Life and death in BG

I think it's time for a new post. This is one that I have been kind of dreading writing about but I hear it's good to get your thoughts out and tell people your story.

So last Sunday around noon, I was at my apartment with Cveti. Cveti was in bed and I was in the living room playing on the computer. My neighbor in the apartment building came home and couldn't get into her apartment. She was banging on the door loudly and calling to her husband. I heard it and figured that he had gone out into town, locked the door and she had simply forgotten her keys. She ended up leaving for a minute or two before coming back to knocking on the door. I assumed she went out briefly to look for him. In another minute or two, she rings my doorbell. I answer the door and she has tears running down her face. She asks me if she can use my balcony, since they are adjoining, to yell to him. She does this and there is no answer. The door to their apartment is open though so Cveti, without hesitation, climbs over the railing and shimmies her way across the 2 inch wide foothold 2 stories off the ground. She gets over the neighbors balcony, into their apartment and unlocks the door from the inside. She comes back in the apartment and I asked her what happened. She says she didn't look around. Within moments, I hear the woman start yelling. I listen intently and wishing to hear him respond to her yells. I hear nothing from him, so I knock on her door and open it at the same time. I see her in the hallway leaning over her husband who is on the ground with his upper body coming out of the bathroom. He had apparently fallen against the closed bathroom door from the inside and when she opened it, he fell into the hallway. He was on his side when I came in the apartment. I quickly gave my phone to Cveti and told her to call for help. I bent down and found a faint pulse in his neck. My hopes went up and I knew it was time for action. I asked the wife to help me move him to his back. All my CPR trainings were coming back to me like a lightning storm of information. Call for help, assess the surroundings and situation, check his pulse, feel for breathing, secure neck while moving the body, begin CPR. Well, it was just instinct at this point. I will leave out the vivid details for your own good.

After a few minutes, two of my neighbors from the building came over to help. I was continuing CPR (which is a bit more difficult to manage alone on a real person than with the CPR dummy.) when my other neighbor assisted me in holding his head in the proper position. For a long 10-15 minutes I continued working on him. But after about 5 minutes of this, it became apparent that it wasn't any good. The wife was crying and saying over and over again that he was dead. My neighbor told me it was too late, but I insisted on continuing and he helped me without complaint. After a while, I too decided that it was too late for him. His pulse was gone and had been for some time. We stopped, I turned around and hugged his wife and said sorry. While we were waiting for the ambulance (which took about 30 minutes to arrive) the three of us moved his body to the bed where he was in a more dignified position. Turns out that he had a weak heart and if finally stopped working. He was 65 years old.

So that was my Sunday. I have now seen the cycle of life here in Bulgaria. I have been to the hospital hours after Cveti's baby sister was born, I have been to weddings, I have seen death here and everything in between. It is amazing to me how differently our two cultures, Americans and Bulgarians, cope with and understand death. Granted their are great number of traditions both our cultures practice before, during and after someone has died and each tradition has its own reasons for existing. One of the strangest to me was the utter acceptance of death that I saw from all involved, even his wife. Don't get me wrong here. His wife was devastated by the loss, but when she first saw him on the ground she did not check a pulse to see if he was alive or call for help. She started mourning the loss immediately. I am sure she was in shock and couldn't believe it. I have also never witnessed a death like this in the states. But my first reaction was, and I would assume most Americans would be, to see if he can be saved. Call for help, check to see if he is still alive. Basically to do everything possible to see if he can be saved. There is always hope. Right?

Ok, so say that his wife was in shock right? Then we can excuse her due to her extremely close connection with the victim. But the other people in town, the neighbors, my co workers, the cafe owners, my other friends here... they all just kind of shrugged, said he was old and he had a weak heart, and then went on with their day. It was like it was an everyday occurrence. It got about as much attention as if you told someone you cut your finger while chopping onions. A quick story followed by 1 or 2 questions and then a shrug saying "it happens."

That part for me is what scares me the most. Even the paramedics that came just had a stethoscope. They didn't bring anything else that I saw. Just listened for a heart beat, said sorry, and walked out. The utter acceptance and complacency of being sick and dying trickles down from the people to the doctors and nurses. They just kinda throw something at you, pray for the placebo effect to work, and if it doesn't say, "well, there was no hope for him." It's really something that upsets me.

But is it that the Bulgarians are doing something wrong? or are my American expectations, hopes and handling of these kinds of situations the problem? We all die right? Isn't it harder on everyone, including the person dying, if we always wish for a hope and do everything we can, only to come to the same end? Doesn't that just make it harder to deal with? If you believe there was hope and that there was something you could have done to save the person's life, doesn't that make you feel guilty for their death? The performing of CPR is an exercise taught to us to prolong the oxygen delivery to the victim's brain so when help arrives they can bring him back to life with some magical electric paddles or a quick shot of some wake-up juice. But when that fails - the ones close at the end feel guilty. Whereas the acceptance of it and the knowing that death is going to come to us all and we can never stop it from happening must make coping so much easier. I am a bit jealous of the people here that just shake their head, say tsk tsk tsk, and move on. I dunno.

But these are where my thoughts are these days.

Big entry today - big event happened.

I am taking Cveti to Sofia tomorrow to help her move into her new apartment. She will be starting school next week there and our summer of fun will be officially over. Now it's time to play the long distance relationship game.