Essay 117. Clip on the back of the head

I’ll never stop singing the praising of women, their beauty, their incredible ability to adjust to various situations and their patience and their unique female humor. Though, let me tell about everything in order. In my essay 89 “A born obstetrician”, I touched the topic of obstetrics and childbirth. However this is an all-embracing and boundless topic, that is why I’ve returned to it again with a short story that happened with Sasha Khoroshilov’s group in their forth year. I was always proud that I studied in a group # 18 and later group # 14, where there were only three girls. In the graduation year of 1972 it was the only group of that kind; however it turned out that Alexander’s group was totally male. In our group we, for instance, considered Tatyana Yanchilina and Olya Ptitsyna “cool guys” in everyday communication, nevertheless we never forgot that they were young girls, and that kept us within the limits, though, to be honest, we were telling jokes without any hints or significant silence, but called a spade a spade, and the girls were laughing louder and in a more rollicking way than the guys. I do not know why in our group of young and single the most favorite jokes were the jokes about a mother-in-law. And the most favorite was the one in which a man was standing on a roof of a five-storied building together with an old lady trying to push her off the roof; the lady actively resisted. The crowd standing down on the ground was scolding the man for his attempts to push a human being, a woman, off the roof. However when the man on the roof announced to everybody that that was not a human being and even more, not a woman, but his mother-in-law, sympathies got dramatically changed. There were even shouts heard: “Eh, old bitch! She is even resisting”.

However I want to talk not about this. So Sasha Khoroshilov’s group consisted almost completely of former secondary school leavers; only the group monitor managed to finish a Kemerovo medical college, serve in the Army and even get married and have two twin boys.
Generally speaking, he was all around positive, because of his being so positive he was appointed to be the group monitor. So the group got into hands of an associate professor Titova, I had already written that she was our Tatiana Yanchilina’s aunt. She was an excellent professor, honestly, it was pleasant to get any telling-off from her. All students knew that if she was reprimanding someone, that meant that she considered him or her to be a good and promising student. Theoretical classes in class rooms are of no interest now. However when Titova brought the group to a labor room to train in assisting at childbirth, the guys got confused. No, they did not lose their heads, but got confused. They were in their fourth year, were majoring in their future profession; however they still felt embarrassment in certain situations.

So that time the delivery was going on without any pathologies, even though there was born a Thumberlina like girl there were insignificant ruptures. Titova was aware of the situation, nevertheless she asked: “Who is going to suture up?”  The guys hiding behind each other pushed forward the group monitor. Titova was waiting. The poor devil had no choice, he sat on a low chair, blushed with embarrassment, sweating hard with trembling because of excitement hands started suturing up the insignificant ruptures, which had resulted from the childbirth.

And the woman almost completely came to consciousness after the delivery, she saw how the guys were confused and pushed forward one of them, and how he started suturing up the ruptures, so she decided to relieve the tension. A very clever woman, she asked the group monitor to be careful and not to sew up anything extra. She said she would find him and make him restore everything the way it was before. The group burst into laughter. Sasha as if not addressing anyone commented that the guy could not do that as he was married. The group monitor gave Sasha a clip on the back of his head, and Titova approvingly said to the group monitor, though it was not clear meaning what – the results of his suturing up of the ruptures or his reaction on Sasha’s comment; she said: “Good job; that’s right!”

10 June, 2012