She was a baby girl.
The man at the Jacmel Jetty Medical Clinic was agitated and upset because his wife was about to give birth to their first child.
“It was before we opened the gates. This gentleman came to the gate. Lucie and I were working triage,” Monique explained. The doctor on the mission kept the two women together, “because he recognized the bond we shared and we were able to help each other through.”
As they prepared to open for the day, Lucie saw the man in a “big panic,” according to Monique, “ ‘My wife! I think she’s in labour! Can you help us?’ He was just a ball of nerves.”
As she recounted the day of the birth, she constantly looked at photos she had brought to spark memories, a reminder of the toll the PTSD has taken. The diagnosis has not robbed her of the sheer joy she still feels surrounding both the birth of the girl and the special interaction with the family.
Monique escorted the expectant mother, who was in heavy labour, into a tent to be assessed. There was a gynecologist on duty as part of the DART team, but she had broken her wrist. “So she was like, ‘Who wants to deliver a baby today?’ ”
One part of the medical team took charge in the delivery of the baby while the other half looked after the mother. Since it was the woman’s first child, it was a long labour.
Monique said the father was afraid, and as time for the baby’s arrival drew nearer, he asked if he could wait outside the delivery area, but remain near. To calm him, Lucie and Monique showed him pictures of their own children. “ ‘It’s going to be okay. She’s in really good hands,’ ” they said. “We constantly spoke to him and kept him abreast of what was going on.” The anxious father sat and waited on a bench. His little girl eventually arrived safe and sound in her devastated homeland.
Monique went to speak with the father, only seconds after the birth. “I went to share the good news … and asked if he wanted to join us to see his new, beautiful, healthy baby girl. He looks at me and says, ‘Monique, huh?’ And I said, ‘Yep.’ He says, ‘And your friend – Lucie?’ He said, ‘Thank you. We talk about it, and to say thank you to Canada, we gonna call her Monique-Lucie.” ‘
Word spread like wildfire and led to national headlines. A Canadian Press article, its author unknown, was published on January 28, 2010. “The story of Monique-Lucie Marie, the cute Haitian baby with the Canadian name,” articulated what the baby’s arrival was like at that time in Haiti:
“JACMEL, Haiti – If you read this story in a few years’ time, Monique-Lucie Marie, here’s how things happened on the day you were born.
“You came into this world in a medical clinic run by the Canadian military, in a canvas tent just a few metres off the beach in Haiti.
“Your country had just been crippled by a powerful earthquake that reduced the area around you to chunks of rubble.
“Your grand entry occurred on a Thursday, with the help of the Canadian soldiers who’d come to lend a hand in your battered country.
“You had a full head of hair, weighed six pounds, and already had this habit of bumping your tiny hand into your button-shaped nose.
“Your first name, by the way, comes from Canada. Its origins can be traced back to places called Oromocto, N.B., and Quebec City, the respective home towns of Cpl. Monique Bartlett and Master Cpl. Lucie Rouleau, the two Canadian medical technicians who assisted in the delivery.
“Your father promised he’d tell you one day why he and your mom chose it. ‘I did it to say thank you,’ said Jean-Charles Pierre. ‘I will tell her one day that in the middle of a natural catastrophe, Canadians were in Jacmel. And she carries their name.’
“After the delivery, Pierre was proudly snapping pictures on a digital camera of you, Bartlett and Rouleau. One is an Anglo from a military town in eastern Canada, the other a francophone from a provincial capital famous for its stone walls and European architecture.
“Yours was the first delivery of a newborn baby in the military clinic by the beach in Jacmel, the base of Canada’s Disaster Assistance Response Team. Other Canadians were involved in similar deliveries at another clinic in nearby Léogâne.
“Foreign militaries and aid workers have been handling much of the medical work in southern Haiti communities ever since the earthquake struck Jan. 12.
“Mom-to-be Marie-Jean Jilles arrived at the military clinic early Thursday morning with light contractions. After several hours of labour, the delivery occurred at just before 1 p.m. and went smoothly. No painkillers were required.
