Chapter 10 #3
One of the two men caught Oxana before Petro dropped her, the other caught him as he fell to his knees. He was so out of breath he couldn’t speak by then, just in short gasps.
“She’s dying…starving…no food…” he said, and lost consciousness, as each orderly carried one of them and ran to the emergency unit, the still-burning cigarette forgotten on the street. They laid each of them on a gurney and called for help.
One of them explained to the trauma team that came running.
“I think they’re both dying, he said ‘no food’ before he passed out. He carried her here from somewhere, must be one of the shelters.” There were no apartment buildings left within blocks. The doctor gave them rapid-fire orders as two nurses joined them.
“Fluids IV, warm blankets.” She checked Oxana’s pupils and she was still alive, barely.
“We need sugar, juice, protein, EKGs for both of them.” The whole team worked on them.
Their hearts were normal, but they were suffering from severe malnutrition, starvation, and dehydration, and Oxana was in a coma in extremis, and Petro was slipping away.
His heart stopped once and they used a defibrillator on him.
An hour later, they had IV fluids going into both of them, nutrients, protein packs.
They were both still unconscious but everything they needed was going into their bodies, if it wasn’t too late.
They had come in at ten in the morning, and at midnight, they woke up.
Oxana regained consciousness first, shocked to see Petro beside her, and didn’t know where they were and what had happened.
She had just slipped into unconsciousness silently in her sleep and had nearly died.
Petro had saved her by getting her to the hospital in time.
“Did the shelter get bombed?” she asked a nurse taking their vital signs.
“No. I don’t think either of you had eaten a decent meal in a long, long time.”
“He had an egg this morning, and a potato and lentils last night,” Oxana said with a guilty look. “It’s all we had.”
“And when did you last eat?” she asked her gently.
“I don’t remember,” she said softly. “I had a piece of bread this morning.”
“And not a big one, I’ll bet.”
“Why isn’t he waking up?” she asked, panicked, and as she said it, Petro opened his eyes. He looked confused, as she had been.
“Why am I lying here with all these tubes?” he asked gruffly.
“They said you don’t like my cooking,” Oxana said, and he smiled.
“They’re right. That egg was pretty good, though, probably better than all this stuff.” He waved at the nutrients pouring into both of them.
“How did we get here?” Oxana asked, and then she looked at Petro. “Did you find an ambulance?”
“Your husband carried you,” the nurse said, touched by both of them. They were so sweet and loving to each other. The doctor had wanted them in one room. She said that with older people who were that dependent on each other, it was important to keep them together.
“You carried me?” Oxana looked at Petro, shocked. “How?”
“I just did. You weren’t going to get any better in the shelter and you looked pretty bad.
It’s a good thing you haven’t put on any weight or I couldn’t have done it.
I nearly dropped you a few times,” he said, and she laughed, her eyes damp with tears.
She already felt better and she could see that he did too.
“You’re both going to be here for a little while, enjoying our cooking,” the doctor said gently when he came to examine them.
They were literally starving, and if he sent them back to the shelter too soon he knew they’d die, which was the whole point of the Russians cutting off the food supply.
It was working. Younger people were somehow managing to hang on, older ones were dying.
And sooner or later, the younger ones would die too.
But they had saved the two of them, and all their vitals were already improving.
Petro’s heart had stopped purely from lack of nourishment.
If they had remained in the shelter, they’d already be dead.
They were within the last hour of their lives when they came in, and Petro had saved Oxana. He knew she was dying.
They had the paramedic on duty move their beds closer together so they could hold hands.
“I’m sorry I nearly starved you,” she whispered as they lay in their beds.
“You couldn’t help it. What else did we have?
I couldn’t believe you found an egg.” They were still being fed intravenously and would be for a while.
The doctor wanted them on a high protein oral diet too.
Their symptoms compared to statistics he had read from the Nazi concentration camps in World War II.
The staff had weighed them when they were unconscious, and though both of them were tall, Petro weighed a hundred and twenty-one pounds, Oxana seventy-nine.
All their bones protruded. The female doctor who took over their case had seen people that emaciated only in photographs, never in real life.
She suspected that there were others in the shelters in equally dire shape, and that many had died.
They had survived the bombings only to be starved to death.
Oxana and Petro fell asleep that night holding hands, and walked down the hall together in the morning with an orderly on either side of them in case they got dizzy and fell. They couldn’t walk far, but Petro encouraged Oxana to try. And she scolded him when he didn’t finish his lunch.
“I don’t like pea soup,” he said petulantly. “You know that.”
“It’s good for you. Two days ago, we would have killed for any of this food. Now they’re feeding us like kings, and you don’t get to be picky.”
“I want my spices,” he complained, but he ate all the chocolate pudding and hers too.
The hospital was planning to keep them until they reached a normal weight, which might be a while.
They weren’t going to starve as long as they were here.
Their story circulated to other hospitals, and inspired Sasha and Anton to send a basket of fruit to each of the nearby shelters.
The hospital was low on food too, but they had enough to at least send some fruit, cookies, and bottles of water.
People burst into tears when they saw the baskets arrive.
And Petro and Oxana’s friends at their shelter were keeping track of their belongings for them.
They watched TV from their beds, and called Yulya in Warsaw.
She hadn’t been able to speak to them in weeks, as they no longer had cell service.
It had been cut off. Yulya was relieved to hear from them and shocked when she heard they were both in the hospital.
Petro and Oxana played it down, and Petro said he got tired of his wife’s cooking.
Yulya could tell it was more than that, and she had heard about several of the cities being reduced to starvation rations.
They said they were fine, and sounded in good spirits.
They talked to Olek and Nina too, and their four grandchildren.
There was an air raid that night and they were taken to the basement in wheelchairs. Bombs were dropped on an oil refinery, and two schools that were still being used as shelters, but the hospital was untouched, and the patients were back in their rooms by three a.m.
Oxana and Petro rapidly became the love story of the hospital, and everyone knew about the older man who carried his wife for three long blocks to save her from starvation, and collapsed when he got there.
They looked like poster children for a happy marriage.
They never left each other for a minute, and held hands all the time.
The medical staff cheered now whenever they saw them walk down the hall.
Within a week they didn’t need orderlies to watch them on their walks and they would stop at the nurses’ station to say hello.
Everyone was delighted to see them. They continued on their walks after that and went out to the garden.
Within a week, they had each gained five pounds, but they still had a long way to go.
And keeping them in the hospital would keep them alive.
The medical staff had made a pact, agreeing to use every excuse to keep them there.
They were too sweet and too much in love to be sent back to the shelter to die. Petro had saved them both.