I sat in a hospital that was—well, let’s just say it was different than the one I’d sat in almost two months prior. Two months ago my wife was about to have a surgery to remove a benign but unhelpful growth from her uterus in hopes of making room for a baby to develop one day soon. I had waited for her in a waiting room decorated in all shades of pastels, with soft chairs, TVs, and complementary coffee, tea, and water. A screen on the wall updated those in the waiting room on the progress of each patient having surgery that morning. The doctors were consummate professionals, and in their eyes we were living, feeling human beings. The reality of the full power of malpractice lawsuits also played heavily in our favor. They had to know their stuff or they could soon find themselves out of a job or worse. We arrived at 8:00 AM, the surgery began at 9:15, and we were leaving the hospital by 1:30 that afternoon.
The hospital I was currently in was, well, different.
That morning Laura and I picked up Bektur*, a man who’s become like a Kyrgyz father to us, at 8:20 AM to drive him to a hospital in the city. His daughter Aliya*, a midwife by training who does home visits with Laura, came with us. Another local doctor and friend of Laura met us at the hospital. We arrived, parked, and wound our way through the hospital complex, a series of old Soviet buildings of solid concrete the color of a rainy day. With a pink scarf wrapped around his neck, Bektur walked slowly without taking his hand from his mouth. Sores all throughout his mouth and throat had prevented him from eating and sleeping much of the previous week. I wish that had been the only reason for his hospital visit that day. In reality, he’d just recently been given several diagnoses that needed attention.
Our local doctor friend led us into one of the buildings. She got a piece of paper from a woman sitting at a desk and was told where we needed to go next. No smiles. No personal attention. Just an exchange of information. We exited that building and walked down the sidewalk into a different entrance. The first room the local doctor checked wasn’t the right place. Someone there told us we had to walk around to the other side of the building. We did so, found the right entrance, and stopped in front of what looked to me like one of those toy dispensers I remember sitting at the exit of the local grocery store in my home town—those evil devices that tempted children to throw a tantrum at the end of every grocery store trip unless their mothers deposited a quarter for a piece of gum, a bouncy ball, or some slime. This dispenser didn’t have any of those things, and it only cost us the equivalent of seven cents to retrieve its contents. Our prize? Two plastic shoe covers so we wouldn’t dirty the floor in the hospital. We donned the covers and proceeded.
After ascending some stairs, we fell out into a long dark hallway. The floor was gray and the walls were white. There were several hard benches outside the door we had to wait to enter. Nurses in bright pink scrubs, matching hats, and long faces sauntered up and down the halls. Other people scurried past and popped in and out of doors. Signs warned patients that without their shoe covers, they couldn’t enter the rooms. Soon Bektur, Aliya, and our local doctor friend disappeared into the exam room, and Laura and I were left on the wooden benches to wait. I later found out that that first visit was to an infectious diseases doctor. That doctor sent him down the hall to another room to get an ultrasound on his mouth. After that, the three of them left Laura and me there on the benches and went to another floor of the hospital to get his liver scanned.
After that, we had to leave that facility and walk about a block down the street to some other facility for another test. Don’t ask me what it was for. The facility turned out to be above a small cafe, but because we didn’t see the signs for it at first, the local doctor poked her head into the cafe and asked the waiter were it was. He directed us to a small side door that led directly up a flight of stairs to the second floor. We put our plastic shoe covers back on (we’d all saved them, instinctually, perhaps), and walked into another waiting area. After Aliya paid, Bektur went in to another small room by himself and soon came out with a red-stained cotton ball taped to the back of his hand.
From there, we had to get in our cars and drive somewhere else. The local doctor drove, and the other three and I followed in our car. We parked next to another dreary concrete behemoth of a building in a lot recently turned into a small swimming pool by the rain we’d had. Once we arrive I found out it was a different hospital where Bektur hoped to be admitted. After making our way into the building, we again put on our shoe covers. We were really getting our seven cents worth. We needed to take an elevator to the fourth floor, but the button that should have been marked “four” was instead marked with the little sign that’s normally reserved for the button that closes the elevator doors. When we hit that button, the elevator began to go up but stopped on the second floor. Our doctor friend assumed that meant the elevator couldn’t reach the fourth floor, so she hit the third floor and said we should all get out and walk the last flight of stairs to the fourth floor. So we did.
