Encounter brings adventure
by Mel Bloom

A chance encounter with a stranger presented Joan Jennings a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity while simultaneously bringing her close to death in a Russian hospital.
Three years ago Joan was flying home to Ojai, after a two-week holiday in Europe. Her seat companion was Ili Katilli, the wife of a university professor who was to become Indonesia's ambassador to Russia. The two women got along splendidly. Mrs. Katilli was also headed for Ojai to attend her grandson's graduation from the Ojai Valley School, one of the town's several illustrious boarding schools. During her visit she was invited to join the Jennings family in a number of activities and a burgeoning friendship was soon on solid footing.
Last year Ili invited Joan to spend a couple of weeks at the embassy in Moscow. It was to be an adventure far bigger than Joan had anticipated. The prelude was almost a page from a Tolstoy novel, grandiose on a Russian scale.
The Indonesian embassy, elegant behind wrought iron gates, is a graceful three-story building with lavish Old World flourish - huge rooms, marble floors, high ceilings, crystal chandeliers. Joan's quarters included a bedroom salon (larger than her home's living room), a bathroom and a small kitchen where the refrigerator was filled with an array of enticing edibles.
Though it was like the presidential suite at a deluxe hotel, there was no hot water. In early June, Moscow's hot water system of reservoirs, heating plants and conduits to all the city's buildings shuts down as it undergoes a thorough cleansing and no hot water flows for three weeks. For those who can't do without, water may be heated on the stove, in the fireplace or with an electric water heater.
The first several days in Moscow were a social whirl of concerts, theater, and embassy parties. In fact, said Joan, "Had I been 30 years younger, I would have felt like Natasha Rostova," the heroine of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" novel. Additional Moscow adventures included a lavish underground shopping mall with an opulent array of merchandise affordable only to the wealthy or foreign diplomats and a detailed tour of the Kremlin and its Czarist treasures.
After a five-day social and cultural inoculation Joan, Ili and an ambassadorial assistant from the embassy departed by plane for St. Petersburg. Prior to checking into the city's posh Moscow Hotel they toured St. Petershof, the summer home of Peter the Great. When Joan became chilled and started to shake, the women knew it was best to go to the hotel.
That evening Joan's condition worsened and she was unable to make the schedule which included an evening ballet and a following day trip to The Hermitage, the imperial palace built by Peter the Great, and now a world-class museum. Ili was constantly at her side. By morning Joan's fever had soared and brought her near delirium. She was unaware three doctors were in attendance and had injected her with medication.
She was taken to an international clinic used by foreign visitors and dignitaries. After long hours at the clinic, doctors, still unable to diagnose the reason for her high temperature and weakened state, put her in an ambulance with a doctor and rushed them to a prominent hospital in another section of the city. Ili, not allowed to accompany Joan in the ambulance followed by car.
During the "white nights" of late spring there is no darkness, and the seven bridges along the waterways of St. Petersburg are drawn up one at a time, an hour apart. When the last one is raised, crossing from one side to the other is impossible. Luckily for Joan. the ambulance made it just before the last bridge was drawn at 4 a.m., averting a three-hour wait until the first bridge would be lowered. But Joan's luck was soon running on empty as Ili and the ambassadorial assistant were not allowed to cross the bridge.
Arriving at the hospital, Joan's uneasiness mounted since she didn't know Russian and the doctors didn't speak English. She clung to the hope that she would be treated effectively. After tests and an examination, she was stripped naked and covered with a knitted shawl considerably less comforting than a blanket and dispatched to another wing of the hospital.
There one of the few staff members who could speak a modicum of English informed her she was in acute toxic shock caused by a kidney infection probably begun 10 days earlier. She was next told her blood pressure was dangerously low and her chance of survival uncertain.
The doctors wanted to put Joan on kidney dialysis, but Ili, who had arrived at the hospital a few hours later adamantly resisted because as she said, "Joan had no prior kidney problems and I have seen too many friends and relatives die from this treatment."
The next four days were the most dispiriting Joan had ever lived. Uncomfortable and uncertain, she found herself assigned not to an intensive care unit but to something that resembled a storage facility. It was crammed with a broken desk, bed frames, and other equipment she could not distinguish. Though it was tiled, the place was filthy. The floor was littered with bottle caps, needle sheaths, and intravenous bits of tubing.
Her iron bed was covered with a 3-inch-thick foam rubber pad that had begun to crumble from prolonged use. A lumpy, stained pillow was her head rest. A catheter drained her urine into an open bucket on the floor. For three days the catheter remained unflushed and Joan's stomach had become painfully distended. "I had a roly-poly belly any Santa Claus would have been proud of," she later said.
An empathetic cleaning woman, whom Joan described as a saint and who spoke no English, brought her a forceps to bang on the metal bed when she needed attention as no call button was available.
When a non-English speaking nurse arrived Joan had to gesture, grunt and point to the catheter and the almost-empty bucket on the floor to convey the cause of her discomfort. That night she lost the catheter and had to lie in a urine-soaked bed. Hours after the catheter was replaced, the container on the floor overflowed.
Summers in St. Petersburg are hot and humid. Joan's screenless open window enticed flies and mosquitoes along with their annoying buzz which never stopped. There was neither soap nor towels and the closest thing she ever had to a bath was when the cleaning woman brought her a small piece of moistened gauze to wash her body.
Ili, though restricted by the number of visits the hospital allowed, did not return to Moscow but chose to stay as close to Joan as possible. When she could see Joan, she was appalled by the accommodations, the mess on the floor, and the day-old meals and beverages resting on the sill of the open window. She called the American Consulate in St. Petersburg. A staff member visited Joan, but was unable to get her transferred to another section of the hospital.
By the fourth day Joan's infection had miraculously lessened and though the doctors claimed she wasn't strong enough to leave the hospital, she insisted on doing so. After long debates with hospital authorities, Ili was instrumental in getting Joan released, providing she would be checked into a Moscow hospital as soon as they returned to that city. Once liberated Joan refused to enter another Russian hospital.
Upon arriving at the Moscow airport, Joan and Ili were met by a doctor and an ambulance. Enroute to the embassy the doctor stopped at a pharmacy with the antibiotic prescriptions from the St. Petersburg doctors which were to have been filled at the Moscow hospital that Joan had refused to enter.
At the embassy the maids were so alarmed by Joan's appearance, they volunteered to sleep in her room until they she was well enough to be left alone. Over the next three days Joan gradually got stronger thanks to a ravenous intake of fruit juices, medication and leisurely walks in the embassy. The greatest remedy, however, was the shower and shampoo as hot water once again flowed through the pipes of Moscow. "It was one of the greatest blessings of my life," said Joan.
Still frail and easily tired, Joan insisted on returning home. All the people at the Indonesian embassy had treated her like royalty and without Ili she felt she might have died. But she realized with fervor the truth in the adage, "There is no place like home." Four days after the Kafkaesque horrors of her St. Petersburg confinement, Joan boarded an Areoflot plane for the 18-hour trip home, fragile but grateful.

© 2002 The Ojai Valley News

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