In which I get irradiated
The Story of the X-Ray

I went to the doctor yesterday, because my bronchitis still hurts. He decided that an x-ray was called for. "Okay," I said. "Wait in the waiting room," he said. "The nurse will come for you."

So I waited. And waited. And waited some more. Finally, a nurse came out. You know how nurses in America are known for their sensible shoes? Well, she was wearing elf shoes with low heels, so I guess that counts here. (All the girls here wear these astounding elf shoes with pointy curled up toes and spike heels. I really want a pair, although I know they'd be the death of me.) The nurse said something unintelligible in English, so I asked her in Russian to repeat it, and she looked really relieved, and switched over to Russian herself. I think it's a requirement that Euromed personnel speak English, but she clearly wasn't up on it, so I figured my ungrammatical Russian was probably better than her unintelligible English.

She told me to follow her, then went out the front door.

Hmm, I thought. This is sketchy. But I followed her anyway.

Outside, an ambulance was waiting. "Wait, wait," I said. "I'm just the one getting the x-ray!"

She rattled off a long technological-word filled explaination, then broke off and mumbled, all embarrassed, "Basically, our machine is broken. We have to go to a different machine."

So the ambulance drove at top speed (lights off - seeing as how it wasn't an actual emergency. I think the driver was just in the habit of traveling like an insane thing) skidding to a stop in front of this warehouse-looking building about a mile away. The teeny nurse body-slammed the giant medieval fortress-like door open, and I followed her inside into the dark, beginning to suspect that I was going to be offered a glass of water and it was going to turn out to be roofies and then I'd wake up sometime tomorrow in a vat of ice with no kidneys or liver, possibly missing an eyeball, too.

I crept down the corridor after her, ready to spin and run at any second.

Suddenly, an old lady in scrubs popped out of nowhere. "We need to go up to the X-ray!" she announced cheerily, and led us to the elevators. She proceeded to run around this enormous foyer pushing all the elevator buttons one by one repeatedly for about ten minutes, to no avail. I noticed that a sign above each set of elevator doors said "Jumping up and down in the elevator can put your life in danger!" This naturally led me to imagine that the reason the place seemed deserted and no elevators were coming was that some poor bastard who didn't know how to read Russian had jumped up and down in the elevator, causing an elevator-catastrophe, and all the hospital personnel were now in the basement tending to the victims.

It's possible.

So, finally, we had to take the stairs. Five big flights of stairs. Not normally an exorbitant amount, but when you can't breathe, well...

Once we got to the top, the floor was locked off by a giant prison-like grille.

"Huh!" the perky old nurse said. "I'm gonna have to run and get some keys!" and she took of down the stairs slalom-style. I think someone was sampling medicine cabinet. This left the young fashionable nurse and I to stand at the top of the stairs in front of a grille.

The young nurse shrugged.

I started reading all the signs on the wall. They were total Soviet kitch - pictures of noble sturdy blonds performing great athletic feats. Lift weights for your health and for the Motherland! Brush your teeth and be a good member of society! There was also a sign posted informing veterans of the Great Patriotic War, Afghanistan combatants, survivors of the Siege of Leningrad and military widows and orphans that they were entitled to free health care by order of the USSR. So, I'm thinkin' this hospital has not been in use for a while.

This impression was reinforced when the old nurse finally returned with the keys and let us into the X-ray room and had to UNPACK THE MACHINE.

The machine was terrible and awesome, not in the Wayne's World sense of awesome, either, but in the sense that it inspired awe and fear. It looked like something the Romulans might torture you with, if you were a fictional Star Trek character, or a really big geek with an inability to separate imagination from reality.

The young nurse looked awestruck too. She patted me on the arm. "Think of it this way: it's an adventure!"

"Hopefully not my last one," I mumbled to myself.

Then I stipped to the waist and they zapped me and now I probably won't ever be able to have children, but that's okay, because babies look like creepy little aliens anyway.
- declared by Liusia @ 2:16 PM