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| These are our good sides... |
We are middle-aged guys with baggage or, what the insurance industry and Congressional Republicans like to call 'pre-existing conditions'. We are reasonably healthy from day to day, but with hefty pill boxes and a few nagging complaints. We plan these trips anticipating good health- we maximize self-directed tourism, with lots of walking. I have arrived home from Europe the last two years fifteen pounds lighter as a result.
We coordinated our scrips to the last pill with the help of our friends at CVS and each of our doctors' offices. We opted to pour all six weeks of our European trip's meds to avoid traveling with a dozen or more pill bottles. The CVS app had every scrip recorded if anyone had a question. We were entering the EU through Amsterdam, a port of entry we know well. We couldn't imagine we would have a problem there. (We didn't.) After that, from the Netherlands to Bulgaria and back, we would be in the bosom of the European Union and its customs union. Now, as we are at our final stop in our itinerary, the meds, plus the basic medicine chest of poop pills, pain pills and itch creams has completely worked. Yay.
But our string of unremarkable travel health days ended as we left Athens. On out last evening in Athens Mark complained of a twitch in his eye. The next day, as we waited in a stupidly long immigration queue in Sofia, Bulgaria, it became clear that something was wrong with Mark's face. The right side was beginning to sag. Right there, in the airport, I called our doctor in Albuquerque, describing what seemed like Bell's Palsy, the partial paralysis of the face along a facial nerve.
An hour later we had checked into our Airbnb apartment. I made a 14 second video of Mark's face and sent it to a buddy back in Burque, a plastic surgeon. Probably Bell's Palsy, something viral, likely to run 7-10 days. Mark and I both were Googling away at the symptoms. It was likely Bell's Palsy, but the prognosis was uncertain and might be improved with prednisone. We went out for a walk that evening. I noticed a clinic a few blocks away. Our family doctor called back and wanted Mark to go to the ER to be evaluated for a stroke. As 'strokey' as he might have looked(his words), he didn't have any significant pain or other symptoms. After hanging up with her we decided to wait, then hit that clinic in the morning.
We aren't unfamiliar with facial paralysis at our house. Ever since I had brain surgery in 2005 I have dealt with a mild paralysis on the left side of my face. There was an acute phase, right after the surgery, when closing my left eye at all required surgical tape and an eye patch. We lived through those weeks together, so we knew we needed to take care of his eye.
Now we were in Sofia, Bulgaria, a place where we had never been. Everything is written in Cyrillic. In a great coincidence, Julian, our Amsterdam host, arrived in Sofia for meetings with a renowned group of HIV pharma nerds. Surely they knew Bulgarian doctors. We called Julian and he was on the charge.We went back to the clinic we had seen the night before. After initially saying that they had no openings, a very sweet woman took pity on us and said to come back at 1pm. Meanwhile, Julian had gotten the advice of a Bulgarian physician, and that we could get prednisone over-the-counter in any pharmacy. Self medicating with a cortico-steroid seemed like a last resort.
We had to suck it up. The first of four precious days in Bulgaria was going to be spent exploring the health care delivery system. Ugh. We had a guided walking tour of Sofia planned for that afternoon. I reached out to our guide, and she graciously moved our tour to the next morning. We showed up at the clinic a little early then, after inspecting Mark's driver's license and his health insurance card, we were escorted upstairs. He first saw an opthamologist, a young woman with fluent English, who gave him a complete eye exam. She agreed that it was likely Bell's Palsy, but that Mark should see her colleague, a neurologist, down one floor in the clinic building. So down the stairs we went.
The neurologist was an older woman, likely trained in the Soviet days. She spoke no English but the clinic sent in an interpreter. She did a full evaluation for possible stroke. She came back with the Bell's Palsy diagnosis, a prednisone scrip and a bunch of other stuff. Three pharmacies later, we had the eye goops, the eye patches (night time use) and an analgesic that played nice with the corticosteroid. And she said it would likely get a little worse before it got better. She was right.
So we then went down to receive and pay the bill. For the exams by two specialists, mercifully under one roof, and a 90 minute set of medical encounters we paid the princely sum of... 108 lev/ $60. I paid cash and collected the receipts. I carry a large credit line credit card in case of something drastic, but I had this much Bulgarian currency in my wallet.
Meanwhile, I was having mobility issues, both feet and knees. I had stomped around Amsterdam in my Wesco lace-ups for a day and a half. It all felt very virile but definitely was too much. We then spent six days climbing the hills of Athens. My pegs were hurting. When we got to Sofia we had a killer guest apartment, but at the top of a 100-step climb, a fifth floor walk-up. Lordy. We couldn't just pass by the apartment- it was a mountain climb.
We were a fine mess-Strokey McStroke-face and Limpy. Mark took to mimicking the Yips, a skit from Sesame Street, puppet aliens with floppy mouths. Incessantly. We had to tailor our plans, but we did everything we wanted to do in Bulgaria. We took a few more taxis, but we still got around. We went to Plovdiv (more later), climbing a hill to get to the Roman amphitheater. We went slowly but walked the entire way. The rough cobbles of the old town there nearly killed me, but we walked all the way back to the station to take our bus back to Sofia.
We planned to stroll Rome- such a great way to know a city- and stroll we did. My feet were improving but we had three long walking days, Tuesday thru Thursday. On Thursday I broke down and deciphered the Roman metro system to get our day started. A breath of sanity. And we took a taxi at the end of the day to avoid walking back from Trastevere in the rain. Oh, and pasta is not a good food for someone with Bell's Palsy.
We could have written this post earlier but we didn't want anyone worrying about us. We are now ensconced in the cozy home of our Belgian buddy. Mark is practically yip-less but still wearing an eye patch and goop to go to bed. We feel like we dealt with the situations well. Our vacation was not ruined- we just earned another set of stories.
Yup yup yup yup yup yup
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