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This story by Maria Georgieva, editor-in-chief of “ELLE Bulgaria”, was told on her Facebook profile. The title is from the editors.
I’ve been in the group of survivors for a while. The coronavirus did not kill me, but the health system almost buried me, with positive tests, RHI sent us with the children alone to spread the virus to Pirogov, and the Emergency Department drew up an action plan for me over the phone: “Call the jeep, give the phone to your child and let him cough so the doctor can listen to his lungs on the phone.” – They did not send equipment to cough 10 times per minute and temperature 38.5 in case of coronavirus. This is, in short, the situation.
I wondered for a long time whether to tell this story or save my writing, because I know nothing will change. I do it for those who are about to endure the absurdities that turn Bulgarian “healthcare” into living health. If you read to the end, the veil:
Despite the masks, disinfectants, social distance, isolation, food and coffee from home alone, hand washing every 5 minutes and all the sterile daily routine that I have built in the last few months, the coronavirus has returned to home.
I don’t know if it makes sense to say that schools are its biggest incubator. But it makes sense to tell how after more than 7 months of quarantines, emergency measures, personal, general, briefings and chaotic actions of those on whom our lives depend, children are left out of the whole scheme (not that we are in it) . The coronavirus does not kill them, in fact, it will not kill us either, we pray that we are lucky, but the system will do it, quickly and safely!
“The PCR test for a student suspected of COVID-19 will be free,” Chief State Inspector Dr. Angel Kunchev said before the start of the school year.
A complete lie!
In a week, my daughter’s class fell through, even as a teacher, but the RHI didn’t take a single test. Sick, brainy children were simply returned to their parents in the morning, with no instructions on where to take free school tests, because there are NO such tests. Guess how many parents got 100 BGN for a snot test or mild discomfort? None. Isn’t this the usual condition for most children from kindergarten? However, it turns out that these are the most likely symptoms of the coronavirus in them: My daughter did not even have a runny nose and no one at school noticed that she dropped out or got sick until we left her at home due to such a mild illness.
He had a low fever twice, his throat was a little red, his stomach hurt, and so on. Enough for you to come to us and find out that it is a coronavirus.
In my son’s class, the situation was no different. But at 17, the symptoms are not the same as in 9-year-olds. The first doctor was adamant:
“Yesterday some young people came with a crown, in the context of which his son is in good health. Fever and cough are not only the result of covidity, other diseases disappear. He must be walking naked in the rain and catching a cold.”
I trusted him and didn’t think that with a cold from the rain we were dealing with the queues in front of the labs, where you don’t know who’s going to sneeze next to you.
Yet a week later, the burgeoning health was still “blooming,” the same cough and temperature, lowered and raised multiple times, despite a handful of drugs and vitamins, all Grandma’s teas and remedies. It was clear that a photograph had to be taken.
And here the saga began …
“Go immediately to the tent in front of the Infectious Diseases Department of the Military Medical Academy; they will take you there,” the jeep told me.
We found the tent on Friday afternoon, but no one was inside. Ten meters away, in front of mirrored glass doors, a modest line of 6-7 people had formed. No one was coughing, but everyone was waiting for a covid test. They were there for an hour because it was slow. According to my accounts, in an hour we would be inside a doctor. Well, after 4 hours. Luckily it was sunny and hot because the hospital waiting rooms were already open. Let those infected in December think of him!
“We don’t test children!” – with this answer they rewarded our patience of 4 hours here. Where? A divination began, except that the beans were not thrown. There was an infection room for children in Sofiamed, but they did not work there with covid symptoms. Well, she had nowhere to go. They had to illegally examine him. And test it illegally. And call me illegally the day after the test is positive. And RHI more legally to tell me: “Go to the whole family on your own to Pirogov for an X-ray of the lungs.” I called them on the phone after not believing the jeep and the Coordination Center, from where they had sent the same orders. However, it alone can mean a BGN 5,000 fine for violating the quarantine, as well as a high enough risk for everyone else on our way. And if for me it is “only” a personal car, for others it will be a taxi, bus or even worse, the subway.
After searching for a tent in front of the Military Medical Academy, in front of Pirogov, the code meeting point for kovid was a white van. It’s in front of the main entrance, if you haven’t visited it yet. I waited about ten minutes for the Moscow coffee and weather talks to end with the Russians paying for their tests, until someone noticed that I was having a child with covid. Before the boy’s astonished looks, I explained that I was in the car, because I didn’t consider it appropriate to push him to the main entrance to cough against every ambulance that arrived.
