16083: (Hermantin) Sun-Sentinel-Widow aims to provide emergency care in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Widow aims to provide emergency care in Haiti



By Alva James-Johnson
Staff Writer

July 6, 2003

Tears still flow when Dominique Carvonis talks about her husband's death.

Six months ago, the couple was living happily in Haiti, he a dentist and she
the owner of two luxury hotels. Then on Jan. 18, as they slept at 4 a.m.,
she felt his 6-foot-2 frame fall on top of her. When she asked what was
wrong, he couldn't talk intelligibly and she discovered he was having a
stroke.

>From there the story is a sad saga of how Dominique Carvonis and her family
scrambled to get Michel Carvonis emergency care in one of the poorest
countries in the Western Hemisphere.

How they threw him in the back of her Montero because there was no ambulance
service on the island. How the hospital in Port au Prince had no CAT scan,
forcing them to drive an hour just to get a diagnosis. How an air ambulance
flew Michel Carvonis to Cedars Medical Center in Miami on Jan. 20 at 2 in
the morning, when it was already too late.

And how he died four days later at age 53 outside of the country he called
home.

Now Dominique Carvonis, 46, is mixing the tears with action. She was in
South Florida last week on a mission to build an intensive care unit and
emergency room in Haiti, a project that is estimated to cost $3.5 million
for the first phase. So far, based only on word-of-mouth, $20,000 has been
raised toward that goal, she said.

"If he had gotten immediate treatment, maybe he would have had a chance of
being saved," Dominique Carvonis said of her husband.

Helping her with the project is Dr. Reginald Pereira, the physician who
attended to Michel Carvonis when he finally arrived at Cedars. He put
Dominique Carvonis in contact with the medical center's chief executive
officer, who agreed to have the hospital donate equipment, he said.

Pereira also plans to provide medical and technical aid, traveling to Haiti
several times a year to help train physicians, check on patients and assist
with the emergency room and ICU setup.

He said Michel Carvonis might have lived if the hospital in Haiti had a CAT
scan to make a quick diagnosis and if a medication was prescribed to
dissolve the clot that blocked oxygen to his brain.

"You never know," he said. "If you have a stroke, the first four to six
hours are critical to decide how to treat it."

Pereira said the Carvonis case is not unusual. He regularly receives calls
from doctors in Haiti who want to rush their patients to Miami for emergency
care for car-accident injuries, gunshot wounds, strokes, heart attacks and
postoperative complications.

Some of the patients make it to the medical center and get the care they
need. Some die before they get there. Others, like Michel Carvonis, die in
Miami.

One such case was Pereira's 72-year-old aunt, Claudette Ledan, who died
Sept. 22. He said that after she had a heart attack in Haiti, her physicians
called him from the hospital and asked him to arrange to have her flown into
Miami. He went to the island by air ambulance and had her flown to Cedars,
where she underwent open-heart surgery. She never woke up.

As a pulmonary and critical care specialist who happens to be Haitian,
Pereira said it's difficult to watch so many people, including his
relatives, suffer because of the poor health care on the island. It's one of
the reasons he went into the medical field.

"You're frustrated," he said. "I tried some projects to make the situation
better, but they didn't go well. It's a Third World country, and everything
is political in Haiti, so you learn to live with it."

None of Haiti's hospitals has an ICU or emergency room, Pereira said. He
said he's glad to see a private citizen trying to make a difference.

"I don't want other people to have the same experience before they do
something," he said.

Doctors at the Canape Vert hospital were the first to treat Dominique
Carvonis' husband the night he took ill, but she doesn't blame them.

"There are a lot of good doctors there, but they don't have the equipment,"
she said. "I'm the person that will link the doctors to the equipment that's
appropriate to their needs."

She said she never thought she would be leading such an effort. A native of
Haiti, she graduated from Florida International University in 1978 with a
bachelor's degree in hospitality management. From there, she went to New
York to work at the Plaza Hotel and later the Helmsley Plaza. She lived in
Europe before moving back to Haiti in 1982 to start her own business,
managing the two hotels.

That's when she met Michel Carvonis, a Tunisia-born dentist with a thriving
practice. They married and had two children, raising them along with two
others that Michel Carvonis had from a first marriage.

"He was a very humanitarian person," she said. "Very lively and very
well-known. He always dreamed of having a decent hospital in Haiti."

While she always wanted to do humanitarian aid work, she didn't think it
would be so soon. "I saw myself doing projects, helping people. But not now,
20 years from now," she said. "I was always so busy."

But her husband's death changed her life. She donated his organs to a
company called Life Alliance Organ Recovery Agency in Miami. And at his
funeral services -- one in Miami that drew 100 people and one in Haiti that
drew 3,000 -- she announced her plans for the Michel Carvonis Foundation.
Since then she has raised $20,000 and gained enthusiastic support from
Haitians on the island and throughout the United States. She has also been
expanding her late husband's practice, adding new dentists and services.

She knows that is what Michel Carvonis would want her to do, she said. "I
feel like he's with me, and that's what keeps me going."

Alva James-Johnson can be reached at ajjohnson@sun-sentinel.com or
954-356-4523.
Copyright © 2003, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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