Chapter Eighteen
In the few mornings that he spent with us, Cyril would wake promptly at 7 a.m. crying for his bottle or food.
We responded immediately to those request, and got out of bed, happy to
meet his demands. He didn’t eat
much, but he was sure sticking to his schedule!
We bathed him in the bathtub; one day as I was bathing him and the warm water was falling over his thin body, a small smile came across his lips.
How happy that made me to see that smile!
Images of him partying down with all the cool dudes in his teenage years
and the children he would one day have himself filled my mind. His
whole life lay before him, and in that little smile was just an indication of
the life he could have led.
However, he continued to eat slowly. He was still weak and pale — his arms were like sticks; there was no flesh on his bones.
During this time, his head twitch was becoming more frequent, but not alarming. He still had horrible diarrhea and his diaper rash/infection was slowly being brought under control.
Lena and Sergey showed up every day to take us to outings around Perm — shopping, tourism and sumptuous Russian lunches.
On Tuesday she asked us if we wanted to take the baby back to the orphanage and we said no.
In hindsight, it appears she was hinting at something — we believe that she knew the baby was not too well and that something should have been done.
However, since we had heard how badly off Russian orphans were, we didn’t think his behavior was unusual. Oddly enough, he did roll around on his blanket on the floor and even attempted to crawl a few times, but as he was doing so, he would cry weakly.
Tellingly, his first video showed him able to support himself on his
upper arms; by the time he was in our care, he could no longer do that.
We just couldn’t wait for our time to come to go home.
Cyril needed to be home with us in America. Time wasn’t flying fast enough for us, but for Cyril, it was running out.
The next morning, Lena asked us about Thanksgiving Day, since she was aware of it and had wanted to arrange a little celebration for tomorrow, when Linda Wright was to arrive. She and I discussed this over a lunch not too far from the hotel, at a local bar/restaurant with MTV Europe blaring on a television screen in the background.
It was my day out, and Daniel’s day to spend some time with Cyril. I told Lena about turkey, cranberries, stuffing and pies. She said she would arrange something at our hotel, and bring Linda there
after her first meeting with Yekaterina at the orphanage.
Linda was to be staying at the Hotel Nichols, considerably farther away than our
hotel. We do not know why BBAS did
not arrange for its clients to be together during this process. It would have helped us out immensely if we could have been in the same
hotel (and convenience had nothing to do with it … both hotels were a long way
from the orphanage, the Nichols even more so than the Mikos).
When I returned from lunch, Daniel was holding Cyril on his lap.
The baby somehow appeared listless. We had attempted to feed him some baby cereal and mashed up bananas for
breakfast, which he slowly ate, but we noticed that when we went to change him,
much of it was running right through him. His
diaper rash, however, was responding quite well to treatment with the German
ointment.
This day was to be the beginning of the end for Cyril. When we went to feed him his formula that night, he wouldn’t suck on the nipple of his bottle. He merely passed the bottle from one end of his mouth to the other.
I attempted to squirt some formula into his mouth, and he began to
swallow it. By his actions, we
figured he might have been teething, so we also gave him some mashed up potatoes
which he readily ate — oddly enough. We
also gave him lots of water to drink and some Pedialyte that we had brought with
us from America.
Then it came time to put the baby to bed. I placed him in the port-a-crib in our room on his back, but he would always attempt to roll on to his stomach. That night Cyril perhaps didn’t sleep at all; and if he slept, it was restlessly. Maybe I didn’t sleep either, but I swear the baby lay there, waiting and waiting with his eyes wide open.