Who we lost
Among the 145 people still missing in the collapsed condominium in Surfside, near Miami Beach, is Ruslan Manashirov, a family practice doctor, and his wife, Nicole Doran, a nurse in the Aventura Hospital ER. They’d been married for three months.
I met Dr. Manashirov over the phone a year ago. He was empathetic and kind. I had just sent him an angry and aggressive fax: “I’m very concerned about what appears to be negligence on your part,” I wrote. “I’m troubled by this lack of care.” I’d built him up in my mind as someone who must have been too busy to care about my mother, whom I’d been trying to reach for days and days without answer. I’d thought he was either deliberately ignoring me or somehow not aware of how important it was that I hear from him. He was not the doctor who’d given my mother a prescription for Ambien, which had made her problems with her memory appear dramatically much worse. He was the doctor who replaced him. I was worried that the same thing might happen again.
I’d called the assistants at his office frequently enough to know most of their names. I’d faxed my power of attorney—twice. I couldn’t wait to yell at him for what that other doctor had done.
My angry letter proved effective. About fifteen minutes after I sent it, Dr. Manashirov gave me a call. I’d planned to join my mother’s next appointment with him over video, but couldn’t—the promised link had not been sent—and afterward she’d told me that the doctor hadn’t done much. “My mother reports that you offered her no form of medical advice or counseling at your meeting with her yesterday,” I’d written. So I’d wanted to yell at him for that one, too.
He sounded gentle and a little nervous. My mom had told me it was fine with her if I joined her appointment with him virtually—it was mid-pandemic, summer—but, he said, she’d told him that she did not want me to join. She didn’t want to share her medical information. He’d spent some time with her, he said. They’d talked. I understood then that when my mom had told me that her doctor hadn’t said or done much, she was either not remembering or pretending not to, stubbornly refusing to relate.
“Right,” I said to him. “OK. Fine. Can you at least tell me what you prescribed her?”
No, he said. He couldn’t. I could hear the kindness in his voice. As a doctor he had to respect his patients’ wishes. Even though my mom is not in the best shape, and strives to hide how much she can’t remember, he treated her with dignity, and afforded her the same consideration that patients who do not have dementia are obligated to receive. He placed her clearly stated wishes over the piece of paper from her lawyer that involves me in her care. And he did not, I later discovered, prescribe anything that might be unsafe.
My mom saw him again ten days ago. He’d wanted to see her, his assistant had told me when I’d called. It sounded like he’d been concerned. She does not remember this last appointment with him, either, and did not recognize the pictures of him—from his wedding—that are now everywhere online. We learned more about the person that he was: His family came from Azerbaijan. He grew up in Bergen Beach, and practiced medicine in Brooklyn. His wife was a hero during the pandemic, working in that hospital ER. They lived on the seventh floor.
“It’s horrible,” my mom said. “That building.” Which contained the life of a good doctor who is now lost among the unaccounted for 145.
Read
It’s hard to think of anything to recommend with much enthusiasm this week. So let’s stay bleak and read Daniil Kharms, an avant garde poet who believed that “art should operate outside the rules of logic.” During his lifetime he published only children’s books, but was famous in literary circles for his performances—he read his poems from the top of an armoire, in the midst of clowns and magicians and jazz performers, in front of banners that read “Art is a cupboard!” and “We are not cakes!”
When the Second World War began Kharms avoided the front by convincing the draft board that he was crazy. When the Germans invaded he was rounded up (along with everyone else who had a political record) and sentenced to a psychiatric hospital, where, during the siege of Leningrad, he died of starvation. Five years earlier, he wrote this:
This is how hunger begins:
In the morning you wake lively,
Then weakness,
Then boredom,
Then comes the loss
Of quick reason’s strength—
Then comes calm
And then horror.
Updates
Matt has another story in Insider this week, this one about the lab-leak hypothesis and the origins of COVID-19. It’s paywalled, but the gist is that you don’t need to have an opinion about where the virus came from to be troubled by gain-of-function research and the risks it poses to us all.
There is fresh mulch in both playgrounds in Kalorama Park. Its total cost was estimated to fall between $15,000 and $20,000. Its volume is one hundred cubic yards.
Here’s the view from our apartment, from about two hours ago and right now, during this storm.