Lovensky showed up with his ever-present smile, a River Cats hat and his purple Kings backpack adorned with a Sacramento police badge sticker.
Ducelus, her hair freshly permed, was dressed in new jeans and a pleated shirt. She wore spiral earrings, a gift from Carmelle LaGuerre.
Her spirits had brightened. She hugged Law and spoke in Creole. Pierre LaGuerre translated.
"She wants you to know she loves you," he said. "She says, 'Thank you.' It will be a thank you that will never end."
• • •
His ailing heart mended, 7-year-old Lovensky flew back to Haiti and into a different realm.
From the airport in Port-au-Prince, the SUV for Relief International ferried Lovensky, his mother and Law through streets teeming with people, dust and horn-blaring buses. It passed squalid outdoor markets, where merchants peddled goods beneath tarpaulins and pigs feasted in debris.
The two-hour drive to Lovensky's hometown of Carrefour wound through destruction, the dust and rubble of what once had been homes.
Lovensky arrived to a joyous reception at his cousin's cramped cinder-block home. He bounded out. The adults hugged and cried. His older brothers excitedly donned firefighter hats from Sacramento.
Beneath a corrugated metal roof, the group shared stories of two cultures. A volunteer hauled the family tent to the backyard.
Challenges lay ahead. But the long journey of mother and son to Sacramento and back delivered an enduring gift: a boy expected to live a full, healthy life.
"It's absolutely amazing – amazing and very humbling," said Nasirov, the heart surgeon at Sutter Medical Center. "It gives you gratification, a feeling that you affected someone's lifetime. It's just a drop in the suffering. But we've got to start somewhere."