The next morning, I stood outside the gates of a military base. By stood, I mean I held both of my knees and tried not to vomit as Julia led me through a line of armed guards. I had a backpack with my laptop, a book, a few packs of cigarettes, and a phone charger.

“The best doctors are military doctors. He will perform the surgery, and you might have to stay a couple of days,” she’d told me the night before. We hadn’t slept. I was in too much pain.

We passed big army jeeps and pairs of marching officers as Julia led me down a path to an antique building. A doctor in a lab coat made from rent-by-the-hour motel sheets stood outside, smoking a cigarette.

We shuffled past. The stairs were dirt-trodden and there was no receptionist. A Soviet poster from the ’80s told me: IN CASE OF FIRE, DEATH.

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything but stand and watch this poster of people on fire while Julia called the doctor over and over. An hour later, he arrived. He spoke no English. His fingers were huge.

“Did you do this to him?” he asked Julia in Russian.

She laughed, and he laughed. I watched the burning stick figures in the poster run toward a torn-off corner of the hospital map. The doctor led us through a set of chipped white doors, down a hill, and up an elevator that stank of cigarettes and had one button taped over.

“Don’t speak English,” Julia whispered as we passed a desk of old Russian women who made us put blue bags on our feet.

“Why?”

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Mhm,” I said.

We followed further, deeper down musty pink-painted hallways. Half the lights in the ceiling didn’t work, and a man with no face walked by, spinning a set of keys on the two remaining fingers of his right hand. As we turned a corner, we heard a scream come from a room as a man with no foot crutched past saying “fuck, fuck, fuck” in Russian.

The doctor told us to wait in front of the scream room. He walked away. I set down my bag and held on to a windowsill for support and looked out the window at the dead trees and garbage scattered throughout the courtyard. There were bars on the window. A minute later, they rolled an old man out of the scream room; his left arm was a bloody, bandaged stump.

My doctor returned, masked and white-hatted. He pointed into the scream room and I went. Inside, there was a bed to the left where an old man lay on his side, groaning. There was a curtain in the middle, hiding the man from the empty bed on the right. There were almost a dozen people in the room. Many of them were young. They looked like students. He pointed to my pants and then to the bed, miming a sleepy time pose. I de-pantsed in front of the crowd. They gathered.

I assumed he was going to examine me. I assumed he was going to take my blood. I assumed he was going to do tests. Then I assumed he would bring me to a private room where I assumed he would put me to sleep. I assumed I would wake up hours later, healed, healthy, and ready to spend two days in a hospital comfortably reading and picking my nose. You know what they say about assumptions and asses.

They laid a medical sheet over me. Two young nurses came and held my legs, two more held my midsection. Then he said something to the crowd, they leaned in. I watched the cracked cabinets across from my bed.

Up he went.

When he finished his game of “hold on, I’ve got exact change for that” he wiped his finger on the cloth covering my leg. He stood. He walked around into my field of vision, holding a gigantic needle in his left hand. In his right, he held a box covered in Russian letters.

“Allergy?” he asked.

I looked at the needle, then the box. I could barely think in English, never mind read Russian, so I said, “Uhhhh?”

He nodded and returned to his post. The nurses holding me down tightened their grips. I could feel all the air in the room lighten as the medical students took a collective breath.

The doctor sliced and began to squeeze.

If an orgasm lets you see God, I was looking up Satan’s nose. I writhed and tried to scream but my voice was empty and dry. The nurse held me tighter.

“Little-little,” she said in Russian. Every time he squeezed, she said, “Little-little.”

And that’s how it went on. Little-little by little-little.

When the pain stopped, I was shaking. As the bandage was placed on, I could hear the crowd muttering to themselves the way onlookers talk about a woman who just slapped their child, full of helpless empathy.

The little-little nurse was the last to go. The doctor held my underwear over my head, and I reached up and grabbed it. I put them on and stood up. The doctor squeezed my shoulder and held up a finger. It was such a fat finger. He wagged it around to ask whether I was dizzy. I shook my head and he helped me stand. I re-pantsed and walked out of the room to where Julia sat. They spoke for a bit before she turned and said, “It will be 40,000 rubles.”

I reached into my bag and pulled out a trembling stack of cash. The doctor put it into his pocket and spoke Russian to Julia while I stood and bled down my leg.

“He says you would have died if it had gone longer,” she told me. “He took 80 milliliters of puss out of you. Gross.”

“Thanks.”

Then she took notes about what we needed to do for my recovery. Finally, she said, “We have to come back for a follow-up because there is a 50% chance you could have this problem again.”

I looked at the doctor, then back at her, waiting for laughter. It never came.

“Is there anything I can do?”

They spoke, and he said something and pointed upward.

“It is up to God,” she translated.

“But I don’t believe in God,” I said.

I looked at the doctor, trying to write horror and concern onto my face with the time I had.

He shrugged. There was a sound of the door closing down the hall. The doctor turned. The man we’d seen on crutches stood there. The doctor yelled something after him in Russian. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” the man said as he crutched away. The doctor held out his hand. I took it.

“Good luck,” he said, then trotted off after the man on crutches.