Friday 6 December: Day 148
I spent Friday night in the hospital. I ate something today, still not sure what, and decided to go to the hospital to make sure everything is OK. The following days are my impressions of that evening.
…
Sometimes you walk in to a room and stop without meaning to. It’s like your brain tells your legs not to step on a mine, or when a dark alley gives off the wrong feeling and you decide to take the longer, brighter way home.
That’s what happened when we arrived. The first room of the hospital was also the trauma room, I think. Ten beds were crammed next to each other with about a family surrounding each one. Guards bearing rifles stopped mean-mugging a handcuffed patient, bleeding from the face, to stare at us. Nurses wearing jeans and hoodies looked up from two desks on the right side. The lights were white, scalding. There are screams from another room. Old women were wailing over small bodies. You would have stopped too.
The nurses who put the drip in my hand wiped their bare hands on their backsides before plunging the needle in. My blood spit on their clothes, a drop on this young man’s glasses, which we wiped away with his naked thumb. None of the doctors or nurses wore glove, as if sanitation in a hospital was just a lie that everyone here was too raw to engage in.
Where the hell am I?
دکتۆر – doctor
Saturday 7 December: Day 149
A hijab nurse showed us to our kiosk. Each “room” was two cinderblock walls with a shower curtain separating patients from the hallway. The bed is a futon cushion covered in a stained fabric that feels like a fast-food hair net. The line connecting hand to bag is backing up with blood, the hydrocortisone pushing into my vein and making an auburn brine a foot long on display. Mitsu helps me get the IV cleaned up.
Hydrocortisone is used to fight infections. Saline and hydrocortisone, when mixed with adrenaline, is a bad high. I was anxious; in The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen describes the anxiety of Alzheimers as losing one’s self in spaces between sentences, letters and eventually the period at the end of a sentence, and I felt that now. I heard a man screaming next to us, the fervent Arabic that is spoken as he dies, the sobbing of a dozen wives and brothers, the scraping of metal table legs on pockmarked tile floor, the violent shouting of police orders issued in Kurdish, all at once, marking time by the drops of fluid squeezing my IV bag tighter. I felt tired and yet not sleepy, like everything was sharp – as if reality itself ceased to be a seamless, fluid entity and instead became a fractal mist of broken class, objects and emotions losing their roundness.
This is terror: not the emotional distrust of danger that is fear, but the biological response to impending pain, the psychological devolution from Upright Man to flesh, blood and electrical impulse, the thing our frontal cortex evolved to keep us safe from and to give us the space to learn how to form objects in our hands. The only treatments to terror are escape and ignorance, neither of which were presently available.
Drip, drip, drip
نەخۆشخانە – hospital
Sunday 8 December: Day 150
Mitsu’s 150 Day Update
As Chris has written about before, we’re in the middle of what we’ve deemed “Asshole Month” – a month of intermittent fasting and dedication to exercise so that we can, inshallah, post some jealousy-inducing pictures of ourselves relaxing on the beach in Jordan at the end of the month. The results are as good as they are predictable for our body types – Chris is losing fat and gaining muscle, and I’m slimming down. More importantly, Chris is increasing his squat weight, and I’m now slowly by slowly increasing the number of miles I can run without feeling like I’m going to die. We’re also surprising ourselves by how long we can go without eating, and how much energy we have despite the long periods between meals.
We’ve halfheartedly played with exercise before, back in America, and found that the most successful way was when we made time to go to the gym together, and pushed each other to work harder when we’re there. That dog won’t hunt here, though. While in big towns like Suli and Erbil, there are mixed gender gyms, it’s still going to be a few years until those kind of places exist in Kalar. I briefly toyed with the idea of going to a men’s gym with Chris (our friends assured us it wasn’t against the rules for me to go there, but did warn me I would 100% be the only woman there). While I, of course, have no problem going to a mixed gender gym in America (especially with my 6’5” bodyguard mean-mugging any would-be suitors), the prospect of being the first woman doing leg presses these men have ever seen seemed a bit intimidating, even to me. This posed another problem, however – most gyms have set times for women and set times for men. Women go in the morning, and men go at night. Unfortunately, unlike a lot of ladies here, I’m at work all morning, and the logistics of trying to organize our tight schedules is already a headache, let alone with Chris and I working out at different times of the day.
