Julia has been helping me pro bono for several months now as I try to get my emergency medical visa and navigate the beaurocracies of the public health care system.
She is Argentine with a soft-spoken demeanor but she doesn’t take no for an answer.
A day before Christmas Eve during one of Cristina’s populist faux holidays, I was scheduled to meet for достопримечательности Нижнего Новгорода the first time with the surgeons who will be cutting me open in a few weeks. The surgery will take place at a hospital new to me and my friends who have been helping me.
Kate Sedgwick had already shown up that morning for the consultation and Julia was running late (I told you she was Argentine!). During holidays, certain staff positions at city-run institutions get filled by temps who often don’t know what the hell they are doing or where they are. When Kate checked in with reception that day, the young woman at the desk informed her there was no record of my appointment and that, in any case, the surgeons weren’t there.
Kate’s a formidable woman herself but was unable to make headway with the confused and incalcitrant temporary worker.
By the time Julia showed up, Kate was pissed off and I was discouraged. This was the next big step in my treatment, it was just before a week of holidays and we felt like we’d be foiled by incompetence.
Enter: Julia.
Despite her track record in aggressively getting things done, her style is low-key but persistent. Within a couple minutes of first talking to the receptionist, she’d discovered where the surgeons were hiding and we were off. Without her, I wouldn’t have been able to set up my next appointment (I also wouldn’t have gotten finger-fucked by an aggressive, bearish intern). I wouldn’t have been able to enter the system at all. It would have been back to Marie Curie to get them to make another phone call, to set up another consultation, make the trek back to this surgical hospital and hope for the best that they can work me in.
(My last round of treatment included both radiation and chemotherapy. The goal was to shrink the tumors and then take them out. But first, to determine whether any of that worked, I have to get an MRI. The order to get my MRI is still being held hostage by Conyers Thompson along with all my other papers, appointment slips, patient cards and previous MRIs and tomographies.)
So, last week watching petite Julia confront towering Conyers Thompson on the sidewalk outside the Montevideo flat, I had some hope that I would get my stuff back. But, she failed. He glared at her with those half-crazed eyes of his, which anyone who’s seen him mad or manic would be familiar with, told her that my need for my medical records was merely “psychosomatic,” turned on his heel with his little dog Tim on a leash and stalked off.
Coming back to me, she didn’t just look discouraged, she looked defeated, deflated, beaten. It hurt to see her that way.
Now, despite her dedication and hard work, Julia is without sentiment. She busts balls with the best of them, makes jokes about my cancer and colostomy and tells me that she doesn’t feel sorry for me, that she doesn’t see how that would help.
Fairly unsentimental myself, her attitude is a tonic for the greeting-card well-wishes I sometimes get from all sides. It reminds me that I’m not going to get through this thing with words or happy thoughts, but with hard work and resilience, like every other endeavor in life.
Still, later that evening, she looked lost and tired as we began to think about eating something.
She stopped in the middle of the room, stumbled a bit and paused.
“In my whole life,” she said, “I’ve never known anyone to do anything so mean.”
