The Statement

The heroes of all works by Yu. Krelin are doctors. About their selfless work and their working days, Yu. Krelin writes in his stories. For Yu. Krelin’s books, a complex network of plot psychological relationships between the characters is characteristic. On the pages of Yu. Krelin’s stories, important issues are both posed and resolved: profession and personality, profession and ethics, profession and family.

Near the кафедры stood a tall, slender, neat blonde. Short hair, slightly sticking up—maybe called a hedgehog or a beaver cut. The eyes were covered by glasses with slightly darkened lenses in a thin gold frame, which sat evenly on his straight, handsome nose. In short, almost an ideal, a model… You could even make an advertisement: “Use my surgery! Demand my operations!” He was about forty. His name was Vadim Sergeevich. He served as an intern in the surgical department. And now he was reporting to the morning conference of doctors about everything that had happened in the hospital that night.

But let’s not repeat everything he told them. Who needs all these details and tiny bits of hospital routine? Why do we need to know how many patients arrived, how many were operated on, what they operated on, who died, and who was released home? All of this is already there, covered by time—has become “long ago”… or “recently” (everything that happens to us, for some reason, always seems recent—so it is with the passage of time). In any case, it’s no longer interesting.

At the present moment, Vadim Sergeevich was telling the story of a twenty-one-year-old girl, by the surname Ruchkina, admitted two days after the onset of abdominal pain. Earlier she couldn’t go to doctors because she was taking exams at the institute and hoped that everything would take care of itself. “But it didn’t,” said Vadim Sergeevich with a stern and slightly ironic tone, addressing the medical conclave—almost reminding them that “it will be the same for everyone who doesn’t use my abilities.” “The pain kept worsening, and yesterday she came to us. Taken to the operating table with a suspicion of acute appendicitis. During the operation we found pus in the abdomen, and its source was somewhere down below—in the pelvis. The appendix was changed secondarily, but it was also changed, and we removed it. The right fallopian tube was sharply swollen, of a deep crimson color—from it the pus was coming. We removed the tube too. In the morning the patient’s condition is satisfactory, corresponding to the severity of the process. Broad-spectrum antibiotics have been prescribed.”

Vadim Sergeevich looked triumphantly at the audience, at the head of the department—the chair of the morning conference—and moved on to the next case history.