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| "Baby Doc" Duvalier |
Jean Claude Duvalier was my patient. I traveled to Haiti for the express purpose of performing an EMG and nerve conduction velocities on him in his countryside villa. "Baby Doc" died on October 4, 2014 at the age of 63 of a heart attack.
From an earlier post:
One of my more memorable experiences was with Dr. Zwibel, when again I had EMG machine, will travel. This time we went to Haiti to perform an EMG and NCVs on Jean Claude ("Baby Doc") Duvalier. From the airport we were transported to the home of the embassy official where we spent the night. The next day we were taken to a theater in Port-au-Prince where we transferred into three black Buicks (we weren't allowed to ride together) escorted by the Tonton Macoute on a high speed trip on narrow back country roads to the villa that Duvalier had some distance from the capital. We sped by the locals cooking their meals alongside the road, and I feared that the cars would hit some of them, but I was just as sure that if it happened, it would be a hit and run. Arriving at the villa, Baby Doc and his wife Michelle, were watching videos of which Baby Doc had a large collection. The doctors interviewed the patient who only spoke creole french, but Michelle interpreted with her fluent English. Her primary concern was that some medications that a local doctor had prescribed might cause impotence. His medical history revealed that after spraining an ankle, the local doctor had put a cast on it for months, and when the cast came off, he had severe weakness in the leg, which had prompted our visit from the states by the State Department. The testing proved that no great harm had been done, and that his weakness was just from long disuse atrophy resulting from the cast. To show his appreciation, Baby Doc gave each of us a collector's set of gold and silver coins that had been cast in his honor.
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