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Chapter 14. “Everything’s All Right with Me”

The life of every person consists perhaps of large and small, noisy and quiet battles. Our family was no exception, particularly when Mama fell ill. However, after acquiring Mukhitdin as our “general," we became a well-supplied army, and we had hopes of winning. Mama was feeling better and better. She thought that she was over her disease and was drinking the herb brews to improve her general health.

And in this way, two years passed relatively happily, if you didn't consider the permanent inner tension. But then Mama got pneumonia.

Mukhitdin had feared that most of all. “Beware of a cold. Be very careful, and don’t expose yourself to cold temperatures. Take good care of your lungs,” he often repeated to Mama. So how could this have happened?

Mama lost weight, grew weaker and looked drawn in the face. They did everything they could at the hospital, but they also broke the terrible news to me – the cancer had metastasized to her lungs and bones. In other words, what we had feared most had happened. We knew that Mama’s lymph nodes, affected by cancer, were agents of metastasis.

It was difficult to express my despair.

“Mukhitdin most likely won’t be able to help me,” I thought as I held the telephone receiver in my hand. But Mukhitdin, after listening to me, said, "Come here as soon as possible, for a couple of weeks."

Mama was very surprised. “To Namangan? Again? Why?” I had to lie that I didn’t feel very well, that this and that were bothering me… in a word, that I wanted to consult him about myself, and she should go along to keep me company and have another check-up.

Mama, thank God, didn’t suspect a thing.

The doctors at the hospital couldn’t understand why I was concealing the ordeal from her. Here in America, they have different medical traditions, different moral notions. Maybe doctors were afraid to take additional responsibility upon themselves. Maybe… but Mama’s peace of mind was more important to me. Mukhitdin supported me in that. He used to say that the less the patient thought about a disease, the better her organism could fight it, the easier it was to stimulate it, and the greater the chance of recovery.

Mukhitdin’s familiar office, his concentrated face in which all my hopes rested… How long he held Mama’s wrist. He’d never listened to her pulse for such a long time. He talked to Mama, made jokes, tried to smile. Then he lit a cigarette, with his other hand still on Mama’s wrist.

"And how is my oncology going?" Mama asked.

"Oncology? And what is oncology?" he smiled. "Valera, do you know what it is?"

Our eyes met. His gaze was odd and tired, lacking his usual spark. Yes, I understood correctly why he was holding Mama’s wrist for such a long time. He refused to accept what the pulse was telling him. He was trying to feel barely audible signals from an artery that refuted the diagnosis, but in vain.

"Everything is normal Esya-apa," he at last told Mama. "You still have a cold, but it’s all right. I’ll give you some good medicine."

At that point Mama demanded that the doctor get busy on me. I hadn’t had time to decide what to complain about, but Mukhitdin, after feeling my pulse, informed me, "You have a slight pain here, and he pointed at my right side near the ribs. "You have a blockage in your liver."

He was right, as always. Precisely now, in Namangan, I felt an intermittent pain exactly where he was pointing.

"It’s nothing serious," Mukhitdin assured Mama. "Let’s go, Valera. I’ll give you some medication."

We stepped out, and after lighting another cigarette, he told me, "Valera, it has spread to the ligaments. The lungs are also not well."

We were silent. I had already known all that, but I still hoped. Even now I was waiting like a child for a miracle… what if Mukhitdin could help?

He looked into my eyes and said seriously, "I can promise two or three years. She’ll hold out… and now I’ll take you to a place where you can rest. See you in the evening."

We went back to the office to pick up Mama and Abduraim, Mukhitdin’s nephew, who took us to our temporary abode. It was an apartment on the fifth floor with a balcony from which one had a beautiful view of the city and the whole valley spread out below. We could see people – some with hoes, others with seedlings –puttering around in their gardens near neighboring houses. It was the beginning of April, which was usually warm in Namangan, but this year it was cool. It was also somewhat damp in the apartment. Heating was out of the question. There was no hot water either. Mama was a bit sad after our comfortable daily life in America. And my heart was plunged in darkness.

"How shall we live here for ten days? How?" Mama sighed. "I don’t even have energy to cook anything."

But her worries were for naught. A doorbell rang, and Mukhitdin’s wife Fatimakhon and their 18-year-old son Khasauboi entered loaded with packages. Fatimakhon was energetic and skillful. A kettle was boiling on the stove, the electric heaters filled the apartment with warmth, and Fatimakhon’s skilled hands stocked the refrigerator with food. Pots could be heard banging in the kitchen from whence the aroma of something tasty came. It was impossible to confuse this aroma with anything else. Pilaf was being cooked, real Uzbek pilaf. And while it was cooking, we sat down to have some tea, and the music of the melodious Uzbek language filled the air.

