Chapter 10. Is It Easy to Become a Tabib?
Our visit was, in fact, over. All we had to do was get the medication the doctor had sent someone to pick up at the pharmacy – his own pharmacy, naturally. And while we were waiting for the medication, we heard quite a few amazing things about our new acquaintance… or, as I now felt, our new friend.
It all began with the conversation about medications. I asked a question which was, as I now realize, ignorant. What medication did he prescribe for people who had a disease like my mama’s? He raised his eyebrows and answered my question with a question. Did I really think that for one disease, even if the symptoms were the same, it was possible to use one and the same medication every time? For instance, a headache. There were a dozen reasons for it. And a headache would be different in each particular case – it could be in the temples, the forehead, etc. Of course, it was possible to deaden the pain with a painkiller, for some time. But whatever had caused the headache would still be there. It might have been caused by irregularities in different organs. Perhaps, that headache was a warning of a more serious problem.
The doctor was transported by the conversation. He was really carried away. He rocked slightly as he spoke. His gestures were expressive, but his face remained calm.
"My dear man, Eastern medicine distinguishes 28 types of cancer – and each of them happens for so many different reasons. So why is it correct to use the same treatment for all of them? But this is exactly what’s being done. All oncological patients are put through chemotherapy and radiation. Is it possible to get to the source of a disease this way? That’s why they fail to cure it. If you smash a snake’s head, it will die, but if you squeeze its tail, you won’t be able to defeat it,” he ended his speech with an Asian proverb.
It then become quite clear to me that it was absolutely pointless to ask him what kind of medication he was preparing for Mama. Obviously, it was the one that was good only for her particular case. But I couldn’t resist asking a different question, "Mukhitdin Inamovich, where have you learned all of this? I mean… there are no such schools."
He laughed. It turned out that everything began after a serious problem. A very young Mukhitdin, a student in the Irrigation department who had just finished his first year, worked on a student construction team in the summer of 1967. The students lived in kibitkas (nomads’ tents). Every morning, they were taken in trucks down a winding bumpy road to their places of work. One day, one of the trucks was going at high speed and tipped over into a roadside ditch.
"We all flew out of the truck," Mukhitdin Inamovich told me. "On top of that, I was hit by the edge of the side. I could have been sliced in two, but there happened to be a small hole where I had fallen. That saved me. Of course, I was unconscious for a long time. They did an x-ray at the hospital. It showed that my spine was broken in three places and there was a crack in my pelvis. But I was grateful to Fate. One of my comrades had such a head trauma that he died a year later.
The doctors at the Andijan hospital had little hope of saving Mukhitdin. The most they hoped for was that he would survive after a complex and difficult surgery, but he would never walk.
Mukhitdin remained unconscious for many days. That’s why surgery was postponed. When he regained consciousness, his father, Umar-ugli Inam, asked the hospital to discharge his son and took him home.
Umar-ugli Inam was a wise person. I would like to write about him at least briefly.
He was an agronomist, but he also studied other natural sciences and had a perfect knowledge of history. His home was filled with bookshelves. Among his hundreds of books were many Arabic ones – works by scholars, philosophers and theologians. The Soviet state deprived Umar-ugli Inam of all his Arabic books. One day, Red Army guards in pointed hats with big red stars arrived in the village. They searched homes, took away the Arabic books and burned them right there. From that time on, Umar-ugli Inam, a true believer and a very kindhearted person, had no good feelings toward the Soviet state.
Mukhitdin’s father was a very strong man. He was 60-years old, yet he could carry a sack of flour in each hand from the market, each sack weighing 60 pounds.
Umar-ugli didn’t trust the doctors at the Andijan hospital. What could doctors who considered his son's case hopeless possibly do? That wise man was familiar with the Asian medicine pioneered by Avicenna. He took his son out of the hospital because he had learned that a wonderful Asian healer lived not far away in Jalalabad. He was Tabib Abdukhakim Bobo, an old Uighur from Xinjiang, exiled from China. He needed to take the motionless, half-dead Mukhitdin there, so he put him in the back seat of his Volga.
