Page 21 - eBook Living Water 2

We met our officer friends in Rijeka, as planned, and our first
order of business was to see the doctor. I learned that he would be
doing the procedure in his home, since I was not a Yugoslavian
citizen and he couldn’t do it in the hospital. I was rather naïve. I
think I expected it to be like going in to have a tooth pulled.

When we arrived at his modest apartment, he and his wife
ushered me into their kitchen where they helped me onto a table that
they had prepared like an examination table with linens and a pillow.
It began like an obstetric exam. They didn’t speak any English, so I
had no idea what to expect, until I was jolted into reality by a searing
pain in my abdomen. I almost passed out. The room began to swirl
and I was alternately sweating and shaking. They were obviously
doing this without anesthesia, as his wife held me down.

After about 20 minutes, which seemed like forever, he sent me
back to our hotel with some pain pills. I went to bed curled up in a
fetal position, tossing from side to side in agony. It was my twenty
second birthday and I was thousands of miles away from home in a
strange country, scared about what I had just done, and wondering if I
was even going to survive. The realization that I had actually just
destroyed a living person began to set in, along with the suffocating
darkness of guilt and shame.

I did finally fall into a delirious sleep and was grateful to wake
up in the morning to a sliver of sunlight coming through the shutters.
Jan said that our officer friends wanted to take us out and show us
around their town. I jumped at the opportunity to get going and take
my mind off the still gnawing physical discomfort and the awful
thoughts of what I had just done. None of them ever spoke about it.
They were great accomplices in my denial.

After visiting with our friends for a few days, we left Rijeka to
return to Italy, where we were scheduled to spend the Christmas
holidays with Jan’s uncle, a priest, who lived in Naples. While
traveling out of Yugoslavia, Jan was driving, and as we descended
down the mountain, she hit a patch of ice and slid across the road. A