Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, December 14, 1993 TAG: 9312140054
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
He's sweltered in the Florida sun.
And now the Finnish woodworker's brief American odyssey is about to end, when he leaves a Roanoke hospital.
Driving toward the Great Lakes and some longed-for cold weather three weeks ago, he fell ill at the Super 8 Motel near the Roanoke airport. A rescue squad rushed him to Roanoke Memorial Hospital.
Kontkanen speaks barely a word of English, so it's hard to know exactly what happened.
People at Roanoke Memorial won't say much. To get Kontkanen's permission to talk, they'd have to translate their release-of-information form into Finnish and get him to sign it.
The 52-year-old man was admitted to the hospital emergency room two nights before Thanksgiving. A Finnish man traveling with him came to the hospital and interpreted for him but hasn't been heard from since.
Shona Reynolds, assistant manager at the motel, said Kontkanen's friend asked for a scent-free room the night of Nov. 23. The man said Kontkanen wasn't breathing well.
When Kontkanen walked into the motel, Reynolds knew it was serious. "His lips were blue, and he was spitting up blood."
The friend told her they hadn't gone to a doctor because Kontkanen had no insurance. The friend had tried to get Kontkanen on a flight from Roanoke to Finland. Reynolds called 911.
Kontkanen may have blood clots in his legs; he may have had a heart attack. It's unclear. But he's said to have almost died.
After his friend left, Kontkanen was unable to communicate with doctors, so the hospital brought in Inga Solonevich, the only Finnish speaker on a local Red Cross list of volunteer translators.
Solonevich, an artist in Roanoke County, hadn't spoken much of her native language since she left Finland more than a half-century ago.
When Kontkanen was sleeping in cardiac intensive care, she whispered Finnish to him, hoping it would bring comfort.
She was speaking to him one day when, finally, he heard her. "His eyes suddenly opened up and got bigger and bigger," she said Monday.
He speaks an eastern Finnish dialect she doesn't know. So for weeks they have stumbled along with her rusty Finnish and their slightly different native tongues.
They've laughed at their misunderstandings, like the time she assured him doctors wanted to help him, but got her Finnish verbs confused and said they wanted to bury him.
Solonevich has pieced together this much of Kontkanen's story:
He built prefabricated houses in Russia until such over-the-border enterprises ended. Finland, long with one of the highest standards of living in the world, is going through its worst recession since the 1930s. Unemployment has been near 20 percent.
Jobless, Kontkanen and a friend struck out for Alaska. Kontkanen always had wanderlust. He's curious about geography and the planets.
He and his buddy dug for gold, "but they didn't find much," Solonevich said, interpreting for Kontkanen in his hospital room.
The men took off for Florida. To them, it was just a 54,000-square-mile sauna. All they did, Kontkanen said, was "sweat and paint houses." He began to feel sick and blamed it on chemical fumes.
Missing frigid temperatures, they drove toward the Great Lakes. That's when they stopped at the Super 8.
"The doctor said not one in 100 would be alive" after a bout like Kontkanen's, that "he must be a really strong fellow," Solonevich said.
Helena Alaruikka, an attache at the Finnish embassy in Washington, D.C., said she has talked with Kontkanen two or three times a day, explaining his condition and medications.
"He is doing very well," she said. "I'm sending him home this week."
Solonevich, 79, comes by the hospital often, though she is also nursing her ill Russian artist husband, George Solonevich, at their mountain home on Masons Knob. She has brought rye bread, grapes, carrots and apple juice to her new friend.
On request, she reluctantly asked him what she has meant to him during his illness. "He said, `It was so nice to see a friendly person who could talk to him,' " she said shyly, as he patted her hand.
Monday, she quietly left on his bedside table a Finnish edition of her 1992 book, "The Long Trek to Solola."
It's about her and George's own journey - their flight from Poland through Nazi Germany, Argentina and New York and finally to the Roanoke Valley in 1955.
She's hoping Kontkanen will read it on his plane ride home.
by CNB