Bulgaria 2007: A Bulgarian Tetanus Shot

I know, it sounds like the punchline to an ‘ethnic’ joke. But it wasn’t funny.

Trigrad Gorge, like probably thousands of similarly dramatic sites around the world, is also known as “Devil’s Throat,” and it is this particular maw of hell that Orpheus is said to have used on his ill-fated visit to the underworld.

It would have paid for me to spend a little more time looking back; as it was, I managed to stumble over a low stone wall and hit the ground hard. Barry, thankfully, unpacked the bandages he’d sensibly brought along (the bus had no first-aid kit), but by the time our day was done–well, I won’t bore you with the gory details. So before supper, I poured out my boots, wrung out my pant legs, and asked Yoav and Maria to arrange for a doctor to come to the hotel.

And this being eastern Europe, a doctor came. (Try that on this side of the Atlantic!) He quickly decided that I should have the wounds cleaned in a sterile environment, so I got to ride in the ambulance back to the hospital (no sirens, unfortunately). Yoav and Maria handled the paperwork while I was escorted directly into the treatment room; a young doctor took one look at me and used what may have been his only two words of English: “Relax. OK,” before turning me over to a nurse, again, immediately. She gently and efficiently washed the gory bits, declared them nothing more than scrapes, and gave me a tetanus shot.

We were out of there in well under an hour, and I was all cleaned up and feeling much more confident. And the cost of it all? Zero. I was impressed. Still am.