Part One – There
(Eastern Hemisphere)
CHAPTER SEVENTY FOUR – THE MOSCOW EXPERIMENT: WORK AND LIFE (PART 2)
And now, a few stories about life, although don’t be surprised, perhaps some of them will again be about work.
These stories also can be divided into two types – about local and metropolitan life.
We actually lived not in Moscow itself, but three kilometers outside its official border, at the Grechnevskaya station, which everyone called Grechikha. Near the station there were small private wooden houses, and a little further, about a three-minute walk, began the usual six to eight-story buildings in residential areas, like in any city. Uninteresting, unremarkable concrete buildings. Halfway between us and the station, a grocery supermarket, which everyone called “Glassy”, sparkled with its windows, smelling of sour and slightly rotten out vegetables and fruits, and already in the distance, across the river, stood the houses of the district center with a variety of shops, a market, and city services.
All closest neighbors were connected by a courtyard – a huge space between two elongated eight-entry house-ships. Here, some people kept cars, grandmothers sat on benches in good weather, rare men knocked on dominoes, but children from all the entrances walked and played here. Since the walks began with the birth of the child, Lilya already knew several young women with children of the same age as our Ana. The friendliest ones usually became close and became local friends with whom it was easy to communicate.
And to go to see old friends in Moscow was not easy – you had to spend a long time choosing a suitable day to meet. Getting to Moscow took about half an hour by train, but you had to walk ten minutes to the station and wait the same amount for the train. That is, getting to the right place took at least an hour, or even an hour and a half, so coming home on a weekday and going back to Moscow again was incredible. If we were going to the theater, I, of course, stayed in the city after work, and Lilya came to me, and we returned home together – it was also a form of pleasure to travel together.
Local stories are not worth retelling: well, we drank tea, well, we fried barbeque, well, we went to the cinema. True, when I had easy rotations, I got a part-time job at an outpatients clinic in our house. Now I was already a doctor, and received patients in the place of Ivan, who had sunk into oblivion. But palpating bellies and examining hemorrhoids was boring, and I began to carefully perform small operations – removing lipomas, opening boils, suturing wounds and providing trauma care. I must say that rumors about the new service spread throughout the area, patients were pouring in, and I set aside one day for operations (in the morning – sterile, then purulent, then sterilization of the procedure room). However, this stream had not bring in any money, and the head physician was afraid that sooner or later someone dissatisfied with something would complain, and I, and most importantly, she would get into trouble. Therefore, as soon as residency again required full dedication, I quit working at the clinic. But still, this experience opened my eyes to metropolitan life and its useful connections.
Once I removed a lipoma to one grandmother. She persuaded me.
“Oh, son, yesterday it entered me in the left knee!”
“What did you enter in (hit) with your knee yesterday?”
“Not me, it entered into the knee.”
“Did something hit you?”
“No, it hurts on its own.”
I examined her knee. Normal. Not red. Not hot. All tendons are intact.
“It’s arthritis. Take analgesics, anti-inflammatory drugs, do exercises.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Then I’ll show you something else. There’s a bump on my back!”
I looked and touched it.
“It’s a lipoma. Benign lump. A little fat under the skin.”
“Is it possible to cut it?”
“But it doesn’t interfere with anything, after all.”
“Yes, so far. And when it grows, we’re too late! Respect an old woman, help me son. Going to the hospital is a big deal for me.”
“But grandma is right,” I thought. “It’s very easy for me to help an old woman without pain and bureaucracy.”
She was very pleased with the painless procedure and sent her daughter to me with gratitude. She began to stick 10 rubles in my robe pocket. Of course I refused.
“Don’t be afraid of me, I do it with all my heart,” said the young woman.
“What are you, dear, I have not afraid of you even for a second. I like you very much, but here I treat for free. In another place (I meant my hometown), where it is customary to thank for services, every satisfied patient pays, and the doctor lives on this money.”