“It took a while to get the breastfeeding going, because you resisted taking your first sip. But you eventually latched on, which prompted a rousing round of applause from the Canadian soldiers in the tent.
“Monique was the first one to get news about the name. She explained that she learned about it from your dad.
“He said, ‘You delivered the baby. So what’s your name? And I said, ‘Monique.’ And then he said, ‘Who’s that over there?’ I said, ‘Lucie.’ So he said, ‘I’m going to name the baby Monique-Lucie.’
“She was a little emotional when she found out, she said. “‘I was very touched – and I can’t describe how amazing it feels. It was an honour.’
“Lucie put her hand to her heart when asked how she felt about the name. “ ‘ It gives you a funny feeling,’ she said. “It was very moving for us.’
“Maj. Annie Bouchard, also from Quebec City and an obstetrician by training, looked on to make sure things went smoothly. She couldn’t participate herself because she’d broken her hand in a fall some days earlier.
“ ‘I didn’t even feel it,’ Bouchard joked, when asked about the delivery. ‘I just supervised the delivery behind those two. They did great. So I only had to give advice.’
“On the day you were born, there were lots of funeral hearses in the area and the smell of bodies was still strong as collapsed buildings were being cleared by bulldozers.
“But by the beach, in that little green tent, you made lots of people smile that day,” the story concluded.
The joy Monique still feels about the baby was clearly evident when she spoke to me, six years after the birth. “I just looked at him and said, ‘What?’ He just kept saying over and over, ‘Thank you, Canada. Thank you, Canada.’ It was so overwhelming. Both Lucie and I couldn’t remotely catch our breath. It was so exciting. It was the most perfect timing,” the medic said.
Jean-Charles Pierre and his wife Marie-Jean Jilles’ amazing gift and tribute to the two Canadians altered the rest of their stay in Haiti. “We were both just as dumbfounded as it could come,” Monique said.
It was a first for Monique, but the Haitian baby girl was the second time an infant had been named after Lucie Rouleau. In 1993, Lucie deployed to Bosnia for six months. Communication home was sparse, with two ten-minute phone calls a month to speak to loved ones. “Every minute was precious,” said Lucie.
On the Bosnian mission, a doctor asked Lucie for her wish list of what she would like to accomplish. At the top of that list was the chance to deliver a child. “So he gave me a lot of books and he said, ‘Okay, tell me when you’re going to be ready.’ I read all those books, like how to do an emergency delivery … I think it was three days after [finishing reading] I said I was ready.”
Lucie had to give the doctor a presentation about what she had learned. She was also asked to present to her entire medical team about “how to do an emergency [delivery].”
The following day, they received a phone call notifying them there was a Bosnian woman who lived in the mountains who was ready to give birth. Lucie and a medical team had to travel via armoured tank to get to the woman’s home. It was a long distance, Lucie recalled. “This woman was in the porch … there’s two kids … we had to use sign language to communicate.”
She tried to explain to the expectant mother that she needed to examine how dilated she was. “She was so dilated there was no time to transport her. I just grabbed all my stuff [out of the tank] and delivered the ba
by, and it was a baby girl.”
The mother delivered her daughter on the living room sofa. Lucie recalled it was dark in the room because all the “windows were shuttered or covered over with pieces of wood,” for protection during the war.
A doctor had accompanied Lucie to the emergency call but only acted as an observer. The baby was born healthy and without incident.
“When we left, it was war and things were around us shooting and starting to explode, so they gave us, as a gift … a grenade. We just left so quickly and I was wishing the little girl survived,” said Lucie.
JL: “They gave you a grenade that still had a pin in it, so you could have used it if you had to?”
LR: “Yeah.”
JL: “Given the war was happening in Bosnia at the time, it would have been a significant gift.”
LR: “Exactly. It was a big, big gift. It was kind of bizarre. I had a feeling that I had just give[n] the baby birth, [or] life, and with the grenade, mean[t] death.”
