Sasha himself believes that oncology also had advantages for him: it led him down a medical path that he had not even thought about before his illness. In general, I didn’t like biology or chemistry at school.
– Thinking about the future, I imagined myself as a firefighter, military man or police officer. I wanted to choose a real male profession that requires good health. And I had it until I was 15 years old. He was involved in sports, especially athletics. No one in their right mind and with a good memory would have imagined running 10 kilometers outdoors in 40 degree heat. My mother and I lived in Volzhsk then and the heat was normal there,” explains Sasha.
And he also really liked orienteering: you run through the fields and you just have to remember to look at the map and find the right object.
But suddenly, at night, a sharp pain began to arise in the kidney area. Further examination showed enormous darkening of the lungs.
“It was my lymph nodes that decided to have the most fun,” Sasha adds with a smile. – And one of the swollen lymph nodes pressed on the kidney: it hurt.
Diagnosis: cancer, Hodgkin lymphoma. At that time, Sasha was already in the hospital and the doctors did not hide the truth from him or his mother. “We both understood that everything was wrong, that I could leave. Mom was crying and I calmed her down. I told her that we would definitely fix it!” -he remembers. Sasha is an only child, his mother raises him alone, his father left their lives a long time ago. If something happened, she would be left alone, no one would be there to support her and cheer her up, the boy understood it even then. Then the doctors said that for the first time they saw how the boy calmed his mother, and not the other way around.
The teenager could not be helped either in his native Volzhsk or in Volgograd. He required a bone marrow transplant and he and his mother went to St. Petersburg, to the Raisa Gorbacheva Institute of Pediatric Hematology and Transplantology. And they stayed in the city of Petra forever.
Painful treatment, recovery after transplant, when she had to “live on liquid oatmeal” for six months – Sasha overcame everything. While at the clinic, she became interested in medical manipulation. She even asked to be allowed to bandage herself, to feel the “port” (in reality it is a wound that does not allow itself to heal and with the help of which intravenous lines are placed). She was given a sterile glove and allowed to leave. This is where my entry into medicine began: I didn’t want to become a patient, but a doctor who saves other lives.
Sasha managed: the lymphoma went into stable remission and he entered the Nursing Training Institute. Between classes, she sometimes ran to Gorbachevka for a consultation or an exam. I asked the teachers to send me to practice exactly where there were familiar faces around me who had become my family. Sent. And it was doubly great that some patients recognized it. For them, he became an example of how to overcome an illness and move forward.
Then they offered him additional retraining in the specialty of “operational nurse”, he immediately accepted.
– When I performed five interventions in the operating room for the first time, handing instruments to the surgeons, the doctor came and told me: “We bring you the sixth unscheduled patient.” I’m a little scared because some of the tools for the sixth are gone. But they still found him, he remembers.
And the whole day of the operation he thought that, of course, being an operating nurse is important and interesting, but he wants to stand and help the surgeon. Do not hand out instruments or count napkins, perform the operation yourself.
The decision was made, and after receiving secondary medical education, Sasha entered the First Medical School.
Sometimes, as the student admits, he remembers Professor Boris Afanasyev, who died several years ago. For many years he was director of Gorbachevka and, until his old age, his colleagues came to him for a final verdict on the choice of treatment tactics for patients in difficult cases. Afanasiev was the final and decisive authority. Sasha would also like to become a specialist of the highest level, but…
– When people ask me about my dreams, I say: I don’t have long-term dreams. Too often I have seen other people die, including children. But if everything goes well, then surgery, possibly oncological surgery,” she states.
And he adds: if your legs don’t let you fall. After massive cycles of hormonal medications (he was given up to 14 of these tablets a day!), his joints began to hurt. So, there were cases when I had to urgently go to the hospital due to severe pain. The surgeon must spend many hours on the operating table. Can he do it? The alternative option is cardiology. The heart is a mysterious organ and Sasha wants to understand the secrets of it. Including a diagnosis such as myocardial ischemia.
