I just opened this tab for the first time since April 5, and only now realised it is actually already April 11. I usually never go this long without writing, but I have been in a state of…I don’t even know how to describe it. Shock?
I will explain.
On Sunday evening, I went to the Vienna airport quite late to pick up a woman everyone knows as Mama Olya but whom I describe to strangers as “my best friend’s mom”. Which is actually a terrible description, because ever since she first met me at the Mayakovskaya metro station in Moscow, August 1999, wearing a loose-fitting white summer jacket eating sunflower seeds from the pocket, Mama Olya has been to me nothing short of the second mother I adopted for myself. Her daughter is more to me than a best friend; she is something like a second sister I also adopted for myself. You know how sometimes in life you have lifelong friends who are essentially family? It’s like that. She has been family to me ever since and vice versa. She is like a granny to my kids. She loves them to bits and they her.
So.
Sunday evening. I meet Mama Olya at the airport. She is all smiles getting off the plane from France, where she now lives. She is coming to Vienna to see a cardiologist to get a second opinion. We know the doctor, I booked the appointment. It was also a nice excuse to have her come for a visit. We had big plans. Cardiologist. Then dinner at the new restaurant “Odessa” (yes, they spelled it like that) which she loved the last time she was here, and ordered half the menu, telling our waitress in Russian just how amazing the food was. Dinner with my kids at home on Tuesday. A few museum exhibits. Swims in her hotel pool. And the plan was she would fly back home yesterday.
I left her in her hotel room, near my apartment. I went home. We agreed I would come there for breakfast in the morning. On Monday morning, she texted me around 8am, saying she was ready. Half an hour later we met, and probably around 8:45 we started having breakfast. We laughed that the buffet was rather spartan, and the hotel was definitely trying to save money on the food. We took a seat in the corner, by the window, me on the bench, she on a chair. We gossiped about everyone, like we always do. It was just like it always is. Until it wasn’t.
Olya looked at me and showed me her left arm. That’s weird, she said, I can’t touch my nose. She held out both arms and her left arm dropped downwards, she could not fully extend her hand flat to be parallel to her right arm. I opened Google. I read this could be a sign of stroke. I asked her to smile, to keep talking. No obvious signs there, I asked if we should call an ambulance. She said something strange, asking me what day of the week it was, and I jumped up and ran to the hotel staff, tying in Google translate the word for stroke, and asking them to call the equivalent of 911.
Within 20 minutes, the ambulance arrived, and by this point Olya was slurring and could not stand up. She couldn’t move her left side. The ambulance team were amazing, and waited while I raced upstairs to grab all her medications (Olya has high blood pressure and was in hospital last month for a few days with an irregular heart beat), and thankfully, all the papers about her hospital stay in French, which she had with her for the cardiologist visit which never happened.
The rest is a blur. Riding in the ambulance. Translating their questions. At this point Olya could still talk. We arrive at a Stroke Unit. I get out, doctors come in. Tubes blood IVs etc. I am told to hold her gold bracelet. I put it on my wrist and don’t take it off until her daughter arrives, two days later. I am sent upstairs. I sit alone in a hallway of a Stroke Unit and wait while Olya is whisked away for a CT scan.
Eventually, the EMTs come back and say to me one word: Hirnblutung. Cerebral haemorrhage. The doctors ask me lots of questions. I try my best to answer them. No one understands how a Russian lady of 76 comes to Austria to see a doctor from France with Slovakian health insurance and has a stroke, and who is the American speaking accented German. I admit, it doesn’t make any sense on paper.
The doctors and nurses talk to me with very serious faces. They explain the condition is very serious. Her blood pressure is very high. She is treated there, and I am allowed to talk to her, but only briefly. She cannot speak at this point but she moves her head as if to acknowledge that she hears me. I try to reassure her. I am asked to leave until the evening. I walk outside of the hospital in a daze. I walk up to two people speaking Serbian and bum a cigarette, mumbling something about ambulance and my friend in a mixture of Serbo-deutsch. I go home. I force myself to eat something. I come back. It is hot and I am all sticky by the time I reach the hospital building in the evening. It is the last pavilion in a huge campus, with these woods in front.
