Syedyshev Oleg
Syedyshev Oleg

Humorous essays
Guestbook Contacts

Humorous Essays Based on students' memories

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

Essay 87. A Born Obstetrician

At 6.20 in the morning of 26 September, 1949 in the city of Kemerovo, at a maternity hospital of a #3 clinic, which is near the city park, an event took place, which attracted attention neither of the national public nor of the city itself. And why should it attract anyone's attention? What happened on that day and at that hour at the maternity hospital? Did water flush from a radiator? No, luckily everything was fine at the maternity hospital; there was no even a slight fire. Everything was in a standard mode,

as they say in astronautics now. At that time simply some Aleksandra Mikhailovna Syedysheva had a boy of 51cm and 3,800kg at the maternity hospital. And in the very same standard mode the baby boy cried right away.

Of course, the event was very much expected in a certain group of people at Yagunovka mine, where the Syedyshevs family lived. After a discharge from the hospital Peter Andreyevitch Syedyshev did his best and arranged transportation of his wife and his son on a horse set in a two-wheeled cart. Where he had managed to find the two-wheeled cart remained a secret,

though back then when there were certain problems with taxies, that way of bringing a wife and a son home from a maternity hospital was significant. Batya, as his son used to call him afterwards, liked, as it's called, to show off even then.

It's difficult to understand now, why a baby born in the city of Kemerovo, was registered in a council of a village of Komissarovo, which was located between Kemerovo and Yagunovka mine, though closer to Yagunovka. Let's not take guesses; I'll just explain what is special about all that. So there is something special, and a significant one. The baby boy, who was born in Kemerovo at the maternity hospital of the #3 clinic and in such a chic way brought to his ancestral home, was named Yura. Yura was doted on; he was fed and rocked to sleep at night, when he instead of sleeping, like all good people,

was wailing at the top of his voice. For a whole month Yura lived without any problems as well as proper documents; that was not approved of in the Soviet Union. For that month a namesake of a famous Agafia Tikhonovna

from "The Twelve Chairs" (a classic satirical novel by the Soviet authors Ilf and Petrov, released in 1928) came to Yagunovka from a village of Dovolnoye of Novosibirsk region. Peter Andreyevitch's mother was also Agafia Tikhonovna, and she came to spend some time with her grandson and help the young family for a start. So a month passed, and finally Peter Andreyevitch found time to go to Komissarovo to register the fact of his son's birth and issue a birth certificate. When he returned Aleksandra Mikhailovna immediately asked him to show her son's document. I will honestly admit that I cannot say how much bewildered was the Yura's mother and grandmother Agafia, when they learned that Yura's name was not Yura, but Oleg!!! Yes, in the certificate it was written: "Syedyshev Oleg Petrovitch". So that was me!!! That was some trick; Copperfield is nothing compared to that. Well, please, accept my apologies; I do not remember that period of my life, it got erased from my memory, like a drunken feast from an alcoholic's mind in the morning; that's the case. I do not know the reason why. I am writing about the events, including what I've written above, at second hand. What wife Shura was saying to her husband Petya, and what mother Agafia was saying to her son Petya? I do not remember for the life of me, just do not remember. Of course, it would be interesting to learn, what preceded the metamorphosis, what thoughts were boring Peter Andreyevitch's madcap on his way to Komissarovo. Nevertheless the fact is that since that moment your most humble servant has been not Yuriy Petrovitch Syedyshev, but Oleg Petrovitch Syedyshev. To be honest, personally I believe that the name Oleg does for me better, than Yuriy. And I am used to it anyway. Though all this is kind of a warming up.
It's funny enough, but after five and a half years of study I neither had assisted in childbirth, nor seen the process of labor. Well, obviously, I knew the technique of assisting during a delivery, though only purely theoretically. So once I happened to be on duty at the very maternity hospital of the #3 clinic, which was near the city park. We were on duty together with Vagram. Some readers and they are at the same time my former fellow students tell me, that I write too much about Vagram Agadzhanyan. It is their mistake. I write about situations from student life. If Vagram was present in any of the situations, I am just writing about it.
So we happened to be in the very delivery room, where on the last bed from the left I had been born. Sure enough, I did not miss a chance to tell Vagram about that. And Vagram did not waste an opportunity to grab my hand and take me around the maternity hospital and tell everybody: doctors on duty, and midwives, and even nurses that I was born in that maternity hospital twenty two years (at that moment) and several months ago; that at the beginning I was named Yura, and then in some miraculous way I became Oleg. After his story he demonstrated me as a material evidence of the story. Everybody liked the story, everybody was moved that I had been born there and was having my practical training in the very same delivery room. Everything was fine before we ran into Ekaterina Titova, our Tatiana Yanchilina's own aunt and an associate professor of the Obstetrics Department.

