Red Ticket: In the Hospital
“The pain!” I said, “What about the pain?” “Yes,” said Lyosha. “There will be pain.”
Every weekend we serialize Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone’s memoir of her time in Moscow in the early ‘90s. Today, she goes to the hospital before hitting the grocery store. If you need to catch up, go back and read chapters 1, 2-3, 4-5, 6, 7, 8-9, 10-11, 12, and 13.
Chapter 14. In the Hospital
by Robin Whetstone
I woke up several hours later to the sound of a key in the lock. The door opened and Lyosha stepped in.
“Welcome home,” he said. He sat down next to me on the couch bed. We sat there in silence for a few seconds longer than was comfortable.
“So,” I said, “What should we do?”
“We must go shopping to find food,” said Lyosha.
It was 3:30, already almost dark. Outside our building, we crunched across a snowy courtyard and down a residential street. After a few blocks, we stopped in front of a five-story building made of gray concrete. The windows were cracked and grimy, and one of the metal front doors was leaning on its hinges. There were no people around anywhere. This definitely was not a grocery store.
“OK,” said Lyosha, “Here we are.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the building’s entrance.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I said, rocking back on my heels. “This isn’t a grocery store. What are we doing? Where are we?”
Lyosha turned to me and put his hands on my shoulders. “Robin,” he said, “this is hospital. We must go here before we go shopping.”
“What?” I said, shaking off his hands, “No. No. I am not going to the hospital. Forget it, no. Absolutely not.” I turned and began walking back in the direction we’d come.
“Robin,” he yelled, running after me and grabbing my good arm, “If you do not go to doctor, your arm will fall off. Look,” he said, turning around and pulling up his coat and the back of his dress shirt. A ropy scar twisted down the middle of his lower back. “I know all about hospital. I have been many times. There is nothing for you to worry about. I will take care of everything. Please, trust me.”
I stared at the centipede of scar tissue on Lyosha’s back. It was huge and sloppy, like clumsy Halloween makeup. “Lyosha,” I said, “What happened to you?”
“I had back surgery two years ago, when I was 18,” he said, dropping his shirt and coat and stuffing his hands in his pockets. “I was in hospital for very long time. But I am okay now. You will see. There is nothing to be afraid of. I will come with you and I will take care of everything.”
I stood in the falling snow, looking at Lyosha and trying to decide. It was well known that basic hygiene in most Russian hospitals had collapsed. There was no water, hot or otherwise, so the doctors didn’t wash their hands. Supplies were scarce, and the doctors reused syringes. Rates of hepatitis, HIV, and tuberculous were exploding. But what else was I going to do? Put potato skins on my wrist? I had to get this dead skin off of me or I was going to lose my hand, or worse. I was out of time.
I sighed. “OK. But no shots. If they try to give me a shot, I’m leaving.”
“OK. No shots.” Lyosha took me by the hand and we walked into the lobby. A woman sat behind a greasy Plexiglas window with a circle cut in the bottom of it. She looked like a taxi dispatcher. Lyosha leaned in and said a few words to her. Without looking up from her magazine, she pointed toward the lobby.
The lobby was all concrete pillars and broken tile, like a parking garage. There were a few dented chairs, but no lights. Lyosha and I sat on a windowsill. He lit two cigarettes, handed one to me, and dropped the match on the floor. I watched it burn for just a second before being snuffed by the thick layer of sand it had landed in. I looked around. The entire floor was covered with sand, thick enough to almost hide the wood underneath. Someone had taken the time to sweep it into a uniform, light-brown layer across the lobby. You could see the strokes from the broom. “Why would you do that?” I wondered. “Why not just sweep the sand out?”
Then I saw the spots, and I realized. The dirt in the lobby wasn’t really uniform. In places – lots of places – there were wet patches of…what?
“Judging from the size and color, that one there is probably blood,” I thought, then tried to un-think it. There were lots of big and little wet circles in the sand in this lobby. I tried to imagine what the floor would look like if the sand weren’t there. This hospital was almost completely unstaffed, so, the man who drank the poisoned vodka? The woman in early labor, walking herself in alone? The messes these people made would just stay there. The sand was the best of all the bad options.
