MOSCOW, March 30, 2004 – I went back to Nadezhda Gavrilovna Alexeeva yesterday, and she dropped the other shoe.
It wasn’t really that heavy a shoe. I have kidney stones and a benign lump in my prostate. “Is there any possibility the lump is malignant?” I asked. “No.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, patting me on the arm. “It’s normal for your age.”
It was obvious from my second visit, when I returned with my pee sample and had my blood drawn, and then went back to Nadezhda Gavrilovna, that something was amiss. She had me strip and squeezed my testicles until they hurt, and then stuck her finger up my ass.
Funny how her finger had only been a couple of inches long till she rammed it up into no man’s land. It had been very painful -- the first time a prostate exam had ever been so painful. Maybe that’s why anal intercourse with Yegor had hurt so bad. I’m just now getting to the point where I can take a normal dump without pain and bleeding after our last bout right after Shurik left back in January! I will never take it up the ass again, which is why Yegor’s and my sex life is almost non-existent and why he doesn’t mind my having sex with other guys.
Nadezhda had sent me to her cohort down the hall to have my kidneys, liver, and rectum scoped and had told me to come back yeserday for my diagnosis.
In my peregrinations that day I had again encountered the sexy little 15-year-old and we had again looked each other up and down, but there was no chance for anything more than that.
As we sat at her desk yesterday, Nadezhda asked, “Why didn’t you go back to the States for this?”
Before I had a chance to answer, she countered, “too expensive, I guess. But you know our medicine is just as good,” she comforted. “And much cheaper.”
“Yes, medicine in America is very expensive.”
“The doctors there make so much money,” she continued. “Do you know I’ve been a urologist for 40 years, and my official salary is less than a hundred dollars a month!”
It’s one of the great shames of contemporary Russia that doctors and teachers are so abysmally poorly paid.
So she prescribed more medicines than I’ve taken in all the rest of my life put together, and ordered them from a drug store that makes deliveries. A very handsome young courier just brought them – about $ 90 worth. I would happily have kept him and sent the medicines back.
My only consolation is that in America they probably would have cost twice as much.
At least there were no bribes involved.
I can’t say that about the crisis we had Friday evening. After I returned from my lesson at Corning late Friday, I was working on my computer when my nephew Dennis called from Florida. We hadn’t heard each other’s voices since my visit there in the Christmas/New Year’s season of 2001-2002. Nothing has changed, fortunately.
After chatting about 20 minutes, we hung up and I put on my shoes for a trip to the store to buy some light bulbs. We had had three of them burn out in about two days and it was beginning to be a nuisance. But when I tried to turn the key in the lock, nothing happened. Yuri had arrived in the meantime, so I called him to try his hand. Nothing happened.
I tried to call Anton on his mobile phone, and was greeted with, “The subscriber is not available.”
We were trying to figure out what to do next when Sasha buzzed on the house phone. I explained to him our predicament. “I’ve got a key; I’ll unlock it from the outside,” he said.
But he couldn’t open it either. After vainly trying for half an hour, he announced, “I’m leaving.” If he was going to stay at his dorm instead of here, he would have to leave then, he said.
But a few minutes later, I heard voices again. He had met Anton in the courtyard with his friend Alyosha, and they had all returned together.
“We’re going to call the emergency service,” Sasha said through the door. A couple of minutes later: “They can’t help us. They can only open the door if the landlady is here. You’ll have to call her and get her to come tomorrow; then she can call them and they’ll open the door.”
Oh, great. One day wouldn’t be so bad, but I had already looked for her phone number and it was not to be found. Would we have to wait until she came for the rent on April 17? Fucking Russian bureaucracy.
Then a few minutes later, Sasha again: “They’ll come unlock the door, but it will cost you about 500 rubles” – about $ 17. Okay, that’s not so bad.
But when they got here, the price had gone up to 1200 rubles – about $ 40. That’s not so okay. But what were my alternatives? I grudgingly paid it.
It turns out that soon after their first conversation, Anton had received a call on his mobile from an unfamiliar number. It was the emergency service. Now that they were out of the office, there were offering to unlock the door – unofficially, against the rules -- for a bribe.
How very Russian. When I told my nephew Dennis – whom I’d been keeping apprised of developments by e-mail half way around the world, he replied:
“Congratulations on your escape! Even here you have to bribe the guards to do that.”
Vote Bush in '04: It's a no-brainer! Seems that’s one of a long list of Bush/Cheney bumper stickers getting chuckles around America right now. There are lots of others, which my buddy Ned Wright sent me from Union, WV:
Bush/Cheney '04: This time, elect us!
BU_ _SH_ _!
Bush/Cheney '04: Over a billion Whoppers served.
Bush/Cheney '04: Putting the "con" in conservatism
Bush/Cheney '04: Because the truth just isn't good enough
Bush/Cheney '04: Apocalypse Now!
Bush/Cheney '04: Compassionate Colonialism
Bush/Cheney '04: Deja-voodoo all over again!
Bush/Cheney '04: Thanks for not paying attention
Bush/Cheney '04: Leave no billionaire behind
Bush/Cheney '04: Making the world a better place, one country at a time
Bush/Cheney '04: Or else.
Bush/Cheney '04: The economy's stupid!
Bush/Cheney "04: The Asses of Evil
Don't think. Vote Bush!
George W. Bush: It takes a village idiot
George W. Bush: The buck stops Over There
Bush/Cheney '04: God Save the King!
Vote Bush in '04: "I Has Incumbentory Advantitude"
Vote Bush in '04: Because dictatorship is easier
Vote for Bush & You Get Dick!
