Earigations

After being half-deaf for some time now, I made an appointment at the campus health center yesterday as an alternative to learning ASL. It was a relatively painless process -- kind of an awesome sensation, really -- a syringe that sprays water into my ear and lets nasty brown chunks of wax out into a kidney-shaped tray waiting below. The experience, however, brought me back to a day a little over a year ago that involved a dear friend. It is with her permission that I share this story. Actually... she has no idea.

Rachel -- then Sister Richards -- was my LDS mission companion. It's a rare privilege to get to serve in the same mission as your best friend. Even rarer and more privilege-y is when she gets to be your companion. We lived together in a small, quaint Lithuanian town called Siauliai when one morning Rachel woke up without her hearing. A regular part of a missionary day is talking to people, and my friend was getting frustrated as she found herself approaching strangers, not being able to hear them, then having them walk away in confusion when she couldn't communicate with them. Finally we decided it was time to take medical action.

Lithuanian hospitals are very... Soviet. What many have found is that if you don't need antibiotics when you go in, you will most certainly need them when you come out. Instruments are rusty. Doctors don't have fancy light-up tools to look in your mouth but rather duct-taped flashlights to hats on their heads. Dark, moldy, paint-chipped walls surround rooms with squeaky beds and dirty windows. People don't smile, and who can blame them? It was thus with much trepidation that we -- and especially Rachel -- stepped into the Siauliai hospital waiting room.

A dirty old poster hung on the wall and dust covered the painted floor when we walked in. Rachel got more fidgety as we sat and waited our turn to learn our fate and destination. "3rd floor, Wing C," said the pink-haired woman behind the counter when we told her our problem. To get to 3rd floor, Wing C one must walk down a long, very dark underground hallway. It is painted green. There are metal doors leading to other wings as you make your way through the "cave," as we called it, labeled "radiology," "dermatology," and "podiatry." I swear I saw an especially large grey door labeled "morgue."

When we made our way to the "eye, nose and ears" department on 3rd floor, Wing C, Rachel was pale. Her eyes gave away the fear that she would walk away from Siauliai hospital as a female version of Van Gogh (an irrational fear: Rachel's a terrible artist). We sat outside the door, waiting for our turn to enter the mysterious "eye, nose and ears" office. Finally we were let out of the green, dirty flourescent-lit hallway into a bright, fresh, well-lit office. Two cheerful women in clean white coats greeted us, looked into Rachel's ears with an instrument my family doctor in America would use, and chatted with us as they worked. Then one of them used a shiny, legitimate-looking instrument to remove a big ball of wax from Rachel's ear. No one got deadly infections. No one lost any limbs. Nothing in the room was rusty or even smelled weird. The sun gleamed through the big windows. It was incredibly anticlimactic... just like this blog entry. The end.