 With Revolution Comes Hallucination By Serhiy Kharchenko |
Being the head doctor of a psychiatric dispensary, I dubbed myself “the great mendicant”. Because there were more than a hundred medications and other medical items we did not have, I am forced to beggar. I will not even speak about our low salaries, which forced my best orderlies with beefy biceps to leave the dispensary to guard children of rich parents and their dogs.
But these were not all my problems. Within a year, I had to survive four exhausting trials with a dangerous guy who wanted to privatize the dispensary, moving my patients and me to some dilapidated building where a kindergarten had previously been located.
Eventually, my trained psychiatric nerves broke down and I broke into the office of a top ministerial official. My ultimatum was brief: if they do not leave my dispensary alone, I will bring all my schizophrenics, maniacs and epileptics to this room. Then I added that I couldn’t promise my Robespierres would behave properly. I realized that this official was a “roof” for the oligarch I dubbed “Alligator”. First, Roof turned pale of fright – he must have had no experience at communicating with schizophrenics. Then Roof smiled with the lustful smile of a professional swindler, shook my hand and asked me to forget the trials that had been my nightmare.
After my victory, I had an audacious desire to rest at home for a few days. I was ashamed to confess that I was glad my wife was absent. She had gone to another city to see her ailing mother.
I returned home at about twelve, having no energy to even turn on the TV or unfold a newspaper. My cautiousness contributed to my complete political incompetence. In 2005, when two presidential candidates were fighting out a duel, my patients were ‘glued’ to the only TV-set in the dispensary and even stole newspapers from hospital attendants. Sober comments about political events seemed to have oppressed certain psychological complexes. Such results could make psychotherapists happy, but not psychiatrists. You should have looked at the sniffing nostrils of our favorite one-hundred-kilogram Neptune to understand that it was incumbent on us to preserve what remained of our patients’ psyche and not to allow a relapse of mass schizophrenia happen.
I ordered my employees to ‘help’ the TV-set break down and newspapers ‘forget’ their way to their pockets. Since then I lived in a total information blockade. But I got used to it and even accelerated my professional activity.
I finally had two days of rest ahead. First of all, I had enough sleep. Then I took a shower and later bought half a dozen of newspapers in a kiosk. I cooked an omelet with ham and uncorked a bottle of cognac.
French cognac on my table was evidence that I am not quite innocent in terms of law. There are quite many patients from well-to-do families in my dispensary. I strongly reject money compensations, since I think it is immoral to hide other people’s banknotes in my pockets, without promising some unhappy family any prospects instead. And compensations in material form I distribute personally: cognac – to doctors, vodka – to hospital attendants, and wine, sweets and flowers – to nurses-janitors who always have red and swollen hands because of water.
Don’t rush to criticize me. In my dispensary there is a ‘Killer’ with motionless look of squinted eyes and an index finger fixed at an imagined trigger. ‘Killer” appears suddenly from nowhere behind the backs of doctors and hospital attendants. He is feared by nurses and even cats. ‘Killer’ has a diagnosis: progressing schizophrenia. How not to drink a glass of cognac after such communication during a working day?
Sitting in my living room, I proceeded to my intellectual leisure. Soon my well-trained psychiatric brain began to suffer from surprise.
Unburdened with any original or unique ideas and wearing well-tailored suits, some leaders were competing in hypocrisy. I understand that one should love the people, I thought, but not so much.
The thought about Joseph Stalin being a leader of Russian Nazis blew at my face with an innovatory courage. Its author was evidently ready for the first phase of schizophrenia. Sensitive political obscurantism was appearing in my newspapers and flashing on my TV.
Some deputy was running from one church to another church, leading a crowd of old ladies and priests and occasionally wiping sweat off of his forehead. The old ladies were carrying icons and the deputy was bearing a slogan reading “God and Russia are with Us.” The old ladies smelled of decay of past centuries and the deputy smelled of a good honorarium.
Fifty parties know how to make Ukrainians happy. The parties are arrogant and ambitious. Many of them are patriotic, honest and sterilely honest. The professional boxer leading the party Wait a Moment! promises many surprises.
That night I saw many potential patients for my dispensary. But I wonder where I should keep them.
I fell asleep late but woke up early. My consciousness had woken up before: How come? I was not at work for two days for the first time in ten years!
Yawning all the time, I started my car. My German colleagues had bought me this old Chevrolet when I was taking part in a meeting of their association. By the way, my articles are often published in a magazine of German psychiatrists and I am really proud of it.
My dispensary was still asleep when I came to the office. I suddenly had a harmless idea; I’d take a five-minute nap. When I placed my forehead on my knuckle, my head opened like a gate, devouring a stream of associations.
But I had to wake up sooner than planned; suddenly I had work to do. The door opened and my orderlies brought new patients, carrying them as if they were wounded on a battlefield. I was surprised that I had not initially noticed that our wards had become more spacious and some beds were empty.
In my dispensary, I live in a kingdom of expressive and depressive psychopathy and paranoia. I have patients suffering from visual and audible hallucinations, megalomania and persecution mania. Soon I understood that the new patients had all developed self-deprecation mania. Most of the newcomers were deputies. Their self-reproach was both comic and tragic. I learned many interesting facts from their incoherent monologues.
One of the patients asserted that he was political garbage for he had betrayed four parties while the fifth party had betrayed him. Then he found the way out and voted for the cabinet’s dismissal.
The second guy told me how budget funds were disappearing. This news impressed me most for it explained why I could not buy new mops.
The repentant Ukrainian nationalist confessed that he had wanted to give Ukraine to the sticky hands of Mazepa and NATO, but, thank God, this will all come to an end soon and the glorious great grandson of Bohdan Khmelnitsky will lead the country from Donbass.
I will initiate a case against myself, shouted a patient wearing Versace shorts from behind the corner. My technological vapidity and pathological greed pollute the Ukrainian sky with a smoke from the epoch of Henry Ford!
Suddenly I woke up. Office-cleaner Anna was noisily moving chairs in my office. She was cleaning the floor. This chaste woman must have thought I had used my two-day holiday to commit a sin with a strange woman. She knew about the absence of my wife. I greeted her and asked her if there had been new patients in the past two days. Anna replied that unlike Ukraine, and some families, the dispensary was fine and calm.
I sighed with relief. My profession constantly makes me analyze not only my patients but also my colleagues and even family members. I returned to my dream, which had been just interrupted. Did it have more hallucinations or more dreams? It still has to be explored. Perhaps I will write a good article for the German psychiatric magazine. I will write that an information overdose might provoke a hallucination shock even in psychiatrist’s psyche, which usually has several defense systems ranging from humor to snobbism. I will have to say in my article that the collective psyche of my fellow citizens, which lost its immunity to barricade hatred, political opponents and psychopathic ruins in our souls, is in great danger.
|
More in the section:
Ukraine's Leadership and Other Matters
Read also previous issue' articles:
Are Ukraine's Political Habits Unique?
Is Ukraine's Economic Growth Speculation-led?
Ukraine is Drifting to the West - Slowly but Surely
The Unfinished Orange Revolution?
Vacuums, Reforms and the Need to Regain the Initiative
Pirates of the 21st century
|
| |
CONTACT US |
|
|
|