We already knew a few things about the Umarovs, but what the wife and mother of the family told us was more interesting and richer in content than the brief stories told by the laconic Mukhitdin. They had five children, and the youngest was two years old. Fatimakhon was a gynecologist, but she had given up her career for the sake of her family. It was true that during all those years when Mukhitdin hadn’t been allowed to practice, it was necessary to earn at least something. The Umarovs decided to work at home. They wove fabrics on a loom, a skill inherited from their parents, and sold them. That’s how they had lived until the time when Mukhitdin received recognition.

We talked the whole evening, and by the time Mukhitdin showed up, the pilaf was ready.

After dinner, the doctor called me to the kitchen, "We’re going to make the medicine for Mama now." He showed me a lump of some substance that looked like either dark-colored wax or modeling clay. It was propolis, the most powerful natural antibiotic. Mukhitdin picked up a tea bowl, chopped some of the propolis with a knife, put a small piece of butter on it, dumped the whole thing into a frying pan and put it on the stove.

"Butter increases the effect of propolis 15-fold," he explained. "It will be a great help to Mama’s lungs."

In a few minutes, the steamy brown concoction was poured back into the tea bowl.

"It will solidify soon. Give Mama a teaspoon three times a day. When you run out, make some more." He placed a piece of propolis on the table. "She needs to rest and take the medication. Here’s a new herbal formula, as well. In the evening, I’ll stop by to examine her."

We decided that the next morning I would attend Mukhitdin’s classes at the Center, and then our guests – if one could call them guests – left.

The next evening bought us unexpected joy. After feeling Mama’s pulse, the doctor smiled almost his old smile.

"You feel better, Esya-apa," he exclaimed. "I know you feel better. What great medications I’ve given you!" And he raised his index finger solemnly.

Mukhitdin was usually very reserved and never bragged. Only true joy could make him talk like that.

"How… Do you really… Do you really notice the difference?" I asked, happy but afraid to believe it.

Mukhitdin nodded.

"If a choice of treatment is correct, it’s possible to see the improvement after three doses of herbs. The vibration of the pulse changes." He patted me on the hand. "Thank God, it’s already a bit better."

Mama shrugged her shoulders. "I know everything’s all right with me. When will you begin to treat Valera?"

Chapter 15. Ustoz

I woke up as it was just getting light. I needed to fix Mama’s breakfast and brew the herbs before leaving for the Center.

The weather was blustery. I could hear the wind wailing and beating against the panes as I stood at the window. But the sun was rising in a clear sky. The crimson semicircle flared on the horizon, climbing higher each moment until becoming a golden ball. Cars began darting down city streets. Somewhere out there, beyond the city limits, I could distinguish tractors moving slowly across fields beneath the morning fog. There were thick clouds of smoke over each of them. The tractors were old, with diesel engines and chimneys on their hoods.

Mama was still asleep when I set the table and left for the Center. I should mention that the Center, or, to be precise the building that had housed the Center, wasn’t there any longer. The building had been taken apart, brick by brick. Those bricks, thousands of them, arranged in neat stacks, were there in the courtyard where a new building was under construction. Patients were received, and classes were held in the temporary annex. That annex wasn’t large or comfortable enough, but it was in the same courtyard.

I wasn’t surprised to hear the word “construction” from students before the lesson began. But when Timur, the doctor’s student whom I knew well and with whom I hadn't been able to finish a conversation before the lesson began, said, “All right, we can finish our conversation at the construction site,” I was surprised, or rather I didn’t understand. I was planning to visit the construction site with the doctor, not with Timur. What did it have to do with him?

The lesson began at 7:30 a.m. About 15 people were seated around three tables. Pages of books and notebooks began to rustle, as in any school class, but I didn’t see a blackboard, and the students were adults, many of whom had significant life experience behind them.

There was Makhmoudjon, a former surgeon. He had already been studying Eastern medicine for five years. It would be another five years before he finished studies here. Perhaps after that he would open his own clinic. So far, Makhmoudjon’s family, his wife and four children, who lived hundreds of kilometers away, were waiting patiently for their husband and father to return home.

Ikramdjou Usmanov, with whom he shared a desk, was fifty years old and had been a biologist when he was young. About 15 years before, he had fallen gravely ill and became Mukhitdin’s patient. After he was cured, he became his student… his first student, by the way. Now, as he continued to study, he also received patients.

The first sound I heard during the lesson was the melodious clinking of tea bowls. Seated at his desk in front of the students, the smiling tabib was, as usual, pouring fragrant tea into bowls. In that way, while drinking tea, they began an unhurried conversation about a subject they had previously begun to discuss – black bile, savdo, in the view of Eastern and contemporary medicine.