She knew Vagram and me inside out, so she bluntly said: "Stop chatting and distracting the staff. Go to the delivery room; two women are about to start delivering". She promised to come herself and watch how well we participated in assistance. There was no choice, so Vagram and I dragged to the delivery room, though we had already agreed with a doctor on duty beforehand that he would record our presence. Two women were really in labor in the delivery room. One of them was young, I do not remember now how old she was; she was about twenty. She was cursing nonstop. And her cursing was so sophisticated that Vagram's and my ears even turned red, and a midwife reassured us not to pay attention at that, cursing was something like a painkiller for her, it was easier for her to give a childbirth that way. That was easy to say, and it was an absolutely different thing to hear that some Senya would have his something torn away, without which there would be no that, and that he would never ever be allowed within a shooting range. Sure enough, that inconsequence was not clear: first that would be torn away, and after that why not let him close? It would not be dangerous after that. Right before that I had red a novel "Didi Mouravi" by Anna Antonovskaya; there were the following words there: "A woman is suffering, when giving a childbirth, she is in labor pains. She is tormented and is angry at a man, because he does not experience the same. Though when everything is over, a woman forgets about everything amazingly quickly and is ready to repeat the foolishness".

I, a notorious booby, told the quotation to the young woman in labor. The situation was an interesting one. She fell silent and was attentively listening to me, however when I finished the story with the phrase about repeating the foolishness, she again burst into the choicest swearwords and told me to go to hell in such a peculiar way, that I even had a problem imagining how that could be accomplished by a man. Even those, who were on duty at the delivery room, burst out laughing. At that very moment Titova entered the room. She heard the end of my conversation with that young woman. She reprimanded us again that we had our surgeons' masks on not in a proper way and sent us to the second woman in labor. She was a woman in her forties, and that was her third childbirth. She was calm. She asked us not to worry. How she only knew that we were worried, and we really were very worried. She said that everything would be fine and asked us to help her just a little bit. A midwife nodded her agreement and let us help the woman. Vagram and I knew the theory. First I tried to embrace the woman's belly with my arm, though the belly was huge and I could not do that properly. Then Vagram got down to work. He embraced the woman's belly with his right arm, clutched his hand at the edge of the table and pressed, though it looked like he overdid. He pressed a bit harder than it was necessary. Luckily the midwife and I were at the right place. The fetus' head was very low, so it almost like a bullet swiftly was brought into the world. At least I saw it that way. I remember the midwife shouted at Vagram, the woman howled, and everything was over. I was amazed to see that the midwife spanked

the newborn at his tiny butt, and he started crying in a low voice in reply. When all necessary procedures were done, it turned out that there was born a big baby of 53 cm of height and 4kg and 350gr of weight; the birth went without any ruptures and injuries.

The happy mother thanked us. Titova also thanked us and dismissed from the duty in order that we would not do anything else, however she registered our being on duty. We were leaving the delivery room proud, with lots of impressions, accompanied by cursing of the young woman in labor, who still could not start. Later we did our best when telling how Vagram was helping the woman in labor, and how I "practically alone" assisted in the delivery of a big baby, and how the associate professor Titova herself thanked us for good participation and let us leave when it was still evening time. Generally speaking, we were recklessly lying and doing PR of ourselves.

As we learned afterwards, Vagram and I were not the only ones who had been in such situation; Kostya Romashov also had a similar experience. Unlike Vagram and I, who were at the maternity hospital of the #3 city clinic, Kostya happened to be at the maternity hospital of the #9 clinic of Kirovskiy district, where, by the way, his older brother and my friend Yevgeniy worked. Like the two of us, Kostya also was not alone. Kostya was assisting in the first in his life childbirth together with Lena Dubrovina and a group monitor of the forty first group Lyudmila Nefedchenko, who tagged after them. Sure enough, Kostya performed everything excellently. He stood from the left side of a woman in labor, embraced her belly by his left arm, gripped the edge of the table and gradually, I stress, very gradually was increasing his pressure on her belly, and by his right hand he was controlling her expulsive pains around her belly button. The woman in labor was a very young, just seventeen years old, girl, but she was behaving in a heroic way, and during breaks between the labors she was getting acquainted with Kostya and even promised that if she would have a son, she would call him Kostya. There was no ultrasonic scanning back then, and it became known who would be born only during a delivery.
The childbirth went without any emergencies, let alone that the girls accompanying Kostya both fainted with a crash, when the head went out.

And an old lady-midwife praised Kostya very much and even said that he was a born obstetrician. And the born obstetrician could not look at girls for about two weeks without a feeling that they were like aliens.

The last story is courtesy of Kostya Romashov.

17 November, 2011

© Copyright: Oleg Syedyshev, 2012
Publishing licence #21210010317

Translated by Viktoria Potykinato content ↑


Copyright © 2001-2024
oleg.syedyshev.name
All rights reserved