The Russian in Bed No. 6

When my eagerness as a hospice volunteer left me flushed.

Photo by Miguel Alcântara on Unsplash.

During one of my volunteer shifts at the Zen Hospice Project, I heard Young, the RN on duty, talk with the other nurse, Grace, about an issue they were having with a recently admitted resident in Bed No. 6. This older gentleman — I’ll call him Vlad — was a Russian immigrant who was dying from a very aggressive form of stomach cancer, but at this point he was still ambulatory.

The problem was this: Vlad kept flushing the toilet after defecating. Normally, of course, that’s what you’d want him to do. But the nurses needed to look at his poo to get vital information about his current condition — which would, in turn, determine the course of treatment he needed.

And they couldn’t just tell him not to flush after pooing, because Vlad spoke no English. The matter was urgent. They needed to find someone who spoke Russian.

“I speak Russian!” I said.

Alas, this wasn’t totally true. I had taken Russian in high school, but our Russian teacher was also the school’s Spanish teacher, and I think what I learned was kind of a Russian-Spanish hybrid. Plus I’ve always been lousy at picking up foreign languages.

But I really wanted to impress Young and Grace!

“That’s fantastic!” Young said. “Josh, go into Vlad’s room right away and tell him that it’s very important not to flush.”

On my way down the hallway, I consulted the English-to-Russian app on my smartphone and learned that the Russian word for “flush” was “flyesh.” Then, in Vlad’s doorway, I told him, “Nyet flyesh!”

Vlad, lying in his bed, looked up at me quizzically.

Perhaps, I thought, he doesn’t understand the gravity of the situation.

In the firmest tones I could muster, I repeated myself: “Flyesh — nyet! Nyet flyesh!!”

Now he looked truly confused.

I went back to the nurses’ station and told Young and Grace, “I can’t get through to him! Maybe he speaks some sort of provincial dialect, or something.”

So Young went down the hallway and managed, by miming the appropriate actions, to get the message across to Vlad — who, thereafter, refrained from flushing. Problem solved!

It was only when I got home later that day, and consulted my big, paperback English-Russian dictionary, that I realized I’d been using the wrong Russian word. “Flyesh” did mean “flush” — but in poker! As in a royal flush.

I can only imagine what Vlad must have made of me — this stranger shouting at him in Russian about something he shouldn’t do in a card game!

As the weeks went by, I think Vlad figured out that I wasn’t quite as nuts as I’d first appeared to be. I did the best I could to chat with him in my broken, Spanish-inflected Russian. And from a Russian friend of his who frequently came to visit and play chess (not poker!) with him, I learned that Vlad, back in Russia, had been a physicist, supervising a large laboratory. He fled to America, where he settled in the large Russian-émigré community in San Francisco’s Richmond District and earned a living as a cab driver. Then cancer got him.

Vlad had a huge appetite when he first came to the hospice — but as his health continued to decline, his ability to eat and enjoy food diminished steadily.

One week I came in for my shift and Young told me that Vlad was very close to the end. I went to his room, and he motioned for me to approach his bed so he could tell me something. He said that he wanted one last Russian meal — and beer. And not just any beer. “Pabst!”

I went to tell Roy, my supervisor, and Roy authorized me to take some money out of petty cash. Then he drove me to that “Little Russia” neighborhood so I could run in and get take-out from a Russian restaurant that I’d found on Google. We also stopped at a corner store so I could grab a six-pack of Pabst.

When we got back to the hospice, I rushed upstairs to Vlad’s room with the take-out bags. He smiled weakly at me, but he clearly was in too much pain to eat, despite the meds they were giving him.

My shift soon ended and I went home. But I later heard that Vlad’s friend had visited him that evening and they’d each had a can of Pabst while playing one last game of chess.

By my next shift, Vlad had passed away.

My brief time with Vlad had begun with a misunderstanding. But I feel like the experience led me to understand something — or begin to, at least. We try. We try our best to care for people. And sometimes we don’t get it totally right. I used the wrong Russian word for “flush.” Vlad never got to eat that food. But my job as a volunteer wasn’t to make things perfect. It was to connect with Vlad while being as authentically myself as possible.

It’s a lesson that would serve me well, years later, as I sat at my dying mother’s bedside.