Since I was the least prepared of those who took part in the discussion, it was difficult for me to evaluate it. I can only write about my impressions. It was extremely interesting, and I understood how important the subject of the discussion was, in general, and for me in particular. The subject was essentially the way in which Eastern medicine viewed the origin of a cancer cell.

Here I must interrupt my story about the lesson to return to the views of Ibn Sina and other medical scholars of his school.

Any live cell has four functions: it can capture, retain, absorb and expel. A cell can perform these functions thanks to the humors, the same four humors that together form mature blood. Humors, Eastern medicine asserts, are created in a human organism from consumed food. After the preliminary digestion of food, it turns into hilus, a liquid substance, which is as soft and white as a thick barley decoction. Hilus flows through the mesenteric veins and then through the portal vein to the liver, and there, due to the different temperatures of the various cells of the liver, hilus is gradually and consistently transformed into four humors – the four integral parts of mature blood. Phlegm is formed from the liquid part, which, as it matures, forms blood that is not yet ripe. The thick part of hilus forms natural safro (yellow bile), which, as it partially matures, forms natural savdo (black bile).

As the four humors are formed, the liver unites, or captures, them to form mature blood.

In other words, it is the liver, according to Eastern medicine, that is the blood-creating organ. It’s clear that a liver can only produce good, healthy humors and create blood if it is healthy itself. Otherwise pathological changes in the humors occur. There can be many of them, and each can become a source of different diseases.

I would like to emphasize once again that contemporary medicine does not recognize the blood-forming role of the liver or the notion of humors. The sedimentary part of blood – leukocytes and erythrocytes – is produced in the bone marrow. Their deviation from the norm is viewed not as a cause but a symptom of a disease itself. It’s true that the symptoms, in other words, serious changes in the blood composition can, in turn, lead to more diseases.

Now I’ll get back to the cells with which I began my attempts at explaining, dear readers. Eastern medicine asserts that each humor is responsible for a certain cell function. For example, safro, yellow bile or blood plasma is responsible for the function of capturing, and black bile for the function of expelling. These functions are as important for a cell as for any other organism. (A cell is also an organism with its own heart, liver, kidneys, etc.) So, any working organism produces waste, which must absolutely be removed. Waste is removed from a human organism as urine, excrement, and sweat. The growth of hair and nails is also a means of removing waste. When this process is corrupted for some reason, poisoning occurs. Sometimes it’s so strong that it may lead to an organism's demise, to death.

As far as I understand, those were the primary causes of my mother’s disease. Negligent uterus scraping triggered an inflammatory process, which was not dealt with in a natural way. Due to the rejection function of the cells, for which savdo was responsible, the natural process didn’t work in the area of the injury. Cells in the uterus, inflamed by the festering waste, did not receive natural help. Their pathology began and a malignant tumor appeared. In other words, corruption of the work of a blood-producing organ (the liver) and pathological corruption of the composition of blood were the principal causes of Mother’s disease. This is certainly a very superficial and schematic picture – I mean my “scientific” explanations, my attempts to understand what had happened to Mama. In fact, everything is much more complicated. It’s sufficient to remember that a cell, according to Eastern medicine, goes through 28 stages of development before it splits. It’s clear that the stages form an uninterrupted chain. If something is broken in one of the links, a catastrophe occurs in others. Not only one specific cancer can occur as a cell splits but any of the 28 existing types.

I must admit that I couldn’t understand the meaning of a phrase Mukhitdin repeated now and then: “The whole of Ibn Sina’s teaching is built up from the cell level.”

How could that be? Ibn Sina didn’t know anything about cells; he couldn’t without a microscope. It’s not mentioned in his works. But the more thoroughly I read “The Canon,” the more often I thought that the principles of the functioning of an organism as formulated by Ibn Sina, and his keen understanding of the process of that functioning, precisely coincided with cell theory. You may remember that I have already mentioned that modern scholarly term "isomorphism," which aids us in comparing old and new scientific theories to find similarities between them.

I would like to mention once again that my explanations have nothing to do with what I heard in class. The conversation there was much more serious. How savdo, all stages of the process, all causes of its disruption and resulting consequences were discussed in detail. The conversation shifted from the tenets of “The Canon” to the methods of contemporary diagnosis and treatment, to a comparison of old and new approaches to the origin of various diseases.

After some time, I felt that the tabib wasn’t quite satisfied with his students’ answers. It was obvious that he expected them to be more profound, to use a more creative approach to the subject, to expand on it by using materials well analyzed at home – both “The Canon” by Ibn Sina and contemporary books on the corresponding area of medicine. Everyone present knew perfectly well that the basic ideas of Ibn Sina, both theoretical and practical, had withstood the test of time and hadn’t lost their significance in ten centuries.

