Saint Petersburg, Russia is a fascinating and beautiful city to visit today, but the first time I went there, it was more of a challenging adventure. In 1990 the Soviet Union was on its last legs but still a reality. Leningrad, as it was still known at the time, was a city of stark contrasts: the world-renowned Kirov Ballet and long lines for scarce basic foods. The opulent palaces of Peter and Catherine the Great and monotonous stretches of Khrushchev-era apartment blocks. Many of my photos, though taken with color film, seemed to have turned out in black and white when developed.
I travelled there for 18 days in July 1990, accompanied by a work colleague and a dozen energetic U.S. university students, as part of a cultural exchange program. Our project was to help rebuild and restore a church, formerly a Russian Orthodox cathedral but long ago closed down by the government and converted into a factory making iron fences. Now it was reverting to its original function, and we were to work alongside a crew of local parishioners to resurrect the historic building. This was an unglamorous construction project that promised back-breaking labor, long days, and austere living conditions. The team had been carefully selected for their maturity and their construction expertise. (Let’s pause so that those who know me well can have a chuckle over my deficiencies in both areas.)
We were paired up and assigned to stay in the homes of normal Russian families for the 18 day project, in order to have a taste of typical daily life there. My colleague Roger and I were assigned to stay in the apartment of Vera, a 70 year old widow. Vera had worked for 40 years (and counting) in the same job in a factory making steam irons. She had lived for the same period of time in a small apartment on the fourth floor of a huge building in a sprawling urban housing complex. The apartment consisted of a tiny entrance hall, a miniature kitchen, a miniscule bathroom, and a crowded room that was both living room and bedroom. (Did I mention that it was a small apartment?) Vera gave up the biggest room for the comfort of her honored guests and slept on a hard bench in her kitchen for our entire stay.
Looking back on the experience, dozens of memories flood my mind, but all pale in comparison to the kidney stone.
[Unsolicited Personal Information]
It’s not something to be proud of, but I have experienced over 30 kidney stone “episodes” in my lifetime. Being precocious, I had the first when I was eight years old, an almost unheard of phenomenon). The rest have occurred as an adult. I have had one removed by major surgery, one by exploding it with sound waves, two by extraction through an “available passage”, and the rest exiting through said passage on their own, but not without dragging their feet. (Male readers feel free to shudder now.)
[Free Physiology Lesson]
A kidney stone is like a silent time bomb, forming in the kidney, perhaps lying dormant for months or years, and then deciding to attack when least expected. The “attack” occurs when this spiny clot of minerals moves from the kidney down through an 18- inch-long tube roughly the diameter of one of those red coffee stirring straws. The pain occurs when the stone is moving or blocking the passageway and can be agonizing. It can come and go over days or weeks, sometimes stopping as quickly as it started. But I digress…
It is summer in Saint Petersburg, when the sun rises at 5:00am and it is still dusk as the clock approaches midnight. We are six days into the renovation project. Since our group is early in the lineup of multiple U.S. university groups scheduled to work on this renovation project, we are doing dirty, physical labor. Our days consist of busting up concrete and carrying it out in buckets, moving tons of twisted scrap metal from one huge pile into another area 100 yards away, and working on homemade ladders in a basement under the dim but harsh glare of bare light bulbs. I survive by daydreaming about what it would be like to be on the final work team, months in the future, with their cushy jobs, touching up the trim paint and vacuuming lint off the newly laid carpet.
After a few days, we begin to feel more like locals, commuting during rush hour by subway 45 minutes each way to the worksite by packed, returning home exhausted, dirty and hungry. The evening menu in our hosts’ homes consists of whatever is available that day in the market. For Roger and me it was potatoes and greens yesterday, and tonight it is boiled eggs, carrots, and a piece of bread. Vera announces apologetically that, as is typical each summer, the authorities turn off the hot water to each building for the next 10-14 days for systems repairs. For a warm bath, we must heat water in a kettle on the gas stove to add to the frigid water from the bathtub faucet.
Vera is kind and sweet and talkative. She chatters away in Russian, even though we have not progressed past the “Hello/Goodbye/Please/Thank you” level of language mastery. We actually get on quite well, communicating by a combination of Charades and Pictionary, and by looking up key words in the Russian/English dictionary and thrusting it out for the other party to see. Vera has an ancient hardback dictionary, pages yellowed, that must have been published when Lenin was still in short pants.
We chat in this manner after dinner and then retire to start the laborious process of getting clean. We make numerous trips back and forth to the kitchen to carry the large kettle of heated water to the tub. Afterwards we go to our room to read and relax. Vera, a modest and devoutly religious woman, stays in the kitchen, which is perhaps fifteen feet away from where we are, where she spends the last hour of her evening reading the Bible and praying (audibly). When we retire, it is after 11:00 but still light outside, and there are no curtains to trick our body clocks into realizing that it is bedtime. Roger had won the daily coin toss and is sleeping in the single bed, and I am on the small, lumpy couch.