"Do you remember how you got there?"
"Yes," Mukhitdin Inamovich nodded. "I remember how an old man with a long gray beard ordered me to be carried into the house where they laid me on my stomach on a board. He examined me for a long time. He listened to my pulse, and then he got busy with my legs. He pricked my knees, calves, and thighs with needles. He asked me whether I could feel anything, but I couldn’t feel a thing. After he finished the examination, the tabib brought herbal brews. He asked me to smell one of them and to drink another. I fell asleep and didn’t wake up for two days."
Later his father told him what had happened while he had been fast asleep. What happened could be called a miracle – the old tabib manipulated his vertebrae with his fingers. He connected the broken parts of Mukhitdin’s spine in a way that allowed them to knit together correctly.
When Mukhitdin came to his senses, he was lying on his back. He felt no pain, but it seemed to him that he had no body below the waist. He could feel neither his thighs nor his legs.
"Days passed, but I still couldn’t feel my legs. Then suddenly, it happened on the eighteenth day. Pain flared up like fire, and along with it, I felt my legs. They were covered with perspiration as if water had been poured over them, and then they began to jerk violently. My father, who had stayed by my side the whole time, called the tabib. The old healer was very satisfied and laughingly told my father, 'Your son will not only live, but he’ll be able to walk.' As you see, Valera, the tabib told the truth," and Mukhitdin Inamovich grinned. "He gave me my legs back."
In response, I could only shake my head. It was impossible to imagine that doctors had considered this strong solidly built man with straight back and springy gait to be hopelessly incurable and forever condemned to a wheelchair. A real miracle had occurred!
"When did you begin to walk?" I asked.
"About two months later. I lay on a board for the first month and in a bed for the second. The tabib gave me a drug – pills composed of 68 herbs. They were called hap-dora. I still had pain in my legs and spine, but I also felt more and more sensation. I began to feel what was going on in my bowels, my rectum, my bladder. The day arrived – I think it was the fifty-fifth day – when the tabib and my father lifted me, and then suspended by them in midair, I took four steps. Then I walked with two crutches, and in a month with just one. One day I heard, 'Now try to walk by yourself.' And I walked, walked on my own, swaying, touching the walls, but I walked.
"That must have been a happy day," I mumbled.
"It certainly was!" Mukhitdin Inamovich nodded. "It was good that on that day I didn’t know how many hard and heavy things lay ahead, hard and heavy, literally heavy. The tabib began to make me carry heavy things. Two small sacks of sand – one on my back, another on my chest were hung over my shoulder on a rope, plus a sack of sand in each hand. I don’t remember how much they weighed at the beginning, but eventually it was up to 60 pounds in each hand. Just imagine walking like that! But I walked. I was happy. And I pondered something as I walked.
"In half a year I was able to walk quite easily. Then one day, the tabib said, 'It’s time for us to part.' That was when I dared to say, 'I don’t want to part. I would like to ask you, Tabib, if you would kindly allow me to be your pupil.' The tabib didn’t agree right away. First, he tested my memory, then the sensitivity of my fingers. That was very important for a pulsologist. And, at last, I heard, 'I'll agree to teach you under one condition – you won’t drop out of the Institute. You’ll need to have lessons on the weekends, and I’ll give you homework for the rest of the week.'
"What could I do?" Mukhitdin Inamovich sighed. "I couldn’t argue with my teacher. I had to agree. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know why Tabib Abdulkhakim Bobo had made that decision. My studies at the Institute plus weekly trips to Jalalabad, plus homework every day were a heavy load for this pupil, particularly after such a terrible trauma. But, perhaps he considered such a load useful for developing industriousness and a sense of responsibility."
Mukhitdin Inamovich endured that load courageously and with honor. After graduating from the Institute – with honors, by the way – he began working as an engineer in his field. And he moved in with his teacher. The learning took 15 years.
