When life sends you a tsunami… Swim!
Three weeks ago, when I was preparing to leave for my mountaineering expedition at Denali, I got the call that every child dreads: “Your mom is getting worse and is being taken to the hospital. Come back at once.”
When you hear these words about someone you love so deeply and you’ve known all your life, it’s as if the ground under your legs sways and your breath is taken away.
Three hours later, I was on a plane to Europe. As I boarded the trans-Atlantic flight, my mom was in an ambulance going to the country’s emergency hospital. I couldn’t sleep a wink on the 12 hour flight, worried what I was going to hear on the other end of the line when I landed.
Seeing my mom in the spartan conditions (and I mean embarrassingly poor facilities that looked more like a war zone than a proper hospital) broke my heart. It wasn’t only that she looked weaker and was not able to walk without assistance, it’s that she had the look of fear and defeat in her eyes.
She was happy to see me partly because she was afraid she would die without seeing me again - something that happened to her and her own mom who also lived in a different country. Mom arrived too late and now she was worried I would be late to our farewell too.
What do you do when faced with the world’s drift and with indifference? With hospital staff that is so underpaid and under-resourced, they just shrug their shoulders over an 82-year old woman. “She’s lucky to have lived that long” they would tell me as they chain-smoked in their little break room, wanting me to go away and leave them in peace.
That was the reality of the facility where my mom was stuck initially after my arrival. I couldn’t wait to get her out of there and into better care because I could clearly see that she was not getting better but getting weaker and more resigned. The malaise of that horrible place and its indifference were penetrating her being like some dark cancer and sucking her will to live.
Finally I was able to extricate her from that nightmare. I had booked exams in the country’s best private hospitals but my mom didn’t even want to hear about going to another medical facility. And I don’t blame her.
But this hospital was the real thing - they had sheets on their beds and patients didn’t have to steal pillows from other beds. They had toilet paper in their bathrooms and staff wore proper nurse and doctor smocks.
However, this time the tsunami wave that hit me and my mom was two fold. One, a doctor matter-of-factly rattled off the duration of mom’s life expectancy, reading the details of her heart exams. And two, after the exams revealed that something was seriously wrong with her lung, the doctor for some reason was adamant that we should take her to another government hospital without giving a rationale why she couldn’t be admitted in the private hospital.
I will never forget the look in my mom’s eyes when the doctor was shoving me and my mom’s wheelchair out of her cabinet, saying “I’m not going to admit her here, there is no space, you have to go to the government hospital if you want her to live”.
There are times in our lives when we are so swept by fear and shock that the only way out is to deeply surrender, listen and act decisively, in that order.
My automatic pilot turned on. There was no way I was going to take my mom away from the only place in the country where I felt she would receive proper care. She wouldn’t survive another government “hospital”.
Most things back in my home-country are accomplished by way of “throwing a fit”, threatening people with their supervisor and with mysterious connections one has to their superiors. However, my intuition guided me differently.
I mentally imagined my heart opening and I talked calmly and decisively to anyone I could find at the hospital, connecting with them through their eyes and heart to heart. Person by person, I was led to a different doctor, pleading with their patients to cut the line and making the case that my mom should be admitted to the private hospital.
When I finally pushed her wheelchair into the pulmonology wing, I was shown into an all-male hospital room. “That’s the only available bed we have right now” the nurse said.
One more heart connection later, I found out there was a private room I could pay for. When I wheeled my mom into that bright airy room with her own private bathroom and shower and a view of the mountains, my mom almost cried of happiness.
The nurse staff brought me a fold-out bed frame that I was able to shove into a corner and make my home for the next week. This hospital had the specialized equipment to diagnose my mom with blood clots in her lungs and start her immediately on blood thinners and antibiotics, which saved her life.
Thinking about that day, I realize now that mom’s life was in my hands. We often underestimate how powerful we are and how we can literally save lives when we put our mind to it.
But what will always stay with me from that experience is being with mom. Lying on the bed next to her, holding her hand and talking. About life, about our family, about her pets, about my life. My mom tells me it was that deep connection and my presence that gave her back her life force and her will to live. By the time I drove her home, she knew and I knew that she was going to recover.
To be honest with you, I’m still processing what happened. I spent over two weeks by my mom’s side but that time passed like a blur.
I was fortunate to be able to push back my Denali launch date to a different climbing team, 10 days later. I was also fortunate to be able to keep my workouts by climbing a 2,000 ft 2 mile trail on the mountain by the hospital, which was my way of airing out the hospital out of my being, re-centering and replenishing alone in the woods with the bird song.
From near the top of the mountain trail - overlooking the capital city of Sofia
Six days after getting my mom settled back in her home, I find myself in the outpost of Talkeetna Alaska, on the other side of the world. We are about to launch our Denali expedition in just a couple of days.
Even though I’m in a world that seems far removed from the hospitals and shock of what happened in Bulgaria, I still managed to find a surprising connection. The girl in the local grocery store in Talkeetna had an unmistakably Bulgarian accent. I’ll take this as a sign from the universe that I’m in the right place after all :)
