She Survived, in Spite of Her Treatment

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Patients call the Yekaterinburg Hospital, located at 37 Kamskaya Street, the “final journey”. This hospital is for patients with tuberculosis and other severe diagnoses. They usually leave this place in black bags.

TB facilities generally do not like drug-dependent people, and try to avoid them. But here, the procedures are especially strict. For example, even a smear-positive patient may be released from the hospital if he breaks the internal rules. “Later he comes back anyway, – says Natalia. – Though not on his own feet, but in a blanket, going straight to the intensive care unit…”

“You lie in your bed at night, thinking and suffering. Dying feels scary. But you can’t just go and ask your doctor, he won’t tell you anything. In the morning, you go to the smoking room and see black bags carried past you. Three people are carried away every week. You stand there, and they are dragging him, with his head bumping the stairs… People say: “If you go to Kamskaya, it is the same as going to the cemetery.” That is how another patient, Aleksandr, described his stay in this hospital.
It has been like this here for a long time. Three years ago, activists were agitating about the fact that there were no drugs in the hospital to treat drug-resistant TB, no ICUs, no specialists apart from the TB treatment doctor, no care for bedridden patients, very poor food, no consumables – syringes, etc., no drug treatment doctor to help drug-dependent patients (even though most of the patients use drugs), no hot water. Even patients with active tuberculosis had to take a bus to go to the AIDS centre to get their medication, making people around them hysterical with their protective masks. Now they bring ARV drugs to the hospital. Everything else is still the same. When we asked what to bring them, patients asked for… 2 ml syringes for the whole department.


This is the story of Natalia Sannikova. She is very similar to thousands of others with tuberculosis in Russia – apart from one thing: she survived, against all the odds, in the most terrible conditions –  in a hospital specialising in drug-dependent people with HIV and tuberculosis.

Natalia Sannikova spent a year in this place. She was taken to the hospital with pulmonary tuberculosis, and after six months here, contracted bone tuberculosis. She saw patients dying, and others being discharged as a punishment, or having their catheter removed to make them feel worse. She was discharged with active tuberculosis, and then the ambulance refused to take her back. She saw patients lying in their own excrement.

“The doctor was talking to me as if I was a dog. I was asking her why I kept losing weight and was not getting better, asking how my test results were.” Tatyana Aleksandrovna told me, “Why do you care about your tests? You’ll kick the bucket in two Mondays.”
But Natalia survived. Now she is a volunteer with the New Life Foundation, helping people like herself to get treatment. Hand in hand, she leads people through long queues, offences and stigma – the fate of everyone in Russia who is drug-dependent and has TB. Trying to make sure it is not their final journey.
Igor Kouzmenko and Alex Kurmanevsky, DUNews