IRKUTSK – The overworked cleaning woman realized that her grown son was not just sleeping off his habitual hangover in the Siberian city of Irkutsk when she discovered – to her horror — that he had quietly gone blind.
Even as his speech slurred and his condition steadily deteriorated, the man, Renat V. Mukhamadeyev, 31, dissuaded his widowed mother from summoning an ambulance until about midnight. Wheeled into the emergency room at nearby Hospital No. 8 – by then a hellish madhouse of the dead and the dying – he fell into a coma and expired within a day, one of at least 76 victims of a mass alcohol poisoning.