Thankfully, a perfect solution arose – Diana Gym. As far as I know, it’s the only all-women’s gym in Kalar, run by the very toned, I-can’t-believe-she-has-two-kids-and-those-abs Diana, a friendly lady with enough English for me to be able to get across that yes, I want to sign up for a membership, but no, I don’t need a personal trainer. She seemed surprised that I already knew how to use most of the machines, and when, in broken Kinglish (Kurdish-English), I explained that most girls learn how to work out in high school or college in America, she explained back that exercising like this was a rather new phenomenon in Kurdistan, and mostly reserved for middle aged women trying to get their bodies back after having kids.
Let me tell you, the vibe of the gym is different than any other space I’ve seen in this country and I live for it. For one thing, it’s just about the only room I’ve been in that is exclusively women, and the attitude could not be more different than the serious, somber tone that most of public life seems to take here. Like most other places in the world (though amplified by the warrior spirit and melancholy history of the Kurds), boys from a young age are taught to take everything seriously, to argue passionately, and to show few emotions. The attitude of the ladies at the gym could not be more different. I’ve long said that middle aged women are my favorite demographic of human; that holds true in America, in Japan, certainly in Africa, and definitely here too. The ladies walk in wearing hijabs and abbas (a long black A-frame cloak that covers their bodies), strip them off as soon as they walk in the door to reveal workout clothes and shades of bottle-blonde hair that would not be out of place at the Ponte Vedra YMCA Chris and I frequented when we lived in Jacksonville.
Here’s the thing though – unlike the Y, this is one of the few public women’s only spaces, so these ladies revel in their ability to be totally free. Not only are they wearing leggings and sports bras, they’re blasting Arabic music so loud it makes my teeth shake, singing along and dancing, shrieking with laughter in such a girlish way you forget that most of these ladies could be my mom. It’s a beautiful thing to see, and something I wish more Americans, particularly American men, could see, because it irrefutably negates the idea of Middle Eastern women being crushed by the weight of the patriarchy here. It’s the feeling of a teenage sleepover, if sleepovers where a new phenomenon and a powerful statement about women’s liberation.
To be fair, not a whole heck of a lot of intense working out happens, but hey, who am I to judge. The women are friendly, adding me to their group chat (of which I only understand about 2%, and that’s because they’re memes), asking me where I work and where I’m from, and encouraging their children to practice their English on me. Because childcare is difficult here, I get the impression that most of the women here work outside of the home during the day, then come home to prepare dinner, then bring their kids to the gym while their husbands visit their friends in cafes or at their houses. The gym teems with children, playing on the expensive machines like they’re a jungle gym, sometimes doing things that make me terrified for their extremities. The only example of corporal punishment I’ve seen so far happened at the gym – a naughty 3 year old girl was playing with a cable machine and just about smashed her fingers off. Her mom swiftly slapped her twice in the face, not hard, just enough to sting, and rebuffed her loudly. The kid probably had it coming, to be honest.
As the ladies finish their workouts (which, while not as intense as mine, tend to last quite a lot longer. I get the impression this is a little mini-vacation for them), their entire bodies change. The tight leggings and t-shirts are covered up by traditional loose, drapey clothes, their blonde ponytails covered by headscarves, and the giddy smiles drop into serious, businesses-like expressions. A few times, I’ve seen these women in the market, or at their work (one woman is a teacher at a school we visited), and I have a difficult time recognizing them in their day clothes. As they step out of this little oasis, they step back into reality, and that requires a much sterner outlook.
Monday 9 December: Day 151
Drip, drip drip.
