Afternoon shadows crept across the page as I sat reading on my front porch. Thousands of feet above me, thunderheads were blazing with a Friday’s setting sun. Where I sat, though, surrounded by mountains, dusk was already falling.

Half an hour before, I had opened my medical book to look up an antibiotic dosage for a child with a respiratory infection. The book fell open to the section on poisoning, and on an impulse I began to read. I didn’t typically study my medical book on Friday evenings, but somehow today it seemed like the thing to do. Finally, having exhausted the subject, and with night coming on quickly, I calculated the antibiotic dosage and headed out to the village.

A few minutes later, Ramon came into the house where I was visiting with a friend. “John, do you have any sugar?” he asked. “My son Dipi has been poisoned.”

The main staple of the Alangan diet is a poisonous tuber called nami. It takes about three days of fermentation and rinsing to extract the poison and render the root edible. Every once in a while, someone is just too hungry to wait, and they pay the price in dizziness, vomiting and a terrible headache. The traditional antidote for nami poison is sugar.

Thankfully, no one in remembered history has died from eating under-processed nami, so I wasn’t too worried when Ramon asked for sugar. After getting him some, I headed back to my friend’s house. Ten minutes later, Ramon showed up again. Earlier in the day, Dipi had played basketball in the lowlands with a few of the boys who lived in this house. Ramon sat the boys down and interrogated them about what they had eaten that might have poisoned Dipi. I finally came to my senses and realized this was more than a simple case of nami poisoning. I asked Ramon, and he confirmed that Dipi was pretty bad off. I grabbed my medical book and a few drugs and took off running for Ramon’s house.

Cooking-fire smoke stung my eyes as I climbed into the little house. A single tin-can lamp hung from the rafters, dimly illuminating the chaos below. Half the village was crammed into the house. Fifty or so of the boldest were packed around the rope hammock Dipi was lying in, offering advice and massaging his limbs. Someone was trying to force dampened sugar into his mouth, and a dish of charcoal water sat under his hammock.

As I got closer, I could see that Dipi’s eyes were mostly closed, and black charcoal drool was running down his chin. I immediately checked his ABCs—airway, breathing and circulation. As soon as I was certain he was stable for the moment, I asked to pray. “Father,” I begged, “please spare Dipi’s life. Please remember his father’s faithful service to You, and don’t let him lose his son now. Please give us wisdom to treat Dipi. You alone understand all that is going on here, so we ask these things according to Your will, and in Jesus’ name.”

I continued to assess Dipi. He was unconscious. His pulse and respirations were slow. His eyes were rolled back in his head, and his pupils were fully dilated and unresponsive to light. There was no fever, muscle spasm, stiffness or any other obvious clue as to the cause of his condition. Onset of symptoms had been sudden. He had asked for water, and when his brother brought him a jug, his hand had shaken violently as he reached for it. Unable to take a drink, he had fallen back into the hammock unresponsive.

My book recommended taking a case like this to a hospital right away, but I couldn’t find Ramon. He had disappeared as soon as I had left for his house, and I knew no one would let me take Dipi out without his approval. Besides, Dipi likely wouldn’t live long enough to get to the hospital on the far end of the island. We would have to do what we could for him here in the village.

Short on ideas, I tried to convince the people surrounding Dipi to give him more charcoal along with the sugar. I knew it wasn’t a good idea to give anything orally to an unconscious person, but there was no way on earth I would be able to convince the villagers to stop. Anyway, he was automatically spitting everything back out. His pulse was slowly weakening, and soon I was having a hard time finding it. Dipi was almost dead.

I learned later that Ramon, knowing there was nothing more he could do for his son, had made his way to the church, fallen on his knees and begged God to preserve Dipi’s life. “Father,” he prayed, “please save my son. I give him up to You. Even if it is not Your will to heal Dipi, I surrender him to You. Please accept him into Your kingdom. Please, Father, may I see him again in the resurrection.”

As Ramon prayed this prayer, I sat alone in the back of the house. Aside from a miracle, it was just a matter of time. With nothing else left to do, I decided to re-read the poisoning section in my medical book. The house was noisy, and my mind was racing, and i was having difficulty focusing, but since I had just read this section carefully an hour or so before, I realized that the book described only one poison that remotely resembled Dipi’s symptoms. The book said that, short of taking him to an advanced hospital (which doesn’t exist on our island), the only thing that might help with this type of poison was spraying a bit of insecticide on a cloth and holding it under the patient’s nose for him to breathe. Apparently many insecticides contain compounds similar to the antidote for this particular poison.

I had never heard of such a crazy treatment, and I was afraid the villagers would run me out of town if I tried it, but anything was worth a shot. I found a man who had a bit of insecticide powder for his crops. I sprinkled some on a dampened piece of fabric and held it up to Dipi’s nose. After about two minutes, Dipi took a long, rasping breath. It didn’t sound like a good sign, so I took the insecticide away from his nose and sat down again. Oh well, I thought. It was worth a try.

“Dipi! Dipi! Can you hear me?” The words broke through my thoughts. It had been about a minute since I had tried the insecticide. I jumped up and ran to the hammock. There was no obvious sign of improvement, but when I shined my light into Dipi’s eyes, his pupils immediately contracted down to almost normal size. Within five minutes, he began to move his limbs and swallow. With prayers of thanksgiving, we made our way home, wondering at the strange and wonderful ways God sometimes chooses to work.

The next morning, Dipi’s mental function was still a little slow, and he was extremely weak, but he was improving. When I saw him again a few days later, he was completely back to normal.

The particular poison Dipi likely ingested is often used by criminals. This is our best guess about what happened: Dipi is a talented basketball player, and earlier that afternoon he had been playing in the lowlands. Between games, when Dipi went off to buy snacks, a jealous opponent must have slipped the poison into his drink.

Praise God for Ramon’s prayer of surrender from a father’s heart. Praise God for nudging me to read up on poisoning ahead of time and for guiding me to the strangest of antidotes.

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