Posted on 01/05/2006 6:34:23 AM PST by doc30
YEKATERINBURG, RUSSIA — Gennady Varlamov, 67, never wondered much about his childhood during the Second World War. He assumed he grew up in a happy family, living with his mother in a three-room wooden house in a village near the Ural Mountains. It was a modest place, with no electricity or running water, but Mr. Varlamov remembers it as a pleasant home with a garden and farm animals.
His questions started in October of 1993, when he suffered a bad headache. In retrospect, he says, it was probably just a flu symptom. But he went to the doctor anyway, and was referred for X-rays at a hospital in Yekaterinburg, the industrial city at the western edge of Siberia where he lives as a pensioner and part-time security guard at a military tank factory.
An elderly neuropathologist gave him the results, with a quizzical look on his face. Three sewing needles were lodged in Mr. Varlamov's brain, near the top of his skull. Mr. Varlamov still has the doctor's diagnosis, scrawled in blue ballpoint: Three needles -- with lengths of 6, 5.4, and 4 centimetres -- and an average thickness of 0.01 millimetres each.
Other than the sharp steel lurking somewhere underneath his balding scalp, the doctor declared Mr. Varlamov to be quite healthy.
"The doctor seemed surprised," Mr. Varlamov said, chuckling. "But he said I'm in good condition and I'll live many more years."
The doctor said surgery wasn't an option, and wasn't necessary because the needles didn't seem to be bothering him.
The needles didn't bother him physically, but they nagged at his mind. They would eventually lead him to think about the desperate situation many Russian families faced during the Stalin era, but for the moment he considered them proof of his good luck.
He had escaped several other perils in his lifetime, and he thought maybe this was further proof of his durability.
As a child, his grandmother had saved him more than once from poisoning after a gas valve was left open inside the house. He once slipped into a river and fell beneath a logjam floating downstream. A three-metre length of heavy pipe fell on his head at work, but that also failed to kill him.
"I'm like a cat with nine lives," he said.
Mr. Varlamov wanted to tell other people about the needles in his brain, but his wife advised him to keep quiet. Still, he learned about other cases similar to his own.
Many people around the world have lived with strange objects in their heads: a construction worker in Colorado whose nail gun sent a nail four centimetres into his brain; a Korean who discovered a five-inch nail in his forehead; a Malaysian man who endured a wood splinter in his head for five years until his doctors removed it.
But these people were victims of accidents, while Mr. Varlamov was eventually forced to wonder who wanted him dead.
Russia suffered the worst of the Second World War. Some young mothers, faced with the burden of unwanted children, resorted to killing their babies with needles slipped into the soft tissues of their unformed skulls.
"There was a tendency during the war to get rid of children like that. And the doctors couldn't discover the real cause of death," Mr. Varlamov said.
The old man's eyes grew moist as he considered the question of whether his own mother's situation had been that desperate. He chose his words slowly.
The year after Mr. Varlamov was born, his father, a railway worker, was killed in the disastrous Finnish-Russian war. His mother told him he was the youngest of three children, but that his older sister and brother had died of unspecified childhood diseases.
Mother and son moved several times, until she finally got a steady job as a janitor in a kindergarten at a small town south of Ufa, about 1,200 kilometres east of Moscow.
Mr. Varlamov says he would like to ask his mother whether life was so hard that she wanted to kill her son. But she died 22 years ago, and he has no other family members to question.
He might never have told the story to anyone, except for an advertisement he saw recently on the local Channel 4 news, offering viewers a chance to win a big television for calling the station about an unusual story.
Such a large appliance would hardly fit in his tiny apartment, but he's still hoping.
In the meantime, he said, the smile returning to his face, the station has already given him $60, a T-shirt and a beer mug.
It's horrible that anyone would do that, but we should be glad that he turned out to have such a sharp mind.
That is sad, for him to realize it so much later.
But it does seem he had a relatively happy childhood, you know, as much as one could in the USSR. Maybe his mom, after her baby wouldn't die, thought that she was meant to keep him.
With all the accidents he's had, it does seem he is blessed to be alive.
That being said, the liberals should be outraged that soviet Russia wasn't giving away late-term abortions upon demand.
It will haunt you the rest of your life.
I got needled mercilessly when I was a child, but nothing like that.
What socialism does to humans and families...
One of the most disturbing books I ever read. I won't go near that author ever again.
Must have been Stalin's fault.
I'm glad he finally pinned down one of his problems.
Is his nickname "Lucky?"
The Russians lived like troglodytes.
And what does it say about our own so called civilized capitalist country that has so many thinking that the right to kill one's unborn baby in the womb is a priority.
Damn thin needles.
Unfortunately, infanticide, especially during stressful periods, is common to all cultures and happens more than most people think.
Something about this story just gives me the willies.
I think he should seek a legal o-pin-ion. I think he has grounds to sew somebody over this...
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