The year 2000 has come. Many people thought this year would be the Apocalypse, the end of the world, but thankfully it did not happen. I experienced yet another problem. On my birthday, I got pneumonia. I was 11 years old. On September 3 my mother called an ambulance, and I was taken to a children’s hospital.
After examining me, the doctors decided to keep me in for monitoring. Of course, mom stayed there with me. Beside the other children in the ward where I was placed, there was also a woman with a son who would just come up to you and hit you. But that was just the tip of the iceberg, because his mother was a drug addict. After many complaints against her and her son, they were moved to another ward.
Speaking of attitude and food at the hospital, the former were good and the latter was disappointing. The medical staff was kind and open. But there were real problems with the food. It could be borsch without potatoes, or boiled buckwheat with tiny pieces of broken glass. (I’m not joking! Someone was probably negligent around food – with these horrible results.) My grandmother could not always bring us food because she worked. Luckily, not far from the hospital lived the family of Tetiana and Mykola Udod. They also had a daughter with special needs who had been given the same diagnosis as mine but a milder version. When Ms. Tetiana found out we were in the hospital, she started to visit us and bring home-made food.
I was fortunate to meet other children who shared my ward (it wasn’t a private ward for just one child, there were several of us). This is probably the first time we really broke down the barriers between us and the able bodied kids, and we started doing many things together. We played cards or other games, sprayed water at each other using syringes, talked about different things and most importantly, there was not that feeling of rejection that the Soviet system has imposed on us. Even when we were moved to different wards, they came back to see me, we ate cookies and drank juice together, and they pushed me around the hospital in my wheelchair.
After being discharged from the hospital, my schooling continued. But I had to say goodbye to Myloserdia. Before leaving, I had a serious argument with one of the staff members. I was outraged by the attitude of one of the employees towards one of the special girls. She was not invited to the International Women’s Day celebration held after her mother’s funeral. I thought the child needed moral support and should have been invited to the event. But they ignored me, and we had a serious row. I was 12 at the time.
Despite this, I kept myself busy. Not far from my home, the Social Service for the Families, Children and Youth opened a daycare center for children with special needs where they could spend some time, talk to each other, go on an occasional field trip and take part in short plays getting ready for the festival Believe in Yourself.
I was given the leading roles which contained a lot of text, more than anyone else’s role. You can see one of these performances titled “Puppet Doctor”
following this link