The baby girl was named Lucie. The retired medic does not know the family’s surname. Lucie, of Bosnia, would be twenty-four years old as of 2017.
Word of the 1993 birth in Bosnia did not spread like the news from the 2010 Haitian mission. That is because journalists were deployed with the DART medical team in Haiti. News about little Monique-Lucie spread rapidly.
“I was on the news and that was the very first time any of my family had seen me or heard me, because we had no communications,” Monique said.
JL: “How important was the event to you at the time, emotionally and mentally?”
MB: “It just totally [reinforced that] we are making a difference. And it turned us around. We started to have a new perspective. I know family could see I was okay, so it was relieving a little bit.”
“It’s kind of wonderful. It’s what I wanted. I wanted to deliver the baby, so it was kind of amazing,” Lucie said, of the fact two people, in two other countries, have been named after her.
Mentally, things may have improved for both women after Monique-Lucie Marie Pierre arrived in Jacmel. Physically, conditions remained “beyond austere. Showers were water bottles over our head. Baby wipes were our best friend. So to this day, baby wipes trigger me,” Monique said.
Monique was also triggered by bonfires. She could not be near one for a long time after Haiti. The smell of the burning was too powerful. “I didn’t understand it,” she said. “Now, after all of this therapy, I can look back and I know what my triggers are … I can’t go in the ocean; there were bodies. It’s just a fear. It’s stronger than me. I still can’t pin exactly what the fear is. I’m working more on getting in the ocean now.”
JL: “Have you stepped foot in the ocean since?”
MB: “Yes, but it took me a very long time, and that’s only been since the last two years I’ve been able to.”
JL: “How far can you go into the ocean now?”
MB: “As long as I can see my feet, I’m good. If it’s murky, I cannot go in. I used to love snorkelling.”
The memories are also painful for Lucie.
The DART medical team repeatedly assisted in amputations in Haiti. One of the lowest points for Lucie was her role in the amputation of a three-year-old girl’s finger, after the child’s hand had been crushed by falling debris. The girl’s appendage had the beginning of gangrene. “So when we [did the amputation] she screamed,” said Lucie.
Adding to the trauma was the fact one of Lucie’s children was the same age as the little girl who needed the amputation. Lucie also said a drug was administered to amputation patients, but despite that, some of them would still have felt intense pain. She explained the medication meant the patients’ memories of what had happened during the operation would not be as clear afterwards.
Monique and Lucie worked with a team of Swiss medics during one round of amputations. “I came in the tent. It was about forty feet long. There were people on both sides [of the tent] who needed amputation … kids, adults. I don’t know how many people were in there. It was crazy,” Lucie said.
They assisted a teenage girl who needed her right leg amputated below the knee. She was sedated. Afterwards, she was given a painkiller and had to recuperate outside the medical tent in sweltering forty-degree heat.
Lucie had a chance to call back home during that round of amputations. She called her husband shaking and crying, and told him she was worried she could no longer continue with the mission. “‘Honey, I can’t do that. I’m going to die over here.’ He said, ‘Just switch off. Switch your brain off.’ And that’s what I [did],” Lucy explained, of how she tried to cope and protect herself. She learned how to manipulate her own emotions.
Lucie later met a social worker who told her, “‘Be careful [about switching off emotions].’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’ He said, ‘What about the kids, they are screaming?’ My reply was always, ‘I don’t care. I don’t care anymore.’ So when I came back home, it was hard because my feeling[s] just stop[ped]. I just stop[ped] my emotions.”
When Lucie returned home to Canada, the most comfortable room for her in her house was a closet. “I wanted to be at home, but [I] didn’t want to be involved in anything. I didn’t want people to talk to me …”
She hid her feelings and her pain at work. She said she even hid them from a psychiatrist, at first.
Since she was diagnosed with PTSD in 2010, Lucie has sought out professional support, guidance, and assistance. “I worked really, really hard, and I’m okay right now,” she said.
