Member-only story
To Save A Child
A Russian mother’s courage
When I saw her in Nome’s hospital ER, her long grey dress, brown cardigan, and babushka, made me think she could’ve been right out of central casting as a rural Russian peasant. I also noted the sadness that seemed to envelope her like a fog.
As a lab tech in Alaska’s Norton Sound Hospital, I was at her comatose son’s bedside to draw his blood. She looked at me with wariness as I proceeded, but when her gaze fell on little Dmitri, only love shone through her tears.
The doc covering the ER that night moved with gentle swiftness, assessing the boy’s condition and beginning treatment even before the interpreter arrived. By the time I ran Dmitri’s lab tests and brought back his results ( only a matter of minutes) he was sitting on his mother’s lap, a crooked smile on his lips, holding on to Mom for dear life.
Against all rules, she had left Providinya with her son, and paid a fishing boat captain to take them across the Bering Sea to Russia’s Big Diomede Island, a distance of about 50 miles. From there, it was just a two mile hop to the U.S. island of Little Diomede, where Native seal hunters could bring her the rest of the way to Nome.