“This is the right place! And the doctors are probably trying, not like ours! You know, doctor, I work in a furniture store. If you need imported furniture, just call. I’ll get what you need at the tag price!”
Eh, I was late! At my father-in-law’s place, we already slept on a wide sofa, in contrast to our narrow red one, which developed the skills of synchronized rotation during our sleep.
I remember one of the capital’s hikes well because I love to cook. But, unlike many connoisseurs of sophisticated cooking, I believe that much of the food business is just an entourage. The taste of a dish, it seems to me, is determined more by the preferences of the taster and the ingredients, rather than by the details of processing and the size of the salt grind.
I knew how to cook from a young age and, knowing this, Lilya’s friend Inna, a girl from a wealthy metropolitan family, who invited us to her new apartment, was nervous and did not want to lose face.
“Don’t bother yourself like that,” Lilya told her, “Nick eats everything except semolina porridge, and loves porcini mushrooms. There is a market near your house. Jump out, buy 100 grams of dried mushrooms and set it to cook. By the time we get there, the soup will be ready.”
When we entered the entrance to Inna’s house, I couldn’t help but praise the delicious mushroom spirit from someone’s apartment. To my surprise, it intensified on the twelfth floor, and when we entered Inna’s, we found ourselves in a cloud of mushroom pleasure.
“And you say that you don’t know how to cook,” Lilya laughed, “Look at Nick, is not he looks like a spaniel who caught a smell of truffles?!”
I, indeed, turned entirely into a “sniffer.” A strong call from the kitchen, like a magnet, pulled me there, and both women followed me. There was a large saucepan on the stove, in which a tar-colored liquid was bubbling, emitting a wonderful aroma.
“Of course, I don’t know how to cook!” Ina assured, “I didn’t even know what else to throw into the water besides mushrooms.”
“And what did you throw?”
“Salt. But 100 grams seemed like a mistake to me, and I bought a kilogram.”
“A kilogram of dried mushrooms?!” Lilya gasped.
“Yes. What difference does it make, fresh or dried?! A kilogram is just a kilogram.”
Yes, Inna was right about the weight, the price of mushrooms did not stop her, and she had no idea what to add to the soup, but I have never eaten a more delicious soup made from dried porcini mushrooms in my life!
The first year in Moscow was, as it were, a year of exploration and adaptation. I can’t say that I loved my new city, apartment, institute, job, employees. I just got used to the new rhythm, colder, official relationships, and even in such an unusual environment for myself, I managed to establish good relationships with individual employees.
Every two months of the first year, residents changed their place of work – they moved to another department of the SRISI in the Central complex or in Moscow hospitals. In the hospitals, no one was interested in the residents, and in some places they even sent them home early so as not to get in the way. At that time, I worked part-time at a clinic in Grechikha.
I did one of my rotations at the clinic of Professor Litovsky, my “godfather.” This clinic was located on the territory of the central Moscow hospital, which became my Moscow alma mater. I worked there for the entire next year, gaining experience and impressions, which I will talk about below. The connection with SRISI became weaker. All employees, professors and residents, had to gather on Friday mornings for a general conference. I have already described a typical meeting in the chapter “Ovation.” It was even nice to see old acquaintances, staying away from the politicized life of the research institute. True, after lunch, you had to return to your hospital, examine your patients, and make notes and procedures (dressings) until everything was finished. However, there were no planned operations on Fridays, and this work did not seem difficult to me.
In addition to conferences, once or twice a month it was necessary to be on duty throughout the SRISI. Overall the work was not difficult. Emergency operations were performed by the person on duty, and the resident was on duty on the floors, making sure everything was calm, prescribing pain relief and, if necessary, calling other specialists.
While on duty, I met the emergency doctors of our institute. Thanks to the director’s connections, we had our own two ambulances, not ordinary ones, but yellow, Finnish ones, designed for resuscitation. One of the doctors, my namesake, was very similar to me, had a small beard, played the guitar and loved funny stories. And the following story happened to us.