Bush/Cheney '04: WWJB: Who Would Jesus Bomb! ?
Adding poignancy to the last one is the numbing realization that the Israelis offed the head off Hamas last week – a 92-year-old man in a wheel chair – as he was leaving his mosque after prayers! Who Would Jesus Bomb? Or his daddy, Yahweh?
The family who slays together stays together! Or “keep it in the family.” That’s the lesson to be learned from a charming story in the Moscow Times last week about Milivan Ristic, a Yugoslav who immigrated to Russia in the middle of the ’90s and married Oksana, a Russian woman, to get his citizenship. Oksana, it seems, had her own pharmacy and had become rather wealthy. She also owned her own apartment.
Milovan had succeeded in getting Oksana to give him power of attorney, and he had – apparently unbeknownst to her – managed to get the pharmacy and the apartment into his name.
But she was still hanging about the place, which was an inconvenience. So he paid a hit man to take her and her mother out for $ 50,000. All the guy had to do was kidnap them, take them to some isolated place, cut off their heads, take a picture of the grisly scene, bring it back to Milivan and collect his 50 grand.
It was such an atrocious crime that the hit man went to the police. So they set the guy up. Oksana and her mom were duly kidnapped and the grisly murder was staged – sans decapitation, which the killer told Milovan was simply too gruesome for him to complete – and the requisite snapshots made.
It was good enough. Milivan paid the dude. Two or three days later the cops called and asked for Oksana. “She and her mother are on vacation,” the man of the house explained; but the cops asked him to come in to the station and answer some more questions. When he did, they arrested him.
At which point, the hit man discovered that he, too, had been targeted. He might, after all, squeal to somebody, so Milovan had hired another hit man to murder the first hit man for $ 25,000 – after all, if two went for 50, one should get rubbed out for half the price. Unfortunately for Milovan, hit man (HM) #2 was a buddy of HM #1, so he, too, went to the police.
Now Milovan’s facing several charges. And Oksana? She says she still loves him. “I’m having trouble believing the story,” she said.
Me too.
My pilgrimage to the doctor’s reminded me of the days in Seattle when I was a medical transcriptionist for one of the Providence Clinics, which was staffed by interns from Univ. of Washington Medical School. Here there are no transcriptionists. Each doctor handwrites her own extensive notes in the patient’s chart.
Anyway, one young Providence intern, Michael S., an absolutely gorgeous and adorably sweet, caring, and conscientious little Dr. Kildare, was particularly adept at slaughtering syntax and misplacing modifiers. I preserved some of his most amusing specimens:
- Patient had three episodes of vomiting after eating a hamburger and loose stools.
- She has one child who is six months old and is pregnant.
- She’s not eating her normal self today.
- Abdomen is soft, non-tender, non-distended, no hip clicks or clunks. The patient is able to stand with help with normal genitalia.
- A urinalysis was done, both the first void and mid-stream. This was chaperoned by Phil Jenson. The latter was sent for urine culture.
- She said the right eye hurt a little bit for a few days afterwards and then went away.
- She denies having any sexual intercourse since the baby was born and denies any sexual intercourse previous to that.
- The operating surgeon will be Dr. Blue – just like it’s spelled.
- Patient appears quite pale with obvious rash in the corner of each mouth.
- She claims that she has been abused as a child with her mother’s boyfriend, who is now currently dead.
- Patient comes in for follow-up of her pain and stiffness when she walks in her joints.
- When patient stands and flexes her back, she’s able to come two inches off the floor.
- She had some discomfort with walking on the top of the right foot.
- Extremities on the right foot show a callus and a bony prominence laterally on the right 4th digit of the toe.
- Patient also here for follow-up regarding her left great toe contusion. The toe continues to be quite dark in nature. Seems to be falling off of its own accord.
- States she’s been forgetful lately; cannot remember what her forgetfulness involves.
- Described as sharp pain involving right face which comes and goes but is present daily.
- Indira has a history of reflux for which she’s taking Reglan as well as constipation.
- Attempts orally to have bowel movement have been unsuccessful.
- Patient has five and a half brothers and one half sister who are all in good health.
- Says at work he walks sometimes up to 20 mi. a day and that sometimes he has some pain after walking all day long on his knees.
- Says that she has committed suicide in the past, but she has not done so for quite some time.
- She has decided no longer to breast feed because of how demanding her baby is of her time, specifically to the extent that the patient did not have time to eat herself.
- Patient has never been hospitalized other than for her two pregnancies, which were both normal vaginal deliveries of a seven-year-old daughter and a five-year-old son, respectively.
- Three-and-a-half-year-old here for follow-up of vaginal itching with dad.
- Testes are circumcised and appear normal.
- I informed him that if he smoked and used the patches concurrently, that he is at higher risk to die and have a bad outcome.
- One-year-old female coming in asking for note that her child is allergic to milk.
- It was found that her ears were totally occluded by cerumen. Patient was given Cerumenex and was told to come back to clinic for an ear removal.
- He scratches his eye and it falls off, then it grows back again.
- Will place her on Albuterol inhaler, as she has had problems with that before.
- She has had the same sexual partner as her second baby and denies any abdominal pain.
- She states that she feels that overall she’s doing well, and she doesn’t want to risk having problems with the surgery, namely dying.
- According to the patient, she was struck by her next-door neighbor, named Eddie Bash.
- By the way, patient denies having any oral sex with me.
See also related pages:
Chapt. #51 - Memories: Mom and Shurik
Chapt. #49 - When the Titanic sinks, we need to be healthy
