Val Karren - The Deceit of Riches

“If you had hit your head again the results could have been fatal! It sounds like you were still very unstable.” Lara’s eyes were as large as saucers as she listened and diagnosed my condition. I went on trying to generate a sympathy effect from her, “The ship’s doctor insisted that I go to the hospital to be looked at by specialists. I was petrified to go alone! We agreed that one of our ship’s tour guides would accompany me to the hospital, to be there is case things got worse with me, but she didn’t want to go with me because of it being Kazan and all. She was afraid that the Mongols were still there ravishing all the blond Russian women in town or something. She was just as nervous as I was.”

“I would be nervous too!” Lara declared.

“Well, I can say that I have never met a more hospitable group than the Tatars. I think that Russians are just prejudiced against them. I found them to be very professional. The medic that came with the ambulance, Vasily, was definitely a Tatar. He was very confident in his job and helped me calm down. He asked questions like he already knew the answers. He was good. He knew what he was doing and he did it well. My blood pressure was erratic and my heart was racing. I did not have a temperature but I was noticeably sweating, even though my face was faint and pail. My legs were numb and I could not walk on my own power. Vasiliy spared me the humiliation of being carried off of the boat on a stretcher with all the the tourists watching from the shore. They more or less carried me standing upright down the gangplank with a medic under each arm. I just tried to look like I was waking,” I said giving Lara sad eyes.

“They took me to the Kazan regional hospital and they reassured us, Valya and I, that I would be in good hands, as it was the newest and most modern of hospitals in the province, but when we arrived I had to climb out of the ambulance and hop down from the bumper and then walk down a flight of stairs to reach the trauma ward. Luckily I had help!” I was really playing it up now, although every word was true. She was eating out of my hands.

“The hospital itself was so new that it had yet to be finished. There were piles of rubble, garbage and concrete from the buildings they demolished to build the new hospital. A jack hammer crew was busy pulverising the old foundations of the old buildings. The clouds of dust this caused coated the outside of the building, and was everywhere inside too, on tables, sinks, light fixtures in the beds and the floors. It was filthy!” I went on and on.

“Yes, our hospitals in Russia are horrible places!” Lara agreed with professional embarrassment.

“So, they finally laid me on wobbly gurney and wheeled me from room to room instead of having me get up off the examination tables in each room. This would have been better than walking, had the safety engineers not built speed bumps in every doorway. Yes, each doorway came complete with raised threshold to keep out winter drafts. It made moving from room to room very jarring. Before going through a doorway, I had to lift my injured neck and head off of the pillow, otherwise I would get whiplash. I have great sympathy for those who arrive the victims of a hit and run, or who come with a broken leg or a broken back. Given the chance, I would choose to die on the street where I had been run down, because the hospital is hardly a place of comfort and reassurance for the injured citizen. Better to just stay away!” I thought I had gone too far with that reference, but Lara agreed whole heartedly.

“Yes, this is what patients tell our doctors as well, that they would rather die at home than be put in the hospital,” Lara seemed ashamed.

“The doctors were looking for signs of haemorrhaging either in my head or in my spinal column. The results were inconclusive so they put me in a room, in a bed, while they debated the issue. When the decision was made to keep me in the hospital overnight for observation and more tests I had no more energy to argue. Valya, who had accompanied me to the hospital was growing concerned about the time of day and told she was afraid to be left in Kazan, so she headed back to the boat, but promised to send others back to help me, or if necessary somebody who could come and stay with me.” I pouted a lonely pout.

“You poor thing!” Lara seemed to be on the verge of tears.

“There was thick dust everywhere; on the floor, window sills. There was fuzzy mould along the floor boards and in the refrigerator. My pillow case had been blood stained in the past, the toilet smelled of undiluted ammonia. I did my best to close my eyes and rest while I waited for my colleagues to arrive, but even laying in the bed was impossible because a spring had broken through the top of the mattress and was poking me in the small of my back. I laid on my side on the edge of the bed facing the door and watched and hoped for somebody to come save me!” I told her every gory detail until even Nikolai was looking worried.

“So, I woke up to a knock on the door and was so happy as I thought it was Irina come to rescue me. But it was a group of three doctors. They came to announce their decision. One of them tried to explain it to me in English but it was so poor that I asked them to repeat it in Russian. Instead they handed me a medical book, in English, and asked me to read it. The procedure was called Lumbar Puncture. As I read further through the narration to the dramatic pictures of needles, poking between some poor guy’s vertebrae and muscles I freaked out! They wanted to perform a spinal tap on me!”

“Bozhe Moi! Did you let them do the test?” Lara blurted in horror.

“No, no way! Absolutely no! Even the book said that the chance of death was high in a sterile environment. Seeing that the hospital was so filthy, there was no way I could trust those doctors to stick a needle, even if they had a clean needle, into my spine. If I didn’t have meningitis before they did, I most certainly would afterwards! No, I refused the procedure and made it very clear the answer was no, no, no!” I insisted.

“Did the boat leave without you? Did you have to stay in Kazan?” Lara was very nervous for me.

“No. Soon after that Irina and Richard arrived and convinced the doctors to release me to them and they would take responsibility for my health. The chief doctor made me sign a paper that said that I was taking full responsibility for my own health as they believed I could die before I made it back to Moscow if I was moved. They warned me that flying would further weaken the blood vessels in my head and I could easily die on an airplane with such a head injury. I didn’t care! I signed the document and we caught a taxi back to the boat. Luckily, I didn’t die.” I said as matter of factly as I could and started eating my soup and bread again.

“And so now you thought you could tempt fate and piss off mob bosses,” Nikolai said as dry as ordering bread and cheese at the grocers. “That’s a good plan!”

“Is that who beat you and stole from you?” Lara quickly connected the dots and was shocked.

I held up two fingers, tapped my wrist and then held up four fingers and finished munching my black bread silently with an admitting look on my face as Lara seemed to fume at this revelation. What did she care anyway?

The weather, as the boat approached Kazan had quickly turned hot and dry. The warm air coming up the river valley from the southern regions of the steppe was having the effect of a blow dryer on my hair when I stood on the forward deck enjoying the view of Kazan’s white walled Kremlin come into view. This warm air made the mornings and evening very pleasant to be on deck and out of doors but made the afternoons almost too warm. I had only brought a few pieces of clothing with me from my ransacked apartment when I fled on Friday night and I had taken the wrong things with me. Why did I grab my shapka? It seemed I had clothes for being outside in March, not May. The plan was to be somewhere over Greenland on Monday morning not on the river, not still in Russia. I needed something else to wear and to have my hair cut as we were heading toward the southern steppes where May and June are already too warm for those used to snow and ice only six weeks earlier.