Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Page B

they come in on camels.”
    â€œAre you an agronomist?”
    â€œNo. Land surveyor.”
    â€œWhy do you live there, basically?”
    Kostoglotov scratched his nose. “I just adore the climate.”
    â€œAnd there’s no transport?”
    â€œOf course there is. Motorcars—all you could want.”
    â€œBut why should I go there?”
    She looked sideways at him. All the time they had been talking Kostoglotov’s face had grown kinder and softer.
    â€œWhy should you? ” He furrowed the skin of his forehead, as though searching for words with which to propose a toast. “Zoyenka, how can you tell which part of the world you’d be happy in, and which you’d be unhappy in? Who can say he knows that about himself?”

4. The Patients’ Worries
    For the surgical cases, whose tumors were to be arrested by an operation, there was not enough room in the wards on the lower floor. They were put upstairs with the “X-ray” patients, those prescribed radiotherapy or chemical treatment. For this reason there were two different rounds upstairs every morning, one for the radiotherapists, one for the surgeons.
    The fourth of February was a Friday, operation day, when the surgeons did not make their rounds. So Vera Kornilyevna Gangart, the radiotherapist on duty, did not start her rounds immediately after the five-minute briefing. She just glanced inside as she passed the door of the men’s ward.
    Dr. Gangart was shapely and not tall. Her shapeliness was emphasized by her narrow waist, to which all the contours of her body seemed to point. Her hair, gathered in an unfashionable bun on the back of her head, was lighter than black but darker than dark-brown.
    Ahmadjan caught sight of her and nodded to her happily. Kostoglotov also had time to raise his head from his large book and bow to her from afar. She smiled to both of them and raised one finger, as if to warn her children to sit quietly while she was away. Then she moved from the doorway and was gone.
    Today she was to go round the wards not alone but with Ludmila Afanasyevna Dontsova, who was in charge of the radiotherapy department. But Ludmila Afanasyevna had been called in to see Nizamutdin Bahramovich, the senior doctor, and he was holding her up.
    Dontsova would only sacrifice her X-ray diagnostic sessions on the days she did her rounds, once a week. Usually she would spend those two first morning hours, the best of the day, when the eye is at its sharpest and the mind at its clearest, sitting with the intern assigned to her in front of the screen. She saw this as the most complicated part of her work, and after more than twenty years of it, had realized what a high price has to be paid in particular for diagnostic mistakes. In her department there were three doctors, all young women. To ensure that they all became equally experienced and that none of them lagged behind in diagnostic skill, Dontsova changed them round every three months. They worked either in the outpatients’ department or in the X-ray diagnosis room or as house physician in the clinic.
    Dr. Gangart was at present assigned to the third task. The most important, dangerous and little-researched part of it was to check that the radiation doses were correct. There was no formula for calculating the right intensity of a dose, for knowing how much would be most lethal for an individual tumor yet least harmful to the rest of the body. There was no formula but there was a certain experience, a certain intuition, which could be correlated with the condition of the patient. After all, this was an operation too—but by rays, in the dark and over a period of time. It was impossible to avoid damaging or destroying healthy cells.
    As for the rest of her duties, the house physician needed only to be methodical; arrange tests on time, check them and make notes on thirty case histories. No doctor likes filling out forms, but Vera Kornilyevna put up with it