The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

Author:Anne Fadiman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 1997-03-04T05:00:00+00:00

Glassrock Health Services will be by at 8:00 p.m. tonight. Give them prescription.

Make sure to come to Clinic this Thursday Dec. 11 at 8:00 a.m.

Keep egg crate mattress pad on at all times.

Turn her every 2 hours so she does not get infected bedsores.

Suction her as often as necessary.

Diet instructions: Feed [formula] every 4 hours during daytime (5 feedings a day)—10 ounces 5 times a day. All foods or medicines go down tube.

Foua didn’t understand the instructions, and in any case had no intention of giving Lia medicines or anything else through a nasogastric tube (which was intended to circumvent Lia’s impaired sucking and gag reflexes and keep food from going down her trachea). Nonetheless, she signed the line that read, “These instructions have been explained to me and I understand them.” Her signature—just as it had been when she signed the discharge papers after Lia’s birth at MCMC four and a half years earlier—was the single word FOUAYANG.

At some point that day, Nao Kao was also asked to sign something. It is not included in Lia’s chart, so no one knows exactly what it was, although it probably had to do with the Lees’ decision to withdraw her from MCMC. It is likely that Nao Kao was told that in two hours, after the discharge paperwork was completed, she would be released, and he could take her home to die. His interpretation was somewhat different. He recalled, “One person gives Lia medicine”—this was probably Tylenol for her fever, which the Nurse’s Notes indicate that “father refused”—“and then another person comes and has a paper on a clipboard and makes me sign and says that in two hours, Lia is going to die. They weren’t fixing her. I thought even if they fix her she is going to die here, and if they don’t fix her, she is going to die here, so I might as well just bring her home right now so the older children can see her. I am not satisfied. I am very disappointed at the hospital. I am mad. Is this a hospital that fixes people or makes them die?”

This was not the first time in the last two weeks that the Lees had been told Lia would die, but for some reason—perhaps because Nao Kao believed it contained such a time-specific prediction—it was the most offensive. In the Hmong moral code, foretelling a death is strongly taboo. It is an unpardonable insult to say to one’s aged grandparent, “After you are dead….” Instead, one says, “When your children are 120 years old….” I asked several Hmong people I knew how they would feel if a doctor told them their child was going to die. “A doctor should never never say that!” exclaimed Chong Moua, a mother of three. “It makes the dab come closer to the child. It is like saying okay, okay, take her.” Koua Her, an interpreter for the health department, said, “In Laos, that means you’re going to kill a person. Maybe poison him.

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