It was about a week after their arrival in Moscow that Marina Kovalevsky and her daughter Yana began feeling sick.
First, stomachache and diarrhea. Then headaches followed by shortness of breath. Within a day, they were in excruciating pain, particularly in their legs, said Leon Peck, Marina Kovalevsky's brother, Thursday.
The women went to a hospital. Worried doctors immediately sent them to a special institute for the treatment of poisonings. There, doctors gave them hemodialysis and took blood and urine samples. But their conditions did not improve.
Test results confirmed that the women were suffering from thallium poisoning. Doctors told Peck that they were not sure that they would survive.
The hospital had no Prussian Blue, one of the few known antidotes to thallium poisoning.
So Peck, a Beverly Hills oral surgeon, decided to go to Russia himself. He purchased about $2,000 worth of Prussian Blue, a drug derived from a blue dye used by artists and manufacturers, from a Santa Ana pharmacy and flew to Moscow, where he administered the drug to the Kovalevskys.
The day before, Marina, a 49-year-old internist who is prominent in the Russian community in Los Angeles, had called him on her cellphone, sounding distraught.
"She was crying. She was saying, 'Please take us home, please take us home,' " Peck said.
After he administered the Prussian Blue, which absorbs thallium from the body, their health seemed to immediately improve. By Wednesday, they were well enough to return to Los Angeles. They now are in the critical care unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
But the family was left with one question: Why were they poisoned? The women are not politically active and have no business ties to Russia, Peck said.
"There was no reason in the world to poison Marina and Yana," Peck said. "They were not involved in anything at all."
Marina and Yana, 26, went to the 50th birthday party of friends soon after arriving in Moscow on Feb. 15. They planned to stay for a wedding later in the month. Peck said the women spent the week before their illness sightseeing, visiting museums, attending the theater and visiting friends.
The two women spent most of their time apart, although they returned every night to the Marriott hotel near Red Square. Three days before they got sick, they had breakfast at a hotel restaurant, Peck said. Health experts said it takes between 12 and 48 hours for symptoms of thallium poisoning to appear.