"Was it difficult? Did you get tired?" I asked.
"Of course, I did. But learning from such a great teacher was a real joy. He taught me the old Tibetan-Asian medicine, pulse diagnostics, and how to cure with herbs. Apart from medicine, he was perfectly knowledgeable in biology and astronomy. But the tabib’s wisdom came not only from his knowledge. I constantly felt the influence of his kindness, fairness and nobility. Let me tell you what happened when I went to the Andijan hospital to see the doctor who had decided to operate on me. I greeted him, and right away he asked, 'How is your brother? Is he still alive?' 'Why my brother?' I said. 'It was me in this hospital. I was in trouble.' The doctor laughed, 'Are you kidding? That can't be true. That guy was a hopeless case.' 'What do you mean hopeless? I’ve been cured.' 'Who cured you?' 'An old doctor.' Then I began to demonstrate that I was well. I squatted, lifted a chair with one hand…
"The doctor only waved his hand, 'Don’t try to fool me. I still don’t believe that you're that same paralyzed guy!' I got angry and left. I complained to the tabib. 'Oh, I said to myself, I want to spite that stupid doctor!' The tabib answered me, 'Why are you hurt? Think a little about the chain of events. If that doctor hadn't told your father that your case was hopeless, but they would operate on you anyway, your father wouldn’t have brought you to me. That means you should be grateful to that doctor. And please, do it before you see me next time.' The tabib was generally convinced that one should look for good in every single person and be kind to them. He used to say, 'Even if your enemy approaches you with a gun, tell him that first of all you want to feel his pulse, and then he may shoot.' That was the kind of person my fate took me to."
"What did he look like?" I asked. I wanted to know how the tabib looked.
"It’s a pity I don’t have his photograph. He instilled respect in you at first sight. He had gray hair, a long gray beard, and such clear, wise eyes, so penetrating that they seemed to be looking straight into your soul. He had a straight back; he never stooped. The tabib was 81 when we met. He left this world when he was 94."
We sat there silently. I understood that it was hard for Mukhitdin Inamovich to remember it, so I didn’t ask him any more questions about the death of the tabib.
"I went through some difficult times after my teacher passed away. I had no right to practice. I had a degree in engineering, not medicine. Besides, Eastern medicine wasn’t recognized as a science in the Soviet Union at that time. Abdulkhakim Bobo had been allowed to have a private practice because he treated local officials. But I didn’t have such luck."
And then, His Highness Good Luck came to the rescue. Mukhitdin Inamovich learned of a talented physicist, Abram Samuilovich Magarshak who was the head of the Scientific Research Laboratory of Distance Diagnostics. That lab was a part of the Institute of General Physics of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Fortunately, a branch of the lab was set up at the Teachers Training Institute in Namangan. Umarov went to meet Magarshak. To begin with, he offered to tell him what his ailments were after feeling his pulse. After getting the exact list of his diseases, the perplexed physicist told the healer "We’ll work together." He had naturally heard of pulse diagnostics before, but now he knew for sure that it was possible to obtain enormous biomedical information, that a pulse on the oscillating wall of an artery gives a full account about the functioning of the heart, liver and all other internal organs. Moreover, a pulse can obviously give information about the presence of a foreign body.
"Can you 'hear' the first cancer cell in a body?" the physicist asked Umarov once.
The latter answered, "I can not only hear it. I can reject it."
Magarshak and his colleagues decided to create a pulse-diagnostics device with Umarov’s help. Mukhitdin Inamovich became a research associate at the lab, and soon after that, the head of the medical diagnostics sector. That’s how a doctor-tabib came to be included in the circle of prominent scientists. And, finally, he met the famous physicist Prokhorov who, thanks to his authority as a scientist, supported Eastern medicine, namely the branch of it developed by Umarov.
