WE HAVE ANDRY’S PASSPORT! RON GOES TO A UKRAINIAN EMERGENCY ROOM OUT OF A HORROR MOVIE.

Thursday, August 2, 2007

Getting Andry’s passport had its panic moment. Someone didn’t pay the 15 hrivana fee (about three dollars). We waited and waited, then had to rush to a particular bank, pay the 15 hrivana, and rush back to the passport office.

With the passport in hand, we rushed to a medical center to get a medical exam, the last remaining piece we needed to request a visa for Andry. We remembered the medical center from four years ago when we went there to get Olya’s medical for her adoption. That time the lights went out and we waited in pitch black for two hours.

This time we had lights. But the experience for Andry was terribly upsetting. While Pippa stood behind a screen so Andry would have privacy, his doctor, who was a woman, examined him very “thoroughly”. Next he had to get vaccinated and have tests for TB and HIV. At least the medical was over. We were told we could have his medical report back at noon the next day.

It wasn’t a time for celebration yet. We had a new problem. Our appointment at the American Embassy to get Andry’s visa was at 10:00 in the morning and they finished visas for adoptions at 12:00. We needed the medical report in order to get the visa.

Yelena also told us that the embassy often does background checks on teenage boys to make sure they don’t have a criminal record. If the embassy did the background check or made us wait a day because the medical record arrived in the afternoon instead of the morning we wouldn’t get the visa in time for our flight. The next available flight wasn’t until Tuesday.

We hatched a plan. Pippa, the kids and I would go to the embassy while Yelena and Vasilly went to get our medical reports. As soon as they got Andry’s medical clearance they would race it over to the embassy. Since the embassy only processed visas until noon we knew it would be a close. We also knew we would have to do some begging.

It was now close to 5pm. I hadn’t had lunch. Pippa and Olya got a plate from the medical center cafeteria. Andry had been too embarrassed to eat. I missed it because I needed to get some medical records from Andry’s school records, we’d left at the apartment. Actually, I had only coffee for breakfast. When I got up, I had some unusual pains in my back and I felt a little nausea, so I settled for coffee.

So, I convinced the gang to go to CCCP (SSSR) the Soviet-era nostalgia restaurant I liked so much that was close to the apartment. A good meal was the way to wind down and talk about what we’d gotten accomplished so far. The passport was critical to leaving Ukraine with our new son, and it was in our pocket.

We ordered a really big meal, complete with a very fine Georgian wine. Andry’s mood had brightened and everything was going well. I had a great feeling of relief. However, I began to have another feeling begin to come over me as well. And it was a sharp pain in the small of my back.

(Since the pages and pages I had written describing the pain in vivid detail were pretty boring and only of interest to me, or the relative few people who have had an attack of kidney stones, I deleted them.)

Pippa called every private clinic in Kiev trying to find one that was still open. The private clinics have western-style medical care and the doctors usually speak English. Since it was after 6:30 all the private clinics were closed. Pippa called an ambulance; she had no choice. Even in my misery, that idea seemed miserable, but I was in no position to argue. I thought I might be dying.

An eternity of pain later, an ambulance showed up. Pippa described it to me the following day as looking like a toaster and being about as medically equipped as a toaster. The temperature inside was certainly toast-like.

The next few minutes are a jumble for me. I was pulled or pushed inside. Everyone was shouting in Russian. Yelena was inside with me; Pippa was fighting to get in, being pushed back by the male ambulance nurse. I was literally screaming in agony, begging somebody to help. Pippa got in. We sped off. I said I was going to vomit. A blue bucket was shoved over to me. Pippa said the male and female nurse were mixing liquids from several vials. A needle was stuck in my arm. We raced on and I soon began to feel the pain dull just a little. Even a little was a lot. I felt the ambulance hit a hundred potholes and someone said we’re at the hospital. I remember a blur of flowers just as I entered the Twilight Zone.