A young doctor tells me maybe they can operate. She thinks the CT got worse. The radiologist isn’t sure. This gives me hope. For about 15 minutes. I am allowed to see Mama Olya. She is snoring loudly, it sounds like very deep breathing. She was clearly exhausted. Another team of doctors came in and said they are taking her to the ICU. She needs to be put on a ventilator. She cannot be operated on; the bleed is too deep and too much. I watch as they take her away, standing there stunned.
All morning I had been texting with all of our old friends. Mama Olya’s daughter was in North America on holiday with her family. They were still asleep. For ours I was holding onto what was happening, not being able to reach them. Friends I haven’t seen in years were texting me, including one who is a doctor. He kept trying to reassure me. I trust the doctors. I have no choice but to trust them. I have no reason to question them. I know she is in good hands. You have to accept this in such a situation.
And so Mama Olya has been on a ventilator in the ICU since Monday night. We are allowed to visit her for only one and a half hours a day, in the evenings. Her daughter managed to fly in yesterday morning. We spent the whole day together. She checked into her mom’s hotel room, her mom’s suitcase still there. We told the hotel we do not know how long she will be here for. Last night at the ICU they told us they will do another CT today, they gave us some hope that things might be moving in the right direction, that maybe they can then slowly try to wake her up.
It is so hard because you have no idea what is coming in one hour, one day, one week. Everyone talks of a long recovery, and a range of disabilities which might follow. No one will give us a chance of death estimate. She is alive but very much in deep sleep. We hold her arms and talk to her, tears flowing over our FFP2 masks. Only visitors have to wear them, not staff. It makes no sense. I don’t bother questioning it. There are rules. We try to follow them. I speak German, no English. It is better this way.
I haven’t properly cried. I think this is still the shock-adrenaline phase.
I have not been able to concentrate on anything cerebral for extended periods of time.
I will write proper Substacks again soon but I need a little time.
Last night we drank and I don’t drink. It was that kind of day. It has been that kind of week. I don’t know why life sometimes throws all the balls at you at once. But Mama Olya, as we keep reminding ourselves, is a fighter. There is a photo of a cat above her ICU bed. She is an animal lover. When I first met her, I think she had eight cats. The number always changed. In a Moscow apartment. Now, in France, she lives with three dogs, the third one a new arrival from Kherson: three-legged Misha who lost his leg in the war. She adopted him and brought him to France via volunteers. There is also Persik, rescued from the streets of Tbilisi, and Malysh, who is not tiny at all, and is the son of a street dog her daughter once rescued years ago in Montenegro. The number of cats fluctuates. One was called Al Capone, grey and shiny. In Moscow, there was an orange one with one ear. I think he too is now in France. Thankfully a young woman came to stay with the animals, and they are not alone.
We walked by a cat on the way to the hospital, and on the way back a woman rode past us on a bicycle pulling a cart with a cat in a whicker basket. That is surely a good sign, we told ourselves. We try to see good signs everywhere.
That is all I have for today. We take each day at a time. It happened in an instant. From one moment to the next. I had just snapped a photo, five minutes before it happened. I posted it to my Instagram Stories. Friends were sending red emoji hearts, and Mama Olya was in the ambulance, and they had no idea.
Surreal. I keep hoping it is a bad dream and we will wake up, but no such luck yet. We keep telling ourselves, lucky I was with her, lucky the ambulance came so fast, lucky such good medical care, lucky she had her medical history with her. Lucky yes indeed. We need that luck to keep going. As her daughter said, I know one day she will go, and I will lose her, but not yet. It is too soon. I am not ready yet.
We are not ready yet.
I'm so sorry for you all. But yes, luck was with you and I hope it continues. If all of those things hadn't come into play, I doubt she would have had a chance.
This is your focus now. Thank you for sharing your story, but please go back to tending your good friends. We'll be waiting patiently, hoping for the best. ❤️
Oh no! How terribly frightening it must be for you and Mama Olya and her family. Do not worry about writing here at all, just take care of yourself and Mama Olya. We’ll still be here when things get better and calm down for you.