At last, a wide range of opportunities opened up for Umarov. In 1985, the Minister of Public Health allowed him to treat patients in Moscow hospitals. He was given the right to do his favorite work, not only in his native Uzbekistan but all over the Soviet Union. He had dozens of pupils. The Centers of Eastern Medicine were set up in Moscow, Namangan, Vladivostok and Khabarovsk with his participation.
As I was listening to his amazing story, I thought how many difficulties this composed, seemingly unhurried man had overcome. And he achieved what may seem to be impossible to achieve. Yes, he repaid his teacher very well. He carried on his cause with dignity.
And the doctor, after he finished his laconic story, sat in front of me smoking his cigarette. It seemed he was somewhere far away, perhaps in Moscow where he, who must hardly have spoken any Russia at that time, had found such wonderful friends.
He lit another cigarette, I didn’t know which one, and I couldn’t restrain myself from asking, "How come, you, a doctor, don’t take care of yourself?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "It’s not that harmful. It’s even useful. It eases stress. I haven’t established through my practice that smoking changes the structure of a cell."
“Oh, God," I thought, "It’s hard to imagine everything he has established in his practice.” And then I blurted out, "Maybe you also deal with AIDS?"
The doctor nodded calmly, "Little by little. I don’t have enough practice. AIDS patients are kept isolated. But I’ve managed to treat two patients, a man and his wife. I’ve made an arrangement with Prokhorov. I will be treating them for three years. We’ll see… in six years."
"How are they doing now?"
"Quite well. I keep the virus under control."
While we were engaged in this amazing conversation, the medication arrived – a paper bag full of herbs. We opened it, and I smelled the aroma of mountain meadows warmed by the sun.
The doctor gave some last instructions about how to take the herbs and what nutrition should be observed. For instance, he didn’t recommend that Mama drink milk, and he absolutely forbade her to eat eggplant and meat, which contribute to the development of cancer.
It was time to leave. We said a short prayer that ended with the word “Amen.” He walked us to the gate and when saying good-bye, Mukhitdin Inamovich shook my hand. I noticed that he did it his own way. He took my hand with both hands and held it lightly, without squeezing it. He had the long fingers of a musician. Yes, those were unusual hands, the hands that had brought good to thousands of people.
Chapter 11. The Road of Hope
While Mama was being prepared for the examination, I told Dr. Pace how we had visited his colleague in Namangan. We were sitting in his cozy office, he at his desk and I across from him. Every time my eyes left the doctor’s face, numerous certificates and diplomas in glass-covered frames met my eye. This time Dr. Pace was more restrained.
"He felt her pulse and told us everything. And we were seeing him for the first time."
"What exactly did he tell you? What 'everything’?"
"Well… He was sure that it had all begun after Mama had a miscarriage, after the scraping was done improperly. In the uterus… he…" I stumbled, "found two scratches. They were the reason everything began…"
I grew silent. The doctor was silent too. It was difficult for me to continue, and I myself understood how strange my story might seem to him.
"You see, now, of course, that’s not the point. Doctor Umarov said that it was already in her liver." I realized that I was expressing my thoughts the same way the tabib had done, in other words, as simply as he, trying not to use medical terms.
"In the liver?" Dr. Pace shook his head. "I ordered a liver test. The result didn’t confirm that. So, what did he prescribe to treat your mother?"
"A combination of herbs."
"What herbs?"
"The combination was created especially for her. There are hundreds of herbs in his pharmacy."
"Mmm, yes. American Indians also used herbs for treatment, but that was so long ago. Hundreds of years have passed." Pace’s tone made it clear that he considered going back to the past an absurdity, simply because it was the past.
An invisible struggle between the present and the past was underway. There was progressive science with its x-rays, tests, biopsies and other objective proof of his correctness on Dr. Pace’s side. And there were just groundless words, a reference to ancient medicine not known to Dr. Pace on my side. I represented, so to speak, the Namangan healer here.
The doctor went to examine Mother.
"The scar is healing all right," he told me when he returned. "There’s a tiny inflamed bump there, something like a little abscess. It has grown a little bit. We'll have to watch it."
