Dedication
This book is dedicated to the kindest people I have met on my road of life – my mother Ester, my wife Svetlana, Doctor Mukhitdin Umarov, and my friend and mentor Raisa Mirrer.
From the Author
I consider it my duty and pleasant responsibility to express my great gratitude to my friend Raisa Isakovna Mirrer without whose help this book would perhaps not have been written. She not only inspired me to write but also put her soul and enormous experience as a literary editor into our common project.
Chapter 1. The Verdict
In April of 1993, my mama, as always, went to have her annual mammogram, a routine preventive test.
Mama’s doctor called a week later.
"Everything is fine," he said reassuringly, "but you'll need a follow-up test at the oncologist’s."
She was received by one of the leading oncologists at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, a very well-known New York hospital. Examining her x-ray, he pointed out a large light spot at the base of her left breast.
"We'll need to do a biopsy. I don’t think there's any reason to worry. Women your age," he explained to my mother, "often get hard lumps of calcium."
But when he came out of the room where the procedure was being done, the oncologist didn’t find it necessary to conceal his apprehension from me.
"It’s most likely a cancerous tumor. And it’s big – 3 inches in diameter. It’ll be clear in a week after I get the results."
A week passed spent in distressed waiting. And there we were back in his office. This time he was also open with Mother.
"Miss Yuabova, you have breast cancer. The tumor is rather large."
Mother sat with her arm up, trying to feel the tumor. The doctor helped her.
"Here it is… It’s very deep…"
I still couldn’t believe our misfortune.
"How can this be? Two years ago she had a mammogram, and everything was fine. That means that since then…"
"Unfortunately, the tumor has been growing for a long time. It was so deep beneath the surface that the apparatus didn’t detect it."
He asked us to sit in the waiting room. I sat down across from Mama, at the window. Outside lay a green valley bathed in sunlight as far as the eye could see, dotted here and there with small houses. Everything was bursting with life, growing, rejoicing, hopeful. But here, in the neatly furnished office, there was no hope. Here, the verdict was pronounced firmly – a long neglected cancer.
It’s interesting, I thought, which verdict is it for today? It’s not even noon yet. Is it the first or the second? I was afraid to look at Mama. I turned to her only after I heard the sniffling. She was crying, very quietly, as always, without complaining. She was looking down at her handkerchief, running her fingers over it as if seeking an answer to the question – what should be done.
I thought that I knew this woman, so unpretentious, quiet, always concealing her worries and ailments from us. She was patient and sad today when this new ordeal befell her. She must be trying to understand why life, which had never spoiled her, wasn't going to allow her a peaceful restful old age.
"Mama, don’t cry," was all I could say, "Don’t cry. Don’t be afraid."
"I’m not afraid. I’m sorry for all of you," she answered.
And I thought I knew her… My whole life, as far back as I could remember, passed swiftly, haphazardly, in torn fragments before my mind’s eye. And she was present in every fragment, our mama, our friend, our defender and support, so fragile yet so steadfast. Even when her life was in danger, she thought about us not herself. I wanted to tell her “Enough, Mama. Let’s think about you.” But I knew she wouldn't accept it.
I sat there feeling helpless and depressed. I didn’t know how to go on living.
The doctor called us in. We listened to his instructions. Mama needed surgery. But first, she had to undergo a course of chemotherapy and radiation to shrink the tumor. All of it was scary. I asked him about the side effects of the chemotherapy. The doctor answered. I asked more questions. The doctor wanted Mother to take part in the conversation and asked me to translate to her in detail from English. I didn’t want to hurt her anymore. I didn’t want to tell her that she would soon be losing her hair and that she would feel nauseated. I made up reassuring answers. They’ll perform an operation, and everything will be back to normal. The disease will go away.
She sat quietly in the corner, not showing any interest in our conversation. To my explanations she answered, “All right, I see. We’ll do what’s required.” And I continued to ask questions for I was afraid to miss something important, something that could help. But it was becoming clearer and clearer that there was nothing that could help, and that any measures they took would only slow down the disease.
The doctor had kind eyes. I saw and felt that he wanted to help us, but the thing was that he had no means to do it… Medicine itself had no means. In his long practice, Mama was one of hundreds of women who had had that terrible disease. My mama had become a statistic, nothing more. I felt so worthless because I didn’t know how to prevent it.
The drive home seemed to last forever. I didn’t quite understand how and where I was going. A plane flew over us. My Lord, I thought, we fly higher and higher, drive faster and faster, but in fact – how does that song go? "Dust in the wind. All we are is dust in the wind…"
Chapter 2. Hope
We stopped by Aunt Valya’s, simply because we needed to share our grief with someone close to us.
"It’s bad," Mama announced. Then she told Aunt Valya what had happened at the doctor’s office. She spoke calmly and quietly, as always.
The silence hung in the room. We were sitting on soft comfortable sofas. It seemed that what we were talking about was unnecessary and superficial. I wanted to relax and sit like that till I fell asleep and woke up with a light mind, as if born anew, with nothing terrible hanging over us any longer. But we needed to get up, to go somewhere, do something, make a decision.... But which one? And how?
"Esya, Valera, look here," Valya exclaimed suddenly. "Don’t you remember that herbalist from Namangan?"
The herbalist from Namangan… Not that I had forgotten about him, but it was an utterly unbelievable story. Actually, a whole number of unbelievable stories.
It all began with Valya herself. She had asthma for a long time, and none of the treatments helped. The person who helped her was the herbalist from Namangan. He diagnosed her in an amazing way – by taking her pulse. He determined that Valya had a bad liver, and her asthma was simply a consequence of her condition. He treated her with herbs.
Then my cousin Yura became his patient. Around that time, he was a student at Tashkent University, and during a chemical test in the lab he accidentally inhaled poisonous vapors. Yura didn’t notice anything, and at first he didn’t feel that anything was wrong. After a week he collapsed with an unbearably sharp pain in his stomach. The herbalist diagnosed him in his usual way – by taking his pulse. Then a long treatment with herbs followed. The healer did his job, and Yura recovered.
Another misfortune occurred. That time it was Valya’s sister. She had cancer of the lymph nodes, then breast surgery and metastasis, followed by despair and complete hopelessness. Valya rushed to the herbalist from Namangan again. He said that he wouldn’t be able to help this time because the disease had been long neglected. Valya begged him, pleaded with him. Then he began doing something incomprehensible. In addition to giving her herbal brews, he told her to apply warm calf manure to the afflicted breast every day, and only calf manure. He said that if she began to recover, pus would accumulate in some spot and then come out of her body. It happened a few months later – pus came out through the sole of her foot.
Those were incredible stories. I had taken them with a grain of salt. That’s why I had them in the back of my mind. A bad case of cancer and calf manure! But that woman's life was saved. Doctors confirmed that she no longer had cancer. It had happened. It really had, I thought. And what does modern medicine offer? It offers state-of-the-art equipment, which only helps to diagnose, and often not accurately. It has been established that breast cancer gene carriers need dual screening. That’s true, but there’s no cure so far. Surgery, radiation, chemotherapy – all that, at best, just stops the process, but it sometimes accelerates it… Cancer is the second most common cause of mortality, surpassed only by cardiovascular disease.
I understood that I would not be able to rid myself of those thoughts, that we would have to decide, to make a choice… But hadn’t I done that? Would I be able to give up this hope that had sparkled so suddenly? I was like a drowning man grasping at a straw.
"Why should you go to Namangan?" my accountant Lev asked me upon learning of our misfortune. "Many healers do pulse diagnostics nowadays. There are wonderful herbalist-healers in Chinatown."