Syedyshev Oleg
Syedyshev Oleg

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Humorous Essays Based on students' memories

"All have died
except for those who are alive, and those whom we remember"Confucius

Essay 62. Feinzilberg's Mistake

We even do not realize, what role a chance can play in our lives. In my case, a chance was a reason of a switch of my medical profession and my transfer from surgery to psychiatry.
After graduation from the institute I was placed on a job at Kurganskiy region. I wanted and was prepared to go not to Kurgan, but to Kirgizia, to Frunze. My batya, Peter Andreyevitch Syedyshev, a WWII veteran did a lot to make it happen; he had involved all his friends into that. To a placement commission I brought a motion from the Healthcare Ministry of Kirgizskaya SSR and a letter from the chief surgeon of Kirgizia with a guarantee that I would be placed on a job of a surgeon.

However the placement commission did not consider those documents, and I was cynically asked "how much I had paid for the papers". I immediately wanted to ask them, how much it would cost me to make the commission consider the documents, but I resisted the temptation; as I had made up my mind to leave Kurganskiy region without any placement procedure for wherever I feel necessary as soon as I got sick and tired of it. And I did so later on. But at the very first days of October, 1972 I, dressed like a fop, in a coffee-colored suite and matching it suede shoes arrived in Kurgan, where it was rainy and chilly.

No wonder, as I came from the capital of sun-lit Kyrgyzstan, where it was warm and good. In Kurganskiy Regional Healthcare Department they had given up on me and were very happy to see me. I was placed on a job of a surgeon at Chashinskiy district hospital. In January, 1973, I was assigned to primary specialized surgery training to Kurganskiy regional hospital, which was supervised by professor Yakov Davidovitch Vitebskiy. By the way, I should mention that at the specialized training I met my former group mates Valya Timoshenko and Arkasha Blyakher. We were very glad because of that and stuck together for the four months of the training, and I even shared an apartment with Arkashka in addition to that. I do not remember exactly, though it seems to me that in February, at its end, when assigning patients during the training Vitebskiy said that there had come an interesting patient with a suppurative coccygeal cyst and asked who would like to be assigned to him and supervise him from the very beginning till he was discharged from the hospital.

And there Arkasha together with Timoshka announced that Syedyshev was an expert in coccygeal cysts. Some parasites! They were kidding, but Vitebskiy assigned me to the patient. Though I have to mention that when an institute's student I had a similar surgery. And while I was at a hospital, it was Timoshka who according to my request had brought to me everything she had managed to find

on those cysts at the institute's library. So if I were not an expert, then I knew the subject as they say from A to Z. As soon as I had been assigned as a doctor in charge to the patient, I went to get acquainted with him and to obtain the case history and all the jazz. The patient's name was Vitya Loytsker, he was a psychiatrist from Kurganskiy regional mental institution. He had graduated from Sverdlovsk Medical Institute and had also been placed on a job of a children's surgeon at Dolmatovskiy district hospital of Kurganskiy region; and the mental institution was also located in the Dolmatovskiy district, and its chief doctor and a Kurganskiy region chief psychiatrist was Boris Zakharovitch Khaikin. To cut the story short, Victor and I got acquainted, and I told him the story of my coccygeal cyst, and with all details, which I had described in the essay "Triplets". Victor laughed loudly at my "delivery" and agreed to the surgery after he had promised me not to repeat my mistakes. Man proposes, God disposes. A car used to arrive from the mental institution to Kurgan almost every day. That was Khaikin, who came to Regional Healthcare Department, or some of the mental institution's doctors were invited to give a consultation.

В. Файнзильберг

В. Файнзильберг

And all of them came to visit Vitya Loytsker. And they also brought things to drink and eat with themselves. Generally speaking, my story was being repeated. There only were no yells during the first stools after the surgery.

Well, Loytsker and I made friends. When I had a spare moment, I used to come to Vitya to have a chat. At his bed I met Boris Zakharovitch Khaikin. Victor was praising his profession. He was not persuading me directly, but constantly offered arguments of advantages of psychiatry over surgery, he had left. "Constant dripping wears away the stone". It was much later when Khaikin himself told me that it had been him, who had asked Victor to persuade me to shift to psychiatry. So in a year I worked as a doctor-psychiatrist at a Kurganskiy region mental hospital.


I had worked as a psychiatrist for twenty five years until I left medicine for entrepreneurship. Volodya Feinzilbeg's statement that "psychiatrist" is a diagnosis, and it is for a lifetime" turned to be wrong.

21 September, 2011

© Copyright: Oleg Syedyshev, 2012
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Translated by Viktoria Potykinato content ↑


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