I asked whether it was possible to prescribe pills to control her hormones. I knew that they were widely used and always prescribed for oncological patients like my mother. But Dr. Pace shook his head.
"They're not prescribed without chemo and radiation," he said, twirling a pencil in his hands. Then he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes tiredly. I could see. I knew that he had been tormented by us, by our stubbornness, and that he was possibly blaming me for that. I was playing with a human life, the life of my own mother. I had refused the recommended course of treatment, which was recognized as necessary all over the world. He had insisted, had tried to convince me.
"We’ll check her bones in four months," the doctor said, sighing. "And meanwhile, try to distract your mother. Have her get engaged in something besides her usual chores. Encourage her to socialize more."
I nodded. It wasn’t worth explaining to the doctor that there was no need to engage Mother in anything new. She had already found what to do and it took all of her time and attention, made her more vigorous, instilled hope in her. It may seem that there was nothing special about it. Put a teaspoon of herbs into a small pot with cold water, place it on the stove, bring it to a boil, and your tea was brewed. It was like that, but there was more to it. With Mama, this simple procedure turned into a kind of sacred ritual.
"Where’s my enamel pot? Have you seen my measuring cup?" When Mama brewed her herbs, her face looked like that of a medieval alchemist as he waited for a philosopher's stone to appear in his vial.
"Mama! What are you doing? That’s not a spoonful! Look!" And I would take the spoon away from her and put it into the bag of herbs. "Look! It should be a heaping spoonful!"
"If I brew them like that, I won’t have enough herbs for a month." Mother would take a spoon from my hand and brush the extra herbs off into the bag. Then she would close the bag and put it on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet, away from grandchildren, just in case.
Then her sacred ritual would continue. Now she had to start watching the pot – it was written in the instructions “bring to a boil” which meant not to miss the moment when bubbles began to appear on the brownish surface of the herb-filled water.
Yes, I was absolutely sure that this “magic process” had a beneficial influence on Mama’s psyche, giving her more strength to fight her disease. It seemed to her that recovery was very near, as soon as the bag of curative herbs was empty.
Four months later, Dr. Pace summoned Mama for a test on the condition of her bones. The procedure took a long time, twice as long as usual. After leaving the hospital, Mama broke out crying. "They must have found something again… It took so long."
I was silent. That was what I thought too. I was even afraid to call the doctor. But Dr. Pace himself called in a week. His voice was vigorous, almost cheerful. "Imagine, the result is negative! The bones are clean, do you hear me? Clean! Six months after the surgery, without radiation, without chemo… I can’t remember anything like that in my practice. I don’t know what you do to your mama, but you can be proud of yourself, Valera!"
What a blessed state is the feeling of relief! Just a short moment, and neither the burden of worries nor the earth’s gravity itself press upon your shoulders. You feel as if you're soaring, weightless. “Oh my! Thank you, Tabib! Thank you, Dr. Mukhitdin!” I mumbled. And I rushed home to make Mama happy.
Soon after that we set out for Namangan once again. The tabib had warned us that he would need to see and examine Mama once every three to four months. Looking back on it now, I can say that we made eight trips in three years. So, our life was predominantly spent on the road, the road of hope.
The second trip was particularly joyous. We were going there with good test results, in a good mood. Of course, we worried. But the tabib, who welcomed us like good old friends, confirmed that we had grounds for hope.
"The liver has improved," he announced in his less-than-impeccable Russian after feeling Mother’s pulse. In other words, during our first visit, Mukhitdin had said that it was already in the liver. Now her pulse showed him that the liver had been cleaned, and it was possible to hope that there wouldn't be further metastasis.
It was wonderful news. The tabib himself was truly pleased. He knocked on wood, repeating “Ptui, ptui, ptui.” Words couldn’t express what we were feeling!