“So, tell me, my friends, show me how it appears in the light of today’s science using specific examples! Don’t behave like contemporary physicians who, after being educated and starting an independent practice, stop being researchers. And don’t behave like those medical scholars who after landing at research institutions and academies mention the works of their ingenious predecessor only condescendingly and quite superficially.”

That impatient anticipation came through in the questions Mukhitdin asked during the discussion. He knew… he well knew that the world of scholarly skeptics awaited his students outside the Center. He himself had experienced it after his teacher’s death. He had experienced it during his work among high-ranking doctors and academicians in Moscow.

"Ah, Valera, you’re so naïve," The tabib used to tell me, the irksome person who pestered him with questions.

"Didn’t Moscow physicians see how fruitful your work was?"

"I worked in Moscow for so many years, curing so many people, but only a few individuals believed me."

The tabib told me many amazing stories on that account. I remember two of them in particular:

The son of academician N. suffered from leukemia. Many years of treatment hadn't helped. His disease was progressing. The father of the young man, "the great scholarly individual,” didn’t believe in either the tabib’s diagnostics or herbal treatments. The son proved to be wiser. He began to receive treatment from the tabib secretly, without his father’s knowledge. After some time, he felt better. His disease receded. When the time came to rejoice, he shared the wonderful news with his father-academician. And what happened? The "sage” stuck to his convictions, declaring that at last the many years of chemotherapy had worked.

The wife of a physician who was the head of the oncology department of a big hospital came to see the tabib. The tabib determined that she had breast cancer, but an x-ray didn’t confirm it, and she didn’t do anything about it. Soon the tumor grew larger and was noticed by everybody. She had surgery, a course of chemo… and in six months she was dead.

That’s why Mukhitdin wanted his students to be knowledgeable, not only in the field of Eastern medicine but also in contemporary medicine, so that they would become hardened fighters capable of rebuffing the skeptics.

Suddenly the tabib stood up, a short stick in his hand.

“That same bamboo stick, ” I thought.

I had heard about the stick both from the doctor and his students. It was the symbol of dissatisfaction. The tabib’s glance was more defeating than a strike with a bamboo stick.

He stopped near Timur.

"Well, please, repeat what you were telling us about, but please, don’t hurry! Go into detail, all right?" The tabib said, slightly waving his stick.

When Timur had arrived at the Center five years earlier, he not only hadn't known what pulse diagnostics was but wasn't able to speak Uzbek. However, he was determined to master both… The tabib acted in a very simple way. He gave Timur a synopsis of his work in Uzbek and said, “Translate into Russian.” Needless to say, it was quite a difficult task, but Timur handled it… and that was the beginning of his studies.

However, the capable, industrious, and seemingly shy Timur had his slight shortcomings. When he began to talk, he tended to go on at length and, as Mukhitdin put it, “liked to beat around the bush.” That’s what happened this time, and the tabib’s advice to “Ponder, don’t hurry” didn’t help. The magic stick in his hand didn’t help either.

"Well… enough for today," Tabib said, sighing.

Corrections and reproaches would be superfluous, for the pupils were upset and wore embarrassed expressions as they left. But how could it be any different?

“Ustoz” is how they addressed the tabib. Ustoz means “master,” “teacher” in Uzbek. But it seemed to me that they attached a loftier significance to it. Mukhitdin was their caring father, friend, patron, and even provider. He provided free lodging for them. (The majority of the students had come to Namangan from other towns and even regions.) Each of them was paid a salary at the Center. To tell the truth, one couldn't call the Center a profitable institution. Even though certain payments were charged for consultation and treatment, many patients paid what they could afford. And if they couldn’t, they didn’t pay anything because the tabib knew how many poor, very poor people there were around. Obviously, only his kindness and unwavering faith in the need for what he was doing helped him to cope with the burden he took on himself. Vast plans, numerous concerns, long hours of intellectual and physical work from early morning until late at night… he usually saw up to one hundred fifty patients a day.

Yes, he was an Ustoz, a real Ustoz, and it was no accident that when his students addressed him, they pronounced that word quietly, bowing their heads slightly. It was not surprising that they filed out ashamed and upset after that day's class.

Actually, I have not expressed what was happening correctly. They were not leaving. They began to change. The outfits they changed into were very strange – pants stained with paint, the same for the tops, some of which had burned spots, boots covered in clay… Some of them put on skullcaps, others wrapped kerchiefs around their heads… Right in front of me, future doctors had turned into construction workers, laborers.

Seeing my perplexed face, Mukhitdin said chuckling, "Yes, we're all going to the construction site."

And then I remembered Timur’s words: “We can finish our conversation at the construction site.”