JL: “Have you been able to turn the switch back on?”
LR: “I never wanted to go back working with patients, like doing care.”
Lucie continued working in the military until she retired on July 4, 2016. She ended her career posted in Ottawa, in another unit in an administrative role, where she no longer directly dealt with patients.
JL: “Were you able to switch it [emotions] back on for your family?”
LR: “I can do it. But it’s important for me to switch off. Right now, I’m on. I know if something happens, I can be off. I know how to do it and I will do it.”
JL: “So you are saying … even in this conversation, to protect yourself, you could turn those feelings off?”
LR: “I do.”
JL: “Are your feelings on or off right now?”
LR: “They are on.”
At that moment, I realized the interview could be causing her trauma. I ended soon after, but wanted Lucie to have a positive experience from our conversation because of her immense service in the line of duty and for her bravery in speaking with me in order to help others. I guided our conversation away from where it had been going.
JL: “Are you okay with them being on?”
LR: “Right now, no.”
JL: “So why don’t we end on a positive note, because I want you to have a good experience here. So we are going to end here. And we are going to end with you telling me what does the birth of Monique-Lucie and the other girl mean to you?”
LR: “What does it mean? It means life. I would be happy to know if she is fine … When we help[ed] people who were in distress, and they were so happy in the end, even if it was war, they were happy.”
JL: “You know, even in the middle of war, you were responsible for making those people happy, and that is a gigantic gift.”
LR: “Yeah. My parents are deaf and I know sign language and there was a [hearing impaired] patient who came at the front gate [at Jacmel Jetty]. She was more mentally ill, but she was trying to explain what she had, and I just came beside her and I started [doing] the sign language. And you know what? It was wonderful. She was screaming. She had a voice and she was screaming to her family around her that I was doing sign language. She came back [later] to the jetty. She brought me some gifts. It was an old frame or whatever she had, but she gave it to me. That was one of the most wonderful things in Haiti: the deaf person and Monique-Lucie.”
JL: “I want you to know people appreciate wha
t you have done.”
LR: “Thank you.”
Lucie still has the picture frame the distraught woman gave her.
The fact Lucie Rouleau can adeptly communicate in three ways – using sign language and by speaking both English and French – has been crucial in her ability to successfully connect with her patients.
Lucie was not the only person from the Haitian mission who struggled afterwards. Monique Bartlett said after that deployment, she drank heavily to self-medicate while trying to cope.
Monique deployed again, to Alert, in 2010, about six weeks after her vow renewal in Cuba and about eight weeks after Haiti. She had not slept much in the eight weeks since she left Haiti. “The only time I’d sleep is if I drank myself to sleep. I was afraid to go to sleep.”
The trauma continued in the Canadian North.
In May 2010, she travelled to Alert for a one-month posting. She had worked there before so knew the routine and understood what it was like to exist in a remote location living in harsh conditions.
For the first time in sixty years, there was a sudden death in the Alert post. A boiler room technician, a civilian in his seventies, died in his sleep. “In Alert, we are so isolated, there is no doctor. There is a senior medic and a med-tech, me, and a warrant officer. We were the coroner, the station counsellor, everything. It was very difficult but we got through it,” Monique said.
They took care of the man’s remains and arranged his transport back to his family. Monique was scheduled to leave herself two days later.
Then just in advance of her departure, a knock came at her door. She was summoned to the gymnasium for a medical emergency. She was the junior of the two med-techs. She thought it was not going to be a serious issue because she was summoned and not the senior officer.
JL: “What was it?”
MB: “A stroke. A thirty-two-year-old [man] and we lost him, and we fought for eighteen and a half hours.”
The man had been in the gym working out when he collapsed. When Monique arrived, he could no longer speak but pleaded with his eyes for help. Tears streamed down his face. That heartbreaking scene and the patient’s eyes are what Monique saw in her nightmares.
The Legacy Letters Page 23