We are just drifting off to sleep when it hits me – the all-too-familiar pain in the side and back. As the pain intensifies, I whisper, “Psst! Roger! You won’t believe this, but I think I’m having a kidney stone attack!” Roger, himself a card-carrying member of the KSVA (Kidney Stone Veteran Association), springs excitedly into action. After a quick search, he brings me the strongest painkiller we have between us – Acetaminophen. Great – This is like fending off a charging rhino with a dinner fork. Within minutes I am nauseated, sweating, and groaning in pain.
As I lie there in this strange foreign city, I wonder if this is another Big One that will require medical attention. Perhaps you remember reading the stories about the state of medical care in the Soviet Union at that particular time. Multiple-use needles and IVs, unsanitary conditions, shortages of doctors and medicines – hospitals were often dangerous places to be. Patients often had to scrounge on the black market to buy their own medicines, dressings, and other supplies to bring with them to the hospital. And with few international flights in and out at this time, I’m not going to make it home quickly, even if I try. Panic sets in. [Author’s Note: Russia medical care is of course radically different now.]
Medic Roger, calling upon his experience, reminds me that some pain relief can be attained by lying in a tub of very hot water. By now, I am ready to lie in boiling tree sap if it will help. This procedure, of course, will involve the complicated process of heating water again (damn you, local authorities!), so we have no choice but to wake Vera, who is asleep in the kitchen. Then we must explain to her what is going on. Roger hurriedly opens her dictionary and points to the word for “kidney”. She can no doubt hear me groaning in the other room. Roger puts on the water to heat.
Thirty minutes later, here is the scene:
Vera is doing what she must feel to be the most helpful thing she can contribute: She is kneeling in the corner of the kitchen, head covered, praying fervently (in Russian, of course.)
I am lying naked in the bathtub in the tiny bathroom in a slowly-deepening pool of hot water, experimenting with an adapted form of Lamaze breathing.
Roger is making repeated trips to the stove for more water. He has now pressed into service every available saucepan, skillet and roasting pan. As he comes in to pour, I contort my body to dodge the cascade of scalding water to avoid severe burns on sensitive body parts. The floor is slippery from splashes and drips along the way.
On one pour from the kettle I am not quick enough, and some scalding water hits my leg. I yowl in pain. Instantly we are both simultaneously struck by the absurdity and humor of the situation, and we both start laughing uncontrollably. Roger is laughing so hard that he slides his broad 6’3” frame down the wall to a sitting position on the wet floor. I can picture Vera, in the next room, hearing these two strange men and the moaning and laughing and splashing in her bathroom, praying, “Lord, what have you gotten me into?”
Eventually, the pain lets up enough for us to go to bed, and I fall fitfully asleep around 3:00am.
Strangely, the pain subsides almost as quickly as it hits, and it usually recurs only after I go to bed at night. So this is our pattern for the next three or four days: painful attacks at night but mostly pain free days. Because I am not sleeping until 3 or 4 in the morning, I sleep later and then join the work team at lunch and work all afternoon. I think that the U.S. students understand and believe my explanation, but I sense that our Russian co-workers are sceptical. Through an interpreter, I’ve tried to explain this strange cyclical illness to them. “How convenient”, they must be thinking. “Must be some Lazy Capitalist disease.” Anyway, after a few days, I am “cured” as the stone stops its downward passage – I will have no more attacks for the rest of the trip, although I know my ordeal is not over yet, because IT is still in there somewhere…
As we prepare to depart at the end of the trip, we are talking to Vera about the experience. She communicates that she is glad I am better, and that she has been praying for me. She opens her dictionary and points to a Russian word. I read across to the English translation, and it says “liver”. All this time she has been praying for the wrong organ, but I assume that God figured it out.
Postscript…
It is four months later in November, in Dallas, Texas. I have had no recurring bouts of pain for weeks, but I have seen my urologist, who has scheduled me the next morning to go to the hospital to scoop the stone out, even though I am in no pain at the moment.
That evening, Cheryl and I are midway through a James Taylor concert when the “final assault” commences. (I’m sure it must have been during the song “Fire and Rain”.) Not wanting to spoil the evening, I tough it out. Later that night, four months after that first attack half a world away, I will “pass” (as we euphemistically say) a kidney stone roughly the size of a raisin.
This is one of those classic “It’s terrible in the moment, but it’ll make a good story later” experiences. And how appropriate a setting, I think now, that it happened in a city named for the Apostle Peter, whose name means literally “The Rock”.