I’ve been on a sabbatical of sorts. I’ve been spending more time in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where my family is from and where I’m working toward residing on a longer-term basis. I envision a life with time split roughly 50/50 between Vincy and Brooklyn. I’m doing contract work that can be done remotely, which gives me the flexibility to imagine building out a life there.

As I’ve spent more time with my family over there, I’ve grown deeper attachments to this place, my other home. At the same time, I’ve become more aware of the realities that concern me about living there long-term. No place is perfect and while Vincy comes remarkably close to feeling like one of the best places on Earth, one glaring gap remains: meaningful advocacy within the healthcare system.

A week ago, my great-uncle passed away from lung cancer—diagnosed just one week prior, after he had already been admitted to the hospital for over two months. When he was first admitted, an X-ray revealed a mass in his right lung. Scans of his pelvis and abdomen did not show additional masses at the time. Eventually, fluid began to accumulate in his lungs. This makes biological sense as the body was responding to a growing, unresolved pathology.

To move forward with treatment, a formal diagnosis was required and the plan was to have a pulmonologist perform a bronchoscopy and collect a sample of the mass. There is no MyChart or secure online patient portal available for this information to be communicated so I went in person to collect this info and apply some pressure for next steps. Apparently, there is ONE pulmonologist serving that area of CARICOM, and they were out of the country. I was told the pulmonologist would return a few days after my visit, but they never did.

Eventually, hospital administration made the decision to perform fluid cytology on the accumulated lung fluid. Cancer was confirmed. Within a week of that confirmation, my great-uncle experienced a rapid decline: labored breathing, falling oxygen saturation, decline of appetite and a body growing visibly thinner by the day. On December 11th, my uncle had a fall and just after midnight on December 12th, I received a call stating he had passed away. 

What devastates me most is the time that was lost. Had that decision been made sooner, treatment could have already begun. Even if the mass itself had not yet been fully characterized, malignant cells do not wait politely for imaging confirmation. They circulate. They spread. Earlier intervention may not have changed the outcome, but it could have slowed progression and provided more time to sit together, to talk, to remember, to love. Death is the final act of our lives, but how we arrive there is shaped by the systems around us.

Now, the mourning has begun. I think about the efforts his sisters—my great-aunts—made to keep him comfortable and cared for in the ways they knew best. He was given fried jack fish and plantain, chichi bush cake (spinach cake), and dandelion leaves steeped in hot water—believed, within the community, to be helpful for cancer.

I love this part of our culture. I love the use of local herbs and ancestral remedies to treat illness. And with my scientific background, I’ve become increasingly curious about the biological mechanisms that might underlie the effects people observe. What do these remedies do, biologically? Are they shrinking tumors? Inhibiting vascularization? Modulating inflammation? Affecting cell signaling? The answers may be complex—or incomplete—but the questions matter.

Beyond that, I feel a growing responsibility to archive this knowledge by documenting what my Tantie and her children have taught me. Record or remedies and to protect our memories by putting them into words—where they can outlive our physical forms.

This, to me, is part of the true Vincy–American crossover: using the scientific education I gained through the privilege of my parents immigrating and raising my siblings and I here, while honoring and preserving the knowledge rooted in where we come from.
My great-uncle’s funeral is in a couple of weeks.

 This work—this writing, this remembering—is one of the ways I’ve chosen to honor my family and their legacy. 

Cheers to life,

Stef