Doc, 82, fights ‘the horror’

– Infectious disease specialist Dr Maria Bogoeva was ready to hang up her scrubs and retire from her post in a small provincial hospital in western Bulgaria when the coronavirus pandemic struck.

A year later, the 82-year-old is still on the Covid-19 front line, despite her age – one of the oldest doctors known to still be practising in the whole country.

She is one of a legion of older medics battling “the horror” of the virus in Bulgaria’s overstretched healthcare system.

“My age? I don’t feel it. I want to work. If I see that I am no longer useful, I’ll bow out,” the energetic doctor said.

She sports ruby-red dyed hair, jewellery and a determined look – she looks after her appearance despite “the daily stress”.

“Just because I work in a hospital, doesn’t mean that I neglect myself,” she smiles.

The European Union’s poorest member state suffers from a severe shortage of medical staff as young medical graduates emigrate to the West in search of better career opportunities.

So, Bogoeva feels she has little choice but to stay at the bedside of her Covid-19 patients in the municipal hospital in Dupnitsa, about 60 kilometres southwest of the capital Sofia.

To sit at home doing nothing in good health at a time when patients need her expertise the most is simply “unthinkable”, she says.

“Was I supposed to let people die? The hospital had no other infection disease specialist,” the doctor explains in a sober voice.

Many other elderly doctors across Bulgaria have made the same choice over the past year, some at the cost of their own lives.

Bogoeva’s colleague, another elderly doctor but 15 years younger, feared for her health and retired after the first wave of the virus.

But Bogoeva says she is not afraid: “They forbid me to approach the patients,” she says, standing at the door of a ward.

She determines the right treatment to administer based on patient data collected by the rest of the hospital personnel.

“I probably have some natural immunity. I’ve lived through so many infections during my life,” she says.

Even so, she shudders, there is something “inexplicable” about this virus and she has seen the devastation it can wreak. –