But there, at Pirogov, they did just that: they put him in the waiting room at the main entrance. They know it’s a covid, it will pass quickly, I thought at first. Until I took his ID to the children’s registry. Didn’t they close the window under my nose when they heard a coronavirus? I was not left with the two children in the waiting rooms of Pirogov for almost an hour, while the phones were ringing and they were still finding out (after more than half a year of the presence of this virus in Sofia) they had the right to examine the children with covid? Weren’t we illegally examined here as well? Well they did it! For the second time we were lucky to meet a conscientious and concerned doctor: Dr. Tea Alexandrova, who took at least Nia. They locked us in a room, they did all the tests in less than an hour. I did not dare to ask for myself, I did not have any symptoms at the time and did not want to create additional chaos in the already chaotic healthcare system.
The four hours in front of the MMA tent turned out to be a warm-up for the 7-hour stay near Pirogov’s white van. I don’t dare to think about how many people we have infected during that time. Adding to another young man with a covid in Pirogov’s waiting room, who already had pneumonia, and with his mother he waited 9 hours for RHI to send an ambulance to Pirogov to take him to a hospital for treatment. The kids just didn’t accept them anywhere. None of the great brains of this country had guessed that the coronavirus was in them either; they had to come on September 15 to understand that kovid not only affects children, but mainly begins in schools where social distance is very high. relative concept.
At 9pm I decided to call RHI and ask them if what was happening was okay: smallpox children coughing at the entrance to Pirogov. It was Saturday night, after hours, said a secretary. I left a message, my names and my phone number, but no one ever called me.
The next day, however, I received a call from Pirogov to apologize for all the chaos we had suffered. It’s not the doctors’ fault, they suffer from the system too. And the only way to help is to surround her.
After the illegal examination, the illegal test and the almost illegal X-ray of our 17-year-old son, the legal quarantine came, the symptoms also at home. Total loss of sense of smell and taste, temperature – sometimes low, sometimes not so much, some – severe cough, others – red throat, sinus pain, pain in the eyes and abdomen, nausea … If one hour you are fine, in the next 5 collapsed. You don’t have the strength to get out of bed and all you feel is how you fall apart. Even if she has “mild” symptoms, like a cough for three weeks and a temperature of 38.5, as we were rated by the Sofia Emergency Department. We went to them because on the eighth day of treatment with antibiotics and all kinds of antiviral drugs and syrups, my son’s condition did not change and no one had examined me, my treatment was monitored by a jeep over the phone.
Call your GP to listen to you on the phone!
After an hour of waiting for a toll-free number with the 112 Emergency Service, I finally met a friendly doctor who kindly explained to me: “Call the GP to hear you on the phone!” But I had already talked to the jeep, and he told me that the only way for a doctor to listen to us on the headphones without paying a fine for not following the quarantine was for an ambulance to come home. I asked for the friendly doctor’s name in case we got worse over the weekend to find out who gave us this professional advice. And he kindly hung up on me (I have the date and time of the call, and the records need to be kept).
With a little more perseverance, after 30 minutes I was able to contact the ER again. I told them the time of my previous call and again asked for the name of the doctor who had scheduled a lung exam over the phone. “You didn’t understand the colleague, ma’am – she intended to call the jeep, make her son cough on the phone to see if the doctor was serious.” If it weren’t serious, it would be fun!
In short, coughing 10 times per minute and a temperature of 38.5 on the eighth day of antibiotic treatment are not dangerous symptoms in kovid according to the Emergency Department. They sent a team after 3 o’clock.
While I was waiting for them, I called the jeep, RHI, Ministry of Health … In the first two places they transferred the ball to the Emergency Department, and in the Ministry from 3 telephones on the site, they did not answer for hours.
The real luck was that we no longer made it to the hospital. And since we all see a lot of movies and a lot of news in which somewhere some RHI takes care of the sick, their families, the contact persons, I will only say that I called dozens of times in RHI capital, but I received only one call from them: to register family members, PINs and phone numbers in case we violate quarantine. And bring us a “Home Isolation Recipe” 2 days before the end of the quarantine. Because they care about fines, but not about people. The RHI in the capital did not ask us for other contacts, did not give us instructions on what to do if we got worse, did not send a team to examine and test us. They passed the ball to Pirogov and the ambulance. And from there they returned it.
The downside is that while these institutions are “transferring” people’s lives, some need doctors. And they are lucky to survive. Despite the PAGING healthcare system …
