You're reading: The Daily Beast: My years as Gaddafi’s nurse

I checked the dictator’s heart and lived in luxury. But when revolution came, I realized the cost. I was just 21 when I went to work for Muammar Gaddafi. Like the other young women he hired as nurses, I had grown up in Ukraine. I didn’t speak a word of Arabic, didn’t even know the difference between Lebanon and Libya. But “Papik,” as we nicknamed him—it means “little father” in Russian—was always more than generous to us. I had everything I could dream of: a furnished two-bedroom apartment, a driver who appeared whenever I called. But my apartment was bugged, and my personal life was watched closely. Oksana Balinskaya talks about what it was like being the nurse for Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Read the story here.