"When did you begin having the pain in your lower leg?"
Her right leg had begun to ache after Mama tore a ligament. And in that way – question after question, without any tests, equipment, or x-rays, in that room with the rugs that reminded me of the Tashkent of my childhood, he told us about all Mother’s ordeals, exactly, down to the last detail. It was like magic, but I stopped myself. “Calm down. He's not a sorcerer. He's a scholar, a doctor, but you’ve never met such a doctor before.”
At last he took his fingers off Mother’s hand and looked at me. His face and gaze were very calm, but when our eyes met, there was something special in that gaze. It was somewhat penetrating, but I didn’t know if I felt that because I was nervous. He looked at me and talked, bending his fingers like a child counting. “First of all, we need to cure her liver, uterus, fallopian tubes… heart… cortex…"
At that moment someone called him. I rushed out of the room after him. I was afraid he would reveal something in front of Mama. Liver, uterus, heart… And what about the most important thing? Why was he silent about that?
"Doctor," I mumbled, "Muhkitdin Inamovich. How about it? Will you be able…? Is there any hope of curing her?"
"We’ll see, my dear man. You see, it’s already in the liver."
Mukhitdin Inamovich expressed his thoughts in a very simple way. Was it because he had talked to her not in his native language or because he was a simple person by nature and didn’t like to overuse scientific terms the way many doctors did?
“It’s already in the liver,” echoed in my mind over and over. Blinking to remove the fog from my eyes, I asked, "What will happen? What?"
"We’ll see, my dear man," he repeated. "In your mother’s uterus, I saw two scars left from scraping. That’s where it spread from. We need to try hard to stop the process. If we succeed, there is a chance, but she will need to be treated for a minimum of three to four years.
I began to nod as if in understanding, though I didn’t comprehend anything then. However, the words “three to four years” made me almost happy. They allowed me to breathe, they meant postponement, they gave hope!
Mukhitdin Inamovich patted me on the shoulder. "Let’s go. Mama is sitting there alone."
It was amazing. I had known this person for only a few hours, but I had the feeling that he was an intimate acquaintance whom I had always known. I felt complete trust. I was relieved. No more of that horrible burden that seemed to press not only my soul but my whole body into the ground. Why had this happened? Because of his unpretentiousness? Because he had managed to determine this just by feeling her pulse? But that didn't explain anything. Probably, some amazing qualities of his soul had made him a true healer.
It seemed that Mama felt it as well. She greeted us with a smile. "You’ve told me everything about myself. Now, please, look at Valera," she requested.
He nodded, "Sit down."
I sat down, fighting off my fear. He barely touched my wrist as he said, "When you were a child, you had a bad case of food poisoning. Do you remember?"
Just think. The doctor was wrong. I was upset. "I didn’t…," I began to say, but Mama interrupted me.
"You did. You had food poisoning. We all had food poisoning from meat… We spent three weeks in the hospital. He was almost ten, so he doesn’t remember," she explained to the doctor.
He nodded. "That’s why when you run for a long time or lift something heavy, you have pain here… under your left ribs."
I looked up at him but couldn’t say anything. The most expensive doctors on Park Avenue had examined me, did all the tests, but they couldn’t find anything. Nothing! They couldn’t explain what caused the pain.
The doctor held my hand, nodding slightly. You have four colics located there, in your intestines," he muttered, obviously explaining what had happened to my intestines after the poisoning. What “colics” were, I could only guess. They must have been some kind of obstructions. But that wasn’t important. If he knew I had pain, he couldn’t be wrong about the diagnosis.
Then the doctor found what I myself knew about – I had an allergy and a pinched sciatic nerve. That was all, thank God. I sighed with relief.
Perhaps in order to calm Mama down, after understanding that we liked him, (With his permission, I was videotaping the way he worked.) Mukhitdin Inamovich decided to show us a video about some of his patients.
In the first frame we could see a woman with a child in her arms. "From Turkey," the doctor explained. "The five-year-old child couldn’t walk from the time he was born. He had cerebral palsy."
In the next frames, the doctor massaged the child. One frame, another, then a third. One angle, then another. But in all of them, there was the motionless little body and the doctor bent over it. But suddenly, something was different. What was it? Yes, the child moved his hand. More frames. Massage, massage, massage… But now we were watching very closely, very attentively… Up… his leg moved… Yes, he moved it, the knee was bent… Another frame – the child was sitting! Now we were excited, waiting as if for a miracle… And it happened. There he was crawling, getting to his feet, and there was the happy mother in tears (Who wouldn’t cry under the circumstances?), watching her child playing, romping. That day, we saw a few more amazing tapes. Not all of them could demonstrate graphically, like the one with the massaging, how the doctor worked, but they showed desperate, exhausted, seriously ill people at the beginning, and the same people, happy, serene, physically reborn at the end.
Chapter 10. Is It Easy to Become a Tabib?
Our visit was, in fact, over. All we had to do was get the medication the doctor had sent someone to pick up at the pharmacy – his own pharmacy, naturally. And while we were waiting for the medication, we heard quite a few amazing things about our new acquaintance… or, as I now felt, our new friend.
It all began with the conversation about medications. I asked a question which was, as I now realize, ignorant. What medication did he prescribe for people who had a disease like my mama’s? He raised his eyebrows and answered my question with a question. Did I really think that for one disease, even if the symptoms were the same, it was possible to use one and the same medication every time? For instance, a headache. There were a dozen reasons for it. And a headache would be different in each particular case – it could be in the temples, the forehead, etc. Of course, it was possible to deaden the pain with a painkiller, for some time. But whatever had caused the headache would still be there. It might have been caused by irregularities in different organs. Perhaps, that headache was a warning of a more serious problem.
The doctor was transported by the conversation. He was really carried away. He rocked slightly as he spoke. His gestures were expressive, but his face remained calm.
"My dear man, Eastern medicine distinguishes 28 types of cancer – and each of them happens for so many different reasons. So why is it correct to use the same treatment for all of them? But this is exactly what’s being done. All oncological patients are put through chemotherapy and radiation. Is it possible to get to the source of a disease this way? That’s why they fail to cure it. If you smash a snake’s head, it will die, but if you squeeze its tail, you won’t be able to defeat it,” he ended his speech with an Asian proverb.
It then become quite clear to me that it was absolutely pointless to ask him what kind of medication he was preparing for Mama. Obviously, it was the one that was good only for her particular case. But I couldn’t resist asking a different question, "Mukhitdin Inamovich, where have you learned all of this? I mean… there are no such schools."
He laughed. It turned out that everything began after a serious problem. A very young Mukhitdin, a student in the Irrigation department who had just finished his first year, worked on a student construction team in the summer of 1967. The students lived in kibitkas (nomads’ tents). Every morning, they were taken in trucks down a winding bumpy road to their places of work. One day, one of the trucks was going at high speed and tipped over into a roadside ditch.