It seemed to me that it was that second trip to Doctor Mukhitdin that made us real friends. In us, he saw people who sincerely believed in him, who felt at ease with him, who enjoyed his company and found it extremely interesting. (I can certainly say that for myself.) We found in him not just an amazing doctor, but also an extraordinary person – unpretentious, kind, open and not vain. We were finding new evidence of those qualities with every new encounter with him.
He welcomed us like relatives, and the famous Asian hospitality was not the reason. We could feel it in many little things – his radiant gaze, his broad smile, his joy upon seeing us. He also always examined me and precisely determined my ailments every time, explaining the reasons for them and, of course, prescribing medications. He spent long hours with us, now asking us questions, now telling us about himself, smoking cigarettes nonstop. Doctor Mukhitdin was an incorrigible smoker, and, perhaps, he dissembled a little when he assured us that he couldn’t find any harm to his health in smoking.
With every trip, my interest in the science, with the help of which Doctor Mukhitdin brought people relief and often cured them, was becoming quite burning and nagging.
During our second stay, I became familiar with the work of the institution called the Center for Eastern Medicine, headed by Doctor Umarov. There was no reason to doubt the popularity of the Center. I saw how many patients there were. Many of them came from far away. And they all waited for him, Mukhitdin. Even though he had pupils and assistants, he examined each patient himself. By the way, we met one of his pupils, Timur Umarov, a skinny guy of 30 who had a master’s degree in botany. He had come to see the doctor three years before, and not for studies. He had a kidney disease which doctors had considered hopeless. Mukhitdin Inamovich cured Timur, but this grateful person with the same last name caught another “disease” – he badly wanted to become the tabib’s pupil. And he became one…
"How much longer do you need to study?" I asked.
"It generally takes about ten years," Timur answered, "but I hope to graduate in five."
I must admit I envied him. What a pity it was – I used to live not far from here, but I never suspected what a miraculous spring of knowledge I could have drunk from, what I could have learned. Alas, now I had no opportunity to correct that mistake. But I had become one of those who was eager to learn. That’s evidently how life is organized – hiding something from our view, then opening it up for us much later, calling forth our regret, but, at the same time, our thirst for knowledge.
And I tried to quench that thirst as much as I could. My trips to Namangan were like visiting the Ancient Library of Alexandria. Doctor Umarov was a walking encyclopedia. I never stopped asking questions, and he was willing to talk to me when he noticed my interest. Little by little, I began to understand some things.
It all started right before our departure on our second visit to Mukhitdin. We were saying good-bye at the front door as Mama and Yakov went to the car, and I asked the doctor the same question once again.
"Do you think you’ll be able to cure her?"
The doctor raised his thick eyebrows, "I hope so, but you should understand. Look here…"
He turned to the door and began to make an invisible drawing on it with his finger like on a blackboard.
"Look. This is the liver… here’s the spleen… here’s the uterus… and this is the heart. And up here’s the brain… and its cortex."
It was an old door of light-brown wood that had not been painted for a long time. There were swollen wavy lines of paint running all over its surface. They looked like arteries and veins – at least that’s what they looked like to me. Perhaps that’s why I could see clearly everything the doctor had drawn on it.
"You see? It’s as if the organs were talking to each other. It’s an uninterrupted connection among them. When this interconnection is corrupted – and there can be many reasons for that – ailments occur, including cancer. One’s body is a unified chain of organs. One link drops out, and everything is corrupted, just as with your mama."
I realized that I was moving my lips, trying not to miss a single word. Everything was clear, simple. Why didn’t they explain it to me in New York, at the hospital?
"This time, I‘ve given your mama a combination of herbs, which will strengthen her liver. They'll help to improve the connection between her liver and spleen. Then we’ll try to add her uterus to them. After that, we’ll need to improve the activity of the cortex. And we’ll proceed the same way. If we manage to restore the normal interconnection among all the organs, we’ll stop the disease."
That’s how my basic education began. It still continues, for I know extremely little compared with what I would like to know. But the fog has definitely begun to disperse. And now I will try, certainly briefly, and in the most general terms, to explain what I have learned and understood.