They want to do an x-ray. We stumble down the hallway, which reeks more and more of cigarettes. The tech is watching youtube videos and minimizes the page to pull up the x-ray application on his computer once his top 10 muscle car countdown finishes. They tell me to keep my phone and keys in my pocket because no one cares if a little radiation is added to the mix. No lead vests, and Mitsu protests, demanding that I wear one. They give her the look underdeveloped male brains give women who articulate their opinions and wave her off. She glares.
On my back on the table. No one has picked up the butts or garbage for weeks, maybe. When I’m done, Yahya gets an X-ray taken, just because he can. Why not?
They explain that the printer is broken so they need us to take a picture of the result on my phone to show it to the doctor. The exhaustion is overwhelming, so we just laugh – at them, at ourselves, at our situation. What’s a little radiation on the torso, anyways?
تیشکدان – radiation
Tuesday 10 December: Day 152
I get it now. It’s all based on the necessity of violence, and the fear of violence – a medieval outlook, where war and death are the normal, and education, science and healthcare are superfluous luxuries of peacetime. And it’s never peacetime.
Back on the bed, I can see between the cinderblock partition and shower curtain, across the sickly-lit corridor, in the same privacy gap of another patient’s cell. I can only see his feet, but his head is covered by a sheet. A man is sitting in the chair next to him: baggy brown Kurdish pants, rough gray shirt, black vest, black-and-white scarf wrapped into a turban around his head. His beard is long, grazing his clasped hands, in which the dark snaking form of prayer beads are drip drip dripping, counted off like drops of saline in the blood.
There are no tears, although I am far away. Physically we are close enough, but I occupy a different time altogether; one in which young men can leave their families, hike up Machu Picchu, gawp in red light districts, swim in African lakes, all in the span of five years. He lives in a dark time, a scary time, one where terror cannot be ignored or escaped. His god teaches him that this is the way the world works, and whether such a diagnosis is self-fulfilling is irrelevant – what matters is that his god has also given him a path, one defined by self-control and precedent and above all the promise of inner tranquility.
This is the beauty of Those Who Submit (for Islam means “those who submit to God”). This is also their curse, their legacy and the fundamental dilemma they will answer as history marches onward.
Or maybe this is the delirium talking.
پاڕەنەو – prayer
Wednesday 11 December: Day 153
There are two types of hospitals in Kurdistan.
The first are private. Private hospitals are tall and brightly lit, which big glass windows facing the street and large, colorful signs. Private hospitals are where all the medical students want to be doctors, because the money is excellent; most private hospitals have partnerships with American medical groups and now monetize every step of a hospital visit, just like home sweet home.
The second are public. Private hospitals outnumber public hospitals by almost 6-to-1, but over 80% of patients are treated in public hospitals, according to the nurses at the place I stayed. Private hospitals are owned by politically-connected dynasties, so lawmakers regularly decrease funding for public hospitals to encourage spending at the private places. Don’t take it from me – every Kurd we’ve spoken to has confirmed to, even the doctor who glanced at my X-ray pictures.
Public hospitals are free for patients, which still shocked me. Mitsu and Yahya kept reminding me that everything here is free. So while the service, sanitation and overall atmosphere were pretty grim, it makes sense for most people to get treated at a public hospital, despite the terror.
I’ve dealt with medical situations in the past, but this was the first time I was treated in a public hospital. My impression was not positive. Corruption taints every aspect of life here.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
نەخۆشی – sickness
Thursday 12 December: Day 154
We left at 2 in the morning. The patients in the entrance room/trauma room had cycled out completely. The doctor glanced at me and said everything was fine, no questions asked. Several new patients stared at us as we walked over to the counter to get the needle removed from my hand; the nurse behind the counter seemed confused when I showed him the port in my hand, and went off to look at his cell phone, so I just pulled the needle out myself. For some reason, I thought it would hurt more.
I could sleep for a week.
خوێن – blood
certification 
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