The old man at the entrance to the reception area tugged at my robe sleeve,
“So you won’t help my dog?” he asked plaintively.
“Maybe I’ll help. Wait a little, people are first.”
I went inside, where a patient was waiting for me to fill out documents for hospitalization. Kolya was about to leave in an ambulance on the call.
“Why is grandfather whining about the dog?” I asked Kolya.
“He can’t distinguish a hospital from a veterinary clinic, asking to remove a nail to his dog.”
“And?”
“What? I sent him away! He apparently mistook you for me and begged you instead of me.”
Kolya left, I admitted the patient, sent him to the department, and could have gone to an on-call doctor’s room, but I decided to help the old man. I took a tool, a bandage, alcohol and antibacterial ointment.
“Where is your dog?” I asked a grandfather.
“She is tied at the door, doctor.”
I quickly removed the nail from the dog in the foyer, who licked my hand in gratitude.
“Thank you, doctor,” said the grandfather, “And I thought badly of you, son, forgive it to an old man.”
Perhaps I was too soft, or maybe I just felt sorry for the poor lonely old people and dogs…
The next morning I shared with Kolya the ending of the story about the dog.
“Wow! What if someone knocked (ratted) on you? I wouldn’t risk it,” he admitted and made the stern face of an ascetic.
It looked good, cinematic. His courageous face even once flashed in the frames of Ryazanov’s film, where an ambulance rushes to save a patient.
And after the conference, a girl in a robe, cap and surgical mask approached me.
“Hello!” she said, “You will not know me?” and satisfied with the prank, she tore the mask off her face.
It was Ira, with whom we collected material in the maternity hospital back in Tbilisi.
She said that she got divorced and moved with her son to Moscow to live with her mother. He does an internship here and works part-time at our institute’s ambulance service. There she met Kolya, my namesake, whom she mistook for me and even kissed him during greeting according to Tbilisi custom. Kolya did not know these customs, he was terribly surprised, and… they began a hospital romance.
In winter, all trauma residents were sent to city small trauma centers. I did not escape this fate either. In such places people who fell were accepted and treated. Typically the result of fall was a broken wrist or sprained ankle. I had to apply plaster bandages – 60-70 per day. But the technique of bones reposition was also perfected until it became automatic.
And in the summer we went to Crimea. From Moscow a lot of people traveled to Crimea rather than to the Caucasian coast. We had our own arguments – we wanted to treat the child for asthma. But nothing came out of it. And in the clinic, where asthma was treated with acupuncture “with phenomenal success,” Ana suffered an attack just during a treatment session, thereby proving to her father-doctor the value of this method. But the sea air was still better than air in the capital. We had as much fun as we could, went to see the famous “Swallow’s Nest” (a castle on a rock) and suddenly we heard the guide’s voice,
“Attention! No panic or screaming! Parents of two children climbing a cliff 40 meters above sea level, calmly call them back.”
Naturally, one of the two turned out to be our daredevil girl.
And another surprise for me was the flowering of some plant in Crimea, which made me wheeze terribly and begin to choke. I stole Ana’s albuterol, but I was getting worse and worse. I had to urgently evacuate to Moscow. As a result, I didn’t smoke for several days, and then a wonderful thought came to me,
“You’ve always wanted to stop smoking, but now comes the chance.”
And I truly and forever stopped smoking. It turned out that an attack of allergies and asthma helped me get through the withdrawal period, and then things were not so difficult.
At work, the employees were very upset when they learned that I had quit smoking,
“We lost both a good conversationalist and fragrant Georgian cigarettes!”
At first I still liked the cigarette smoke, but after a while this illusion was dispelled, and I wondered how I could enjoy the smell of smoke and even asked to smoke near me during the Russian language exam in medical school. But one can’t throw a word away from the song!
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