No, this was a beautiful girl following her encounter with soap. She was lucky.
[L] Because of that?
Well, of course.
In those days, we treated patients from across the whole city so over 24 hours we'd see 80-100 patients.
Not everyone was admitted to hospital but we got through 100, 80 people -
that's more or less how it was and it was hard to work, for two people to be on duty.
I was on duty then with Rysiek Fenigsen a friend who knew about as much as I did
except that he was more precise than me because he studied and knew everything written in fine print.
Yes, extraordinarily precise.
One night, he woke me, it was his half of the night, and he says,
Marek, they've brought in a beautiful girl, she's young, 18 years old,
gorgeous, stunning, she's got thallium poisoning'.
'Leave me alone', I said. 'But come and see how beautiful she is.'
Without really wanting to, I went to have a look and she really was beautiful, a blonde - peaches and cream.
So I said, 'What do you want from me?' and he said, 'I don't know what I want from you, she's on your ward so you see to her.'
Fine. Thallium poisoning with the quantity that she had ingested,
because she'd come home and was hungry while the thallium was in some rat poison that had been sweetened.
She'd spread 'marmalade' thickly on two or three slices of bread and ate the thallium,
so that after a couple of hours she was done, and was in terrible pain and paralysis was setting in.
I came by in the morning,
I'd gone back to bed because what could I have done with thallium poisoning,said a prayer,
but as I'm not a believer I don't have God's protection, right?
[L] I think you do.
You think. Maybe that's what your mummy might have thought, but you're godless, too.
[L] Yes, but I'd like you to talk about the thallium not about my religion...
What, don't you matter?
[L] And...?
So there was this pretty girl, thallium, I didn't have the faintest notion about poisoning.
I went to the pharmacist, Formański who used to be an academic doctor but was now our pharmacist,
and I said, 'Tell me what's the antidote to thallium?'
He told me something, this, this and this but I said, 'Good but will it work?'
He says, 'No, it won't.' 'So what will work?'
'I don't know but some professor once told me that there's this stuff called tioacetamide
which binds itself to thallium, it's in liquid form and might even bind itself in an alien environment.'
So I said, 'You know what, do you have any of this tioacetamide?' 'I do because I use it for something completely different.'
'So can you make some up?' And he said, 'What sort of concentration?' I said, 'Who knows?'
So he made about 200 cm of this tioacetamide. The smell was awful.
Well, we took this girl into the emergency room and hooked her up to an intravenous drip of this tioacetamide.
The first day, it didn't help but she didn't get worse. The second day she was no better.
By the third day the pain began to recede, her hair began to fall out as it does with thallium poisoning,
she went bald but she didn't cry out, she wasn't in pain and she was able to move her toes.
In short, after seven days she was left without any hair, bald as anything, but she recovered.
And she went home. She went home after a few days, or a week or after two weeks and that was it.
She disappeared from sight. But six months later, on the corner of Sterling Street,
we met a girl outside the hospital with beautiful hair, each hair was as thick as my finger and who was it?
It was Bogusia. She says, 'I was here, you looked after me. All of my hair...' and so on and so on.
She recovered. It was amazing. After all, you're not supposed to experiment on people.