IV. Hands and Healing
At the first sight of blood loss Jenny asked what I thought about the nurse who took it. "Is that how they take blood in America?" She asked me. "I suppose they are a bit...gentler," I answered her. She nodded, commenting on how the Russian medical tradition is quite brusque, lacking in bedside manner. This was in marked contrast, of course, to the deeply emotional and empathic side of the Russian soul, which I have seen on display from strangers alerting me to my coat touching the floor at restaurants to the lingering ambulance staff who asked about my health and wished me well before leaving me at the hospital. There are the men who will push you or your arm out of the way to get off the Metro and there are the women who delight in being cornered by street dogs begging for scraps, which are dutifully discovered and given.
The older nurse who drew my blood at the hospital always came with a little smile, forcing me to look at her as she inserted and withdrew the needle, gentle mocking my obvious discomfort with the whole thing. She'd linger and talk to me about my job and other things sometimes. Perhaps she was the same who told me that it was time I married. The strong, friendly, stocky middle-aged woman of Soviet vintage has always been of interest to me.
These are all powerful women, working women, and in the hospital they could be custodial staff or medical staff, providing for patients in any number of ways. Their hands are large, hardly delicate. The younger women, too, possessed hands that would worry a former colleague of mine. In a moment alone 10 years ago we were discussing gender and the Soviet experience. My classmate observed that, apologies to whatever feminism I might harbor, that the women in Russia had large, work-worn hands, not small, delicate ones. She thought this was sad, that the femininity was ground out of generations of women by the demands of the state. I thought it was an interesting observation, if not especially sociologically nuanced.
Even today, though, the hands that stuck me and examined me were hardly American hand-model fodder. My infection specialist was young and healthy with hands larger and thicker than my own, capable, I am sure, of wielding syringes as expertly as of calming a scared patient's palm. This was true also of the strikingly tall nurse who treated me with the most brutal efficiency when it came to drawing blood or inserting an IV, even to the point of doing it incorrectly. On one of the last days, I could feel some of the saline escaping the line and dripping along my elbow. A male nurse checked on the line and saw the problem. He fiddled with it a bit but called in the original one who muttered "How long has it been like this..." as she indelicately fixed the line, jerking about my already punctured right arm, which could at that point have stood in for that of a novice heroin addict.
When I was 9 or so, possibly during my first tangle with pneumonia, I was taken to a clinic off of 355. I think I was on the verge of dehydration, so it was decided that I'd need an IV. I was with my father, who, despite his gruff bearing, around whom I often felt comfortable showing fear and discomfort. He was with me when the staff came to insert the IV, which for some reason was to go in my hands instead of my arm. I anticipated some pain, and maybe even to cry a little, but I did NOT expect the staff to fail, repeatedly, to make the proper insertion. It felt like they were tearing apart my hand trying to find a vein that I think I eventually lost consciousness from crying through the pain. When I woke up it was just me and my dad. No one had checked on me in some time. We eventually left, both quite unhappy with how that visit went. For years I would point out that clinic to remind him of the day's horrors. I wonder if he would remember it today. His memory for thing that hurt me is selective, I have found, so I trust far less what I share.
Over a decade later we were in the emergency room around midnight. I knew the sights and smells of Shady Grove Adventist well, having visited my mother there repeatedly in my youth. Trips to Shady Grove became routine for me, hardly cause for alarm, at least when I went as a visitor.
I'd been plagued by nausea and diarrhea for a full day, unable to keep anything down. Even though I blamed my father's penchant to leave food out on the stove instead of refrigerating it, he pointed out that everyone ate the same thing, yet I was the only one sick in the house, a mystery to this day remains unsolved. I eventually got a bed and an IV put into my left arm. I hardly winced. Several minutes afterward, my father asked if I felt any better. Not really. He looked at the IV and realized that it wasn't flowing. The likely overworked nurse, a mother of two, didn't turn the screw that released the solution. My father did it himself, a benevolent Immortan John letting his child drink.
After I first got into the cot, a tall nurse who spoke some English wheeled over an IV, just the same as I was used to in the States, only these came in bottles, not bags. She took my left arm and plunged a needle into it. She waited for a moment, realizing she failed to find a vein. Quietly frustrated, she told me to wait before leaving and returning with another nurse. I could tell she wanted to say she was sorry for fucking up. They turned me around and took my right arm, wrapping it with a band and having me make a fist. They got the IV in this time, laying the syringe on a cold cotton ball that soon fell away. After some time, they injected the drip with antibiotics that burned at the point of entry. She spoke enough English to tell me what they were doing and would be doing. This nurse I saw several times during my stay, most consequently after the Holy Child left.
By both beds was a small box featuring a switch to call a nurse. Upon arrival, the Holy Child explained that the one by my cot didn't work, but that he could call if I needed anything from his side. One night after he left, though, my left foot was in terrible pain. I was used to my feet hurting from walking about the city's unforgiving, uneven pavement in shoes made for fashion more so than comfort (all praise to the Russian woman). But that night there was no reason for the sharp pain I felt. I couldn't put any weight on my big toe at all and was in agony. I managed to hop on one foot over to the now-empty second cot and call for a nurse.
The one from my first night, perpetrator of the abortive IV, arrived, confused that I was complaining about my foot and not lungs. I explained that I hadn't suffered any immediate trauma but that I couldn't walk on it.. She went out and brought a truly foul tasting elixir that she immediately urged me to wash back with water. There was a pill too. In English she said that if it still hurt to call her. I hopped back to my bed and tried to sleep but couldn't. I mustered the strength to hop over again and flipped the switch. The same nurse came and came up with a new solution. Before she left I proposed wrapping my foot "like ballet" because holding it together relieved some of the pain. She understood and went out. Meanwhile, I hopped back to my cot. The treatments went like this: she gave me a shot of something on the ass and then wrapped my foot, so I looked like a gauzed up Achilles from the Indus Valley.
Whatever the shot was, it worked.
I slept without rage, without pain.
The nightly routine continued, eventually becoming rote: a doctor or nurse would come in around 9, turn me over, stick me, and say goodnight. The nurse with the bedside manner of a T-1000 was the last to give me this shot, my last one at all, on the day I left.
Predictably, I vied for the English-speaking doctor's attention once the Holy Child was gone. Of course I asked questions about my condition, treatment, complications, etc. but on one day I asked her about herself. I learned that she was from the Urals but enjoyed living in St. petersburg. "More interesting diseases?" I asked. "Yes, and more interesting people," she replied. On a lark I told her how I wanted to visit Siberia and hang out with bears and if this pneumonia would be the death of me, I'd like my end to be in the tundra, a mystery for archaeologists to ponder about hundreds of years from now. Perhaps she thought I was as mad as the Holy Child.
We'd talk a little before and after our meetings ended the same way each day: Now I'd like to check your breathing.
She'd direct me to inhale deeply through the nose and exhale through the mouth. Then she would lightly hit me all along both sides of the spine as I continued breathing. This was our ritual.
Still, she laughed. I asked if she knew about the Russian site that was so polluted with nuclear waste that it could kill a person after one hour's exposure. Here she surely thought I was crazy, assuring me that she thought everything would be fine, a cute standard saying here. The next day I showed her the Wikipedia page for Lake Karochai, the place in question. She checked it in Russian, nodding along to the grim facts, her eyes widening dramatically as she got to to the more horrifying details. It wasn't actually that far from where she grew up, she said. We joked a bit about what monsters could rise from such a site. I riffed that perhaps she arose from it herself, like an atomic age Venus on a hollow concrete block.
Part V (Conclusion)