Same routine as before. Laura and I waited on hard benches in a waiting area of sorts right outside the elevators while Bektur, his daugther, and the local doctor went in to see if they had a room. At one point his daughter returned to get the money she needed to pay to admit her dad, an amount equivalent to $43. (By comparison, Bektur makes $143 a month.) We waited some more. They were finally told Bektur would get a room.
The problem was that he didn’t have any clothes or personal items for his stay. Laura and I drove back to their house and picked up a bag of things packed by Bektur’s wife. We returned to the hospital (yes, we put our shoe covers back on) and again headed up to the fourth floor waiting area. We decided we’d just take the stairs and avoid the funky elevator altogether. By the time we got to the waiting area, Aliya and the local nurse had a list of prescriptions that Aliya was responsible for filling at local pharmacies and bringing back to her dad.
The local doctor briefly explained the six or seven medicines to her and the order in which Bektur needed to take them. Aliya, a midwife, was by no means a stranger to medicines, but her eyes made it very clear she was overwhelmed. Then we had to go get all the medicines. Back out of the hospital and down the street we went. By pharmacy number five, we had acquired all the prescribed medicines—or so we thought—and we headed back to the hospital. On the way, we bought soup at a cafe and water at a small store for Bektur. Naturally, a patient’s food is the responsibility of the family. We were all hungry since it was past 1:00 PM by now, but that would have to wait.
The plan was that Laura would wait outside the hospital while Aliya and I carried the medicines, food, and water back up to Bektur’s room. (I had to buy new shoe covers because I hadn’t understood that I’d need to go back up.) Well, right as the elevator doors opened, who should come out of the elevator but Bektur himself. He was carrying a small piece of paper that he’d been told to give to someone in some room so that they could do some test. And all the pain he was in notwithstanding, he had to make his way there himself and explain himself to whomever it was for whatever reason it was. So Aliya and I walked with him to this other exam room down the hall. For some reason he needed another ultrasound. He sat on a metal chair outside the ultrasound room with his head in his hands, massaging his cheeks and head, I assume for relief. All I could do was sit beside him with a hand on his back and wait.
He got the ultrasound, and we went back up to his room together. I waited again in the waiting area while he and his daughter went back to his room. At one point, Aliya came out to get me and asked me to come back to his room. She said that she had forgotten two medicines but wanted me to double check that she hadn’t missed any others. I followed her, and after I gave the “guard” nurse sitting at a table my name, I was allowed down the hallway to the hospital rooms.The room was essentially a bare room with four hospital beds and a shared bathroom. Men sat on two of the other beds. Bektur was hunched over on his bed closer to the window. There were no dividers or curtains for privacy. Aliya was rummaging through the medicines on a night table next to Bektur’s bed. Their phones rang several times throughout the short time I was there, and I wondered how Bektur was going to get any rest.
I told Aliya I’d go get the remaining two medicines. That’s what I did. I stuffed my second pair of shoe covers in my jacket pocket as I left the hospital. By now it was past 2:00. Apparently many hospitals have what they call “quiet hours” between 2:00 and 4:00 every afternoon during which visitors aren’t allowed to enter, so Laura and I had to make sure the guard would let us back in the front door when we returned with Bektur’s medicine. The old man said he would, so we let him close and lock the door behind us.
We only had to go to two pharmacies to find the two missing medicines. We got them and went back to the hospital. Again. The guard let us in, and I returned, again, to the fourth floor. I was able to convince the “guard” nurse at the table to let me go back to Bektur’s room with his medicine. Aliya had nearly finished writing out in some semblance of order the medicines and the order in which Bektur would be responsible for self-administering them during his stay at the hospital. She gave him one medicine that would help relieve some of the pain in his mouth and told him she’d call that night. She kissed her father’s cheek, and I shook his hand. And with that, we left the hospital.
I dropped Laura off at our house on the way and then dropped Aliya off at her house. We were all fried—Aliya most of all. It was past 3:00 in the afternoon. I wondered if she’d get any rest that afternoon. With two young daughters of her own and responsibilities as a daughter in her mother’s house, I doubted it.
And then the next day Bektur’s family decided he should come home because they weren’t really taking care of him at all at the hospital. Aliya can take care of him. And maybe Bektur shouldn’t take any of the medicines the Western doctor prescribed because a friend of theirs told them about some other treatment that would work better.
And so we don’t put our hope in medicine, Western or otherwise, but in the God who’s merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, the God who works for us in spite of us.
*names changed for privacy
What a day! Thank you so much for reading my blog.
You’re very welcome!