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Shattering the peace of his large Hilton Head Island home was this message: A man he'd never met lay dying in Haiti. He'd been crushed in the Jan. 12 earthquake that killed more than 200,000, injured more than 300,000 and left the impoverished nation in chaos.
And Kitchen's wife, Charlotte, was telling him he had to do something. He had to rescue the father of their daughters' friend. The man had been left for dead beneath the rubble of his own home, but he dug out with his one good leg. He had a shattered left arm, fractured vertibrae, five broken ribs and a punctured lung. A tube was inserted in his side to drain the lung, without the benefit of a hospital. Infection set in. He had less than a day to live. And Kitchen had to do something.
"I'm very sorry, honey. What do you think I can do?" he recalls saying to Charlotte on the phone.
"Well, you can do something, and you need to do it."
"OK, I need to do something, but what is it? I can't go to Haiti."
"You can figure it out," she said, and hung up.
That was late on Friday afternoon, Jan. 15.
Within 24 hours, the man whose first name Kitchen didn't know was in a Learjet 35A far above the havoc, roaring for a Florida hospital. Kitchen had given Trinity Air Ambulance his American Express card number. They said it would cost anywhere from $18,000 to $28,000. He said it was OK. It ended up being $18,000.
"I never thought, 'Oh, this is too much money,' " Kitchen told me Thursday in that same quiet living room. "This is just clearly an opportunity God gave us to help. As far as the decision to help, if it had been $100,000 and all we had was $105,000, we would've done it to save a life. It's embarrassing when people talk about it. We did not save him. It's a God thing, and for that we're thankful."
THE ODDS
Dr. Jean-Maurice Duval underwent six hours of surgery, then almost three weeks in intensive care in Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, Fla. He was recently able to move to Atlanta, where he is reunited with his wife, Nadine, and 14-year-old daughter, Vickie, a tennis phenom training at the Racquet Club of Georgia. The Kitchen girls -- Ashley, 15, and Natalie, 12 -- are training there this year, after three years of attending Hilton Head Christian Academy. They're living there with their mother while their father tries to keep the family's successful commercial real estate development company intact here in grueling times.
Duval kept his OB-GYN practice going in Port-au-Prince while his family came to the States. Now, he's lost everything. But the tennis community rallied to spare his life, with Anne Keeton of the racquet club staff coordinating a frantic search for help.
At one point, Duval told his wife goodbye on the phone, and Charlotte and the girls rushed to her side.
"We were praying with her, just trying to keep the mood light," she said.
Then, Charlotte got the fire in her eye that opponents saw when she played basketball for the University of Arizona, or made the athletics Hall of Fame at her high school in Tomahawk, Wisc.
"If she puts her mind to something, it gets done," said Harry Kitchen, 57. They've been married, and business partners, for 16 years. Their business requires a lot of problem-solving every day, something Harry Kitchen always tackles by making lists on a yellow legal pad.
Charlotte Kitchen said: "Once I got my husband on board, I knew we'd get Dr. Duval out. We never thought of the odds."
THE MIRACLES
It's a good thing because the odds were ridiculous.
It's a miracle he got out from under the rubble, and that his cell phone was in the yard, not buried. And that friends found his passport in the ruins. Without it, he could not leave.
It's a miracle that a policeman in the crumbled city of 2 million recognized the doctor for having helped his family and escorted him through the mayhem to the airport.
It's a miracle that the evacuation flight could get in to an airport whose control tower consisted of American military soldiers on the ground with handheld radios. It's a miracle that friends and family coordinated getting a dying patient to the right place at the right time when the rescue plane had a window of 30 minutes on the ground.
Kitchen, still in his quiet Wexford Plantation home after hours of working the phone and checking the fax machine all night, cried when a text message from the racquet club flashed across his phone at 3:39 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 16:
"THEY GOT HIM!!!!!! Should be in Fl. abt 6:30 P. And they're shutting down flights so we got in and out in the (nick) of time. A miracle."
For 24 tense hours, Kitchen and the club had tried to make this happen through a number of jet services, the U.S. State Department, the Mayo Clinic, and others. The Florida hospital told them about Trinity, the first civilian air ambulance into Port-au-Prince after the quake. Within 48 hours, it had conducted 15 successful missions.
Trinity CEO Inger Lisa Skroder referred to Kitchen as "the angel."
She said, "There aren't many people like that out there in the world. I hope people read what you write and go out and do something good for their fellow man."
Lars Skroder, her brother and vice president of Trinity, said when the next request for an evacuation from Haiti came in, they spent days calling to get a landing slot. In Duval's case, that would have been fatal.
HIGHER PURPOSE
Soon, video of the "Miracle Doc" in his hospital bed was splashed across Miami television screens. The story made the front page of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last Sunday, Jan. 24.
"The miracle continues to evolve," Kitchen said Thursday.
An Atlanta friend was surprised to read about the Kitchens in his newspaper as he flew west on business.
Through that friend, Richard Pease, medical help for Duval was arranged in Atlanta.
Dr. Stephen M. McCollam of the Peachtree Orthopaedic Clinic took on the case at no charge, Kitchen said, even arranging neurological treatment through another firm.
"My friend got the medical records from Florida and got Dr. Duval to the clinic, and as he is in the doctor's office he looks up and sees a picture of some doctors in Haiti," Kitchen said.
Every four months since 1957, some surgeons from Peachtree Orthopaedic Clinic, including Dr. McCollam, travel to Haiti to provide care to impoverished Haitians.
"What are the chances," Kitchen asked. "What are the chances?"
On Friday morning, Kitchen met Dr. Duval for the first time.
"It was really emotional," he said. "I spent three hours with him. One arm's paralyzed. He's very underweight. He's facing years of recovery. It would do your heart good to see a person in that condition still be so enthusiastic, so appreciative and so joyful. It was just an inspiration."
Charlotte Kitchen said they were overjoyed for Dr. Duval, but at the same time saddened more people could not have been on that plane.
"When I met Dr. Duval, I told him, 'You have a higher purpose.' It's something huge, I'm sure."