We walked into the hospital and entered a movie stage for a horror flick set in the 1940’s in Soviet Russia.

There were pale green tiles on the floor with a percentage of them missing. The hospital was massive with very few lights and almost empty of humans. I was led into room with a nurse and a doctor; the doctor was about fourteen years old, with a doctor’s white coat and torn jeans.

He examined me by thudding my back until his fist found the right spot. I was careful to let him know he had been successful in his search, by rewarding him with my imitation of a dying bull. He declared I was having an attack of kidney stones. He would do some tests but that was his diagnosis.

I was sent into the bathroom for a urine specimen. The bathroom was rank. The toilet had no seat and no cover. To flush it you had to reach into the water and pull out the drain by hand. There was no paper.


When I came back into the room, I was told they needed to take blood. I rolled up my sleeve but the nurse grabbed my finger and pinched with a needle that hurt like hell despite the pain medication in my body. She then milked my finger as someone would do a cow’s teat, getting all the blood she needed.

Next I was taken, with Pippa and Yelena, down the long empty dark corridor to a tiny office. There was the smallest table, with a pale green formica-type top and a 1950’s-style telephone, with two wooden chairs on either end of the tiny table. We all crowded into the room. Posters of floral arrangements were pinned to the wall. The nurse pushed a button on the wall, doors shut and we descended to another level. It was an elevator! It felt like we were going to open into another universe, perhaps inhabited by a race of body-snatchers.


The doors opened again and we were led into an even darker corridor. We walked down the corridor for a long time in the half-light, passing two square women who could have been janitors or patients. If they were janitors, they haven’t been doing any work in this place, I tell you.

We rounded a corner and I was shown into a large dark room with a splendid x-ray machine that was new in about 1948. A big woman in white pushed me onto the table and I was instructed to pull down my pants. Big nurse made the most cursory adjustment of my position, left the room, I heard the vibration of the machine and then silence.

I lay there for quite a while with my pants down to my knees. This place was not air-conditioned but I was freezing. Earlier when I was having the shakes, I’d asked for a blanket and was told they didn’t have any. Yelena finally came into the room and said for us to go back downstairs to the doctor.

There was a second doctor in the dimly lit office. He was dressed the same and was maybe twenty years old, distinctive with his curly hair, looking at lot like my 24 year old son.

Curly-haired doctor said that I was having an attack of kidney stones and that the thing to do was to break them up with their ultrasound machine. But unfortunately their ultrasound machine didn’t work so they would have to operate on me instead. He seemed pleased at the prospect, ready to roll up his sleeves and go to work right away.

As stoned as I was, I could not for the life of me, see any merit in that choice. There was also a question about insurance. My insurance was no good in Ukraine. Don’t worry I was told, all the tests were free, but I would need to pay the doctor.

We convinced the doctor to skip the surgery he was planning for me and instead, to load me up on pain medication until I could get the USA. He seemed dismayed at not having a chance to cut into me, but he acquiesced, and agreed to the pain medication.

He gave us a prescription for an injectable pain medication that we could pick up in any pharmacy, and other prescriptions for pain capsules. He instructed Pippa to give me an injection before we get onto the plane if I was still in pain on Saturday.

While this hospital, Octyabirskaya Bolnitsa (October Hospital, in honor of the Soviet October Revolution) had been a nightmare, the doctors and nurses had been extraordinarily friendly. Perhaps they were just happy to have a patient at last.

Still in considerable pain, but able to walk, I followed Pippa and Yelena back to the car where the children had been waiting with Vasilly, our steadfast driver. The children had been perfect throughout all of this except that Olya had made ‘butterflies” that kept Andry in stitches. “Butterflies”, we found out later, is Vasilly’s word for farts.

I had a very bad night. Pippa microwaved a wet towel wrapped in plastic that she placed against my kidney, hoping the heat would help assuage the pain. I rolled from side to side for hours. Eventually, the pain subsided and I fell asleep, wondering what the morning would bring.