Near-Death and Other Travel Experiences Hell is Sofia A&E
The story so far.
I am travelling to Turkey from the UK by train and now local buses. In a hostel in Belgrade (Serbia) I was bitten in the leg by a rat. The leg is on its way to doubling in size and I am having a great deal of difficulty walking. I was checked out in a Serbian clinic by doctors who thought I was having a very dangerous Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT). I refused admission to the hospital because I felt they had the wrong diagnosis but also medical insurance and EU Health card did not cover treatment in Serbia. I am on a coach trying to get to Bulgaria, where I do have health coverage. I am laid flat on the back seat of a long-distance bus to Sofia in Bulgaria.
What happened next?
The kindness of strangers (and don’t look at the pictures on the wall)
Delirium sort of creeps up on you. The boundary between talking reasonable sense and confused nonsense is a very fuzzy one. One second you are just there, across the border in la-la land. My eldest daughter says she got a phone call from me singing ‘Young, gifted and black’ and then laughing like a fool and then meandering on about something else. I sort of understood she was concerned and so took double doses of the antibiotic medication I had been given at the clinic. I don’t know if it was them or just my immune system which brought me back from that state of mental confusion but I slept a little and was saner when the bus stopped and we were asked to transfer to another one.
A young Bulgarian man who had lived from childhood in London and spoke English perfectly and recognised I was unwell and helped me get off the bus, then visit the filthy toilets and stock up on bottled water and chocolate bars which is what I was craving. He sat one seat forward of me on the next bus and kept an eye on me. He had migrated to the UK as a young boy with his parents. His father who he was semi-estranged from abandoned them in London and came back to Bulgaria. He was off to meet him now. He had bought a second hand BMW a couple of years previously and driven it to Sofia as a gift for his father. Since then they had been on slightly better terms. The dad would be picking him up at the bus station. The young man’s advice was to let him give me a lift to the hostel as the taxi drivers were all crooks in Sofia. My instincts prick up when strangers offer me favours as I am afraid so many of them have been operating some kind of scam but I trusted this man and said yes.
For the remainder of the journey, we mostly talked about his travels. He was somebody who designed unique fixtures for boutique hotels around the world, but he could do that from his laptop anywhere with a WIFI. He was just back from South America where he had been following part of Che Guevara’s 1950s trip around the continent. I had done part of the Argentinian leg of that trip so we spoke about that. I was still dizzy headed but him engaging me was of help.
The very grizzly looking father (no teeth and baggy shorts) was there to meet the son. He was polite to me and drove straight to the hostel which was in one of the suburbs. It was late in the evening but I arrived before lock-up. I did not get the young man’s details. I regret that.
The next morning I went straight to the A&E department at the main Sofia Hospital. It was chaos. There was no system for queueing to be seen. Just a scrum of about fifty people shouting and waving loudly each time a doctor or nurse appeared. An old woman was sat in a chair looking very ill indeed and I supposed she was dying whilst the fitter people got the attention. My leg was very sensitive so felt scared to get into the melee. I was taller than most people. Each time the door opened and a medical person appeared I shouted out in English, “bad leg, rat-bite “, hoping my English would get attention. I was only there for five minutes or so (some of the others must have been there since the early morning) when my shouting got the attention of a doctor coming out of an adjacent office in the corridor. There was no one waiting to see him. He called me over in English and explained he was a vascular surgeon and would check out my leg. He gave me the most thorough examination I have ever had and prescribed me three different medications, bandages and dressings (the skin on my leg was breaking down) and then personally supported me bodily out of the hospital and across the road to a pharmacy. There were charges but he wrote these off as he “did not have the proper paperwork with him”. He was not sure I had a rat bite but he was bombarding my body with antibiotics and other drugs in order for me to get well enough to catch a flight to the UK. He had worked there and believed it was the best place for my problem.That ‘improving’ took ten days. First in the hostel and then I transferred to an arty hotel in a rundown part of the city. Scores of high rise buildings. Derelict factories. All run down and dilapidated. The hotel had outsize nude photos and painting (in the pop art style) lining the corridors, in the lift and in the dining room. I am not a prude but found it discomforting. I lay on a bed all of those ten days. Reading, sleeping and eating. When at last the swelling had gone down enough so that I could bend my leg, I booked a Ryan Air flight back to the UK.
Over the next three months, I had a further three courses of high dose antibiotics which had little lasting impact. Then my GP, at last, contacted a specialist at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital who advised a cocktail of intravenous drugs via a drip. To do that he needed the permission of a special hospital committee which authorised exceptional treatments. The IV did the trick. It’s accepted now that I was bitten by a rat (doctors always comment on it when they view my file on the computer). The blood vessels in my left leg were permanently damaged and that leg is always bigger and a different colour any season of the year to the other, one which my grandkids think is fascinating.
Photos.
The hotel
A bedroom
The border
(all photos off the internet)
Tomorrow. Deep south to Patagonia and looking for Burch Cassidy in the Andes