After about 45 minutes, a door opened and a nurse poked her head out. She brought us into a small triage area and motioned for me to sit. She began asking me questions about why I was there. I smiled at her, and blinked. Lyosha had warned me not to say anything at all, not even in Russian. If they found out I was an American, he said, they’d charge me $5,000 for the staph infection they were about to give me. Lyosha put his hand on my shoulder, official-guardian-like, and began talking to the nurse. I looked around at the blood pressure cuff and the old iron scale. We were in the middle of a hallway that was dark and quiet. “Where are the other patients?” I wondered.
Right then, from a room down the hallway, a woman began to scream. She started screaming all at once, with no prelude of moaning or anything to warn us that it was coming. She screamed and screamed and screamed, a harsh, rasping sound, and after a while I realized that what she was screaming was words. I listened and listened, thinking not about the screaming but about prefixes and conjugations and the genitive case, and slowly I understood that what she was screaming was “Just kill me! Just kill me!”
I felt disoriented, like this wasn’t really happening. I felt like I was watching a movie. I’d felt this way often since coming to Moscow. The woman kept on with her screaming. “Yay,” I thought, “I understood her.”
A man in a white coat appeared and gestured for us to follow him. He led us into an operating room. This room was painted a sickly salmon color, and did have electricity. There was a flimsy metal table in the center of the room, and on this table lay an old woman. She was fully dressed in her street clothes – heavy coat, crocheted hat and scarf – and she turned her head to look at us as we entered. The two doctors who stood over the incision in her leg smoked theirpapirosi and drank coffee from small paper cups, discussing how to proceed and ignoring us.
I sat down in a chair against the wall. The sight of the woman on the table jolted me out of the stupor I was in. I started to sweat, to panic. Why was I in an operating room? Was I next? I was now eye-level with the woman, who smiled sweetly at me and said “Good day.”
“Hello,” I said. She turned her head away and sighed, looking at the ceiling as the doctors extinguished their cigarettes and picked up their tools.
The man who had led us in pulled up a chair across from me. He sat so close that our knees almost touched. He looked me in the eye and spoke slowly. His name was Evgeny Rudolphovitch, he said, and he’d be looking at my arm. He unwrapped the bandana and I stared hard at the floor. I didn’t know what was about to happen, but I dreaded it. In the corner of the room was a dirty puddle of water. I looked up at the ceiling and saw that it was leaking steadily into an overflowing metal bucket. In this bucket floated a variety of stained gauze and used syringes. I looked back at the doctor, who was staring at me expectantly.
“Shto?” I said.
“He is asking if you have had tetanus shot,” said Lyosha, who was standing behind the doctor.
“Da, da!” I stammered, trying to pull my arm away from the doctor. Evgeny nodded and picked up a small pair of scissors. “Wait!” I yelped, startling him. I looked at Lyosha, frantic. “Isn’t he going to give me something for the pain?”
“What?” Lyosha squinted at me, not understanding.
“The pain!” I said, “What about the pain?”
“Yes,” said Lyosha. “There will be pain.”
In fact, there was no pain. I watched, transfixed, as the doctor took the scissors and carefully cut away the ropes of dead skin that bordered the burn, revealing a much bigger injury than I’d realized I had. He removed the flesh, and my fingers, which had been curled down into a useless claw, finally unclenched. I wiggled them, ecstatic. The doctor stood up and returned with a tongue depressor and a pot of bright orange paste, which he slathered on my wrist. Then he wrapped the whole thing tightly in clean white gauze and sat back, satisfied.
“That’s it,” he said, patting my arm.
“Am I going to die?” I asked.
He laughed. No, he said, I was definitely not going to die. I should come to see him three more times after this, once a week, so that he could change the bandage and reapply the ointment. I should keep my arm clean, and dry. And no, he said again, I was not going to die.
We stood up and Lyosha handed him five American dollars. We said our goodbyes to Evgeny and to the lady on the table, and left the hospital without speaking to anyone else.
Twenty minutes later I was standing in an aisle of a hard-currency grocery store, staring numbly at bags of powdered sugar and wiggling my fingers. Lyosha appeared from around the corner, holding a bag of oranges and an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels.
“You did well,” he said, pulling the plastic off the neck of the bottle and handing it to me. He held up the bag of oranges. “Give these to Evgeny Rudolphovitch next time you go.”
We drank the whiskey as we shopped for food together, giddy with good health and possibility.
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