My Beautiful, Humble Life

I was born a year after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Since my birthplace wasn’t very far from the site of the horrific accident, I think it had an impact on me and my family, but I didn’t begin to think about that until much later.

Three months before I was due, my mother had an emergency appendectomy. Since the surgery was performed without anesthesia—pregnant women aren’t given anesthesia—I can only imagine what my mother went through. I’m so grateful to her for making it through.

And then I was born—I didn’t look so good, kind of yellow—it turned out I had postpartum jaundice. My mother and I spent ten days in the maternity hospital. As she later recounted, “My roommates had already been discharged, but we were still lying there, and my new roommates had also been discharged, but we still remained in the hospital.”

After the maternity hospital, we lived with my grandparents for several months; they were a great help to my parents. After graduating from university—he trained as a teacher—my father was assigned to work as an arts and craft teacher at a village school. So, our small, close-knit family moved to the village. There, we were housed in a large two-story house.

This was in the late 1980s, a time when teachers were still highly respected.

At first, we really liked it there: the clean air, the vast steppe. Along with the house, we inherited a sizeable farmstead, several pigs, and a cow. A little later, we participated in the village lottery; my father bought several tickets for the family and gave them to each of us. Oddly enough, my tickets won, and we received two horses—their names, as I recall, were Laska and Orlik.

Yes, at that time I still didn’t know about my illness, and the world seemed wonderful!

In the village, I was constantly walking outside, and, as I was later told, I loved playing with the little ducklings. I mean, I loved them—I’d try to pick them up and pet them, but often the ducklings couldn’t handle this kind of attention and died. I don’t know how many ducklings I played with, but in my defense, I’ll say that I was only one year old, and I didn’t understand everything yet.

Running a small farm wasn’t easy for my parents, as they had previously lived in the city and weren’t used to paying much attention to livestock. In the late 1980s, the country was in a difficult economic situation—everyone survived as best they could, and as my mother later told me, the administration secretly gave us two sacks of cow feed. My father was at work at the time, and my mother and I would pick him up. So my mother would put this food in the stroller and cover it with a sheet so no one would see. She’d sit me on top, and I’d smile at everyone I met. After all, to me, it was just a game.

After some time, my father was offered the principalship of the school where he worked, but he declined, fearing the responsibility. At the same time, my father’s friendship with his college classmate grew stronger and stronger, and he often began coming home drunk.

My life, however, was normal. I walked around the yard a lot—I called it “walking my bike.” Back then, I was terrified of Hoku, the dog who lived under our stairs.

One time, in a toy pedal car—almost every child in the Soviet Union had one—I came crashing down the stairs from the second floor. As my parents later told me, they were terrified and came running from the kitchen, but they found me alive and completely happy, smiling from ear to ear, already on the first floor.

A year later, we returned to the city. As I later realized, it was still difficult for my parents to run the farm, and besides, my father’s mandatory work for free tuition at the university had ended.

Then, suddenly, my problems began. I was already a little over two years old. My grandmother and I went for a walk, and during the walk, I started to get short of breath. We returned home, and my grandmother called an ambulance. Half an hour later, my mother and father arrived—they lived somewhere else.

The ambulance arrived, and my mother and I were taken to the hospital. I spent about a month there for the first time. The doctors gave me a terrible diagnosis, and it meant I wouldn’t live even a year. I am very grateful to my parents for continuing to fight for my life after the diagnosis.

The next six months were monotonous. I was short of breath, turning blue, and we spent more and more time in hospitals.

My mother even taught me how to read in the hospital. Or rather, it so happened that, thanks to my mother, our entire children’s ward learned to read.

Time passed. The country where I was born ceased to exist, and in 1991, my parents decided to introduce me to a luminary of former Soviet medicine. So my mother and I were flying to another country. Previously, it was a different region of our homeland, but now everything had changed. This was Ukraine. To get an appointment with this famous and very important doctor, my mother had to sell all the gold she had received as a wedding gift. The doctor took the money, looked at my medical records, and told my mother to prepare for the worst.

We returned home, another year and a half passed, and, strangely enough, I continued to live. We went for a routine checkup at the local clinic. After waiting in line, we went to see our local pediatrician. It turned out she was a new doctor—not the one who had examined me before. After carefully reviewing my medical history, she listened to me and said that my previous diagnosis was most likely incorrect.

But the only way to ensure a more or less comfortable standard of living was with surgery. The problem was that the circulatory support system was designed for people weighing over eight kilograms—at that point, I weighed just over five.

I had all the tests done again, and things weren’t as bad as they had initially been. We went back to the hospital, and by then I’d gotten used to them and even made some friends there. I remember playing with one of them, and he came up with the idea of ​​sticking pieces of adhesive tape on each car, representing a plate number. I later learned he died soon after.

I was in the hospital for about two weeks, and my father came to visit. He spent the whole day with me, playing, telling me funny stories about work. Then he took me by the hand, and we went for a walk down the hospital hallway. We walked for about an hour, and then went down two floors below our room. That’s where I saw my mother. Her eyes were red; I didn’t yet know at the time that I was being taken into surgery. I vaguely remember what my mother and father said next, but they opened the door, and I found myself in a special room.

It was completely different from any room I’d seen before. I thought it was just another procedure room. I was greeted by very kind people, and they laid me down on a couch.

The bright light from the lamp hanging above was still shining on it. Then they put a mask on me and asked me to count.

One, two, three, four—a shroud of oblivion enveloped me. It felt like seconds passed, then a bright light and the urge to vomit – I woke up on this table and couldn’t hold back the vomiting.

A gentle voice said to me, “Sleep.”

And I fell into darkness again. I woke up only two days later. I’m still alive!

P.S.

Today I live with my wife and two wonderful daughters. We often visit my parents. My eldest daughter is already in school, and they both take ballet classes, and I take them to and from classes. I still live modestly and happily. And we all love each other very much.