Monday:
Recently the nightmare scenario happened: I was in Bulgaria and needed surgery. Smack in the middle of the semester, with a new journalism project just off the ground, after I'd only been in the country for three weeks since returning from holiday break in America, I needed surgery. Back surgery. Where they play with your spine. I remember California 12 years ago, jogging everyday in Angeles National Park under the sun that always shined, spying the condors and bobcats, running on the dam of the Ronald Reagan Reservoir, past signs that warned visitors to beware of rattlesnakes. I remember the day I was running and felt something pull in my lower back, and the pain the next day, the first of more than ten years of back aches culminating in the Greenberg Clinic in Mladost when my doctor studied my MRI, staring at the image of the herniated disk between my L4 and L5 vertebrae like someone witnessing a car accident from afar.

"Amazing," he said.

Then, in that professionally emotionless, matter-of-fact tone doctors adopt when they are making a routine diagnosis, but you are facing one of the scariest moments of your life: "Ooooh, yeah. You'll definitely be needing surgery."

Soon, with the help of my private American insurance company, whom I'd been dutifully paying every month for the past year for just such an emergency, I'd scheduled a date for surgery in Boston, USA.

But I'd inaugurated a new phase in my predicament. On top of dealing with my pain - it is inconvenient not to be able to walk more than five paces down a snow-covered Sofia street without stopping and wincing and subjecting oneself to the stares of bus riders who wonder why that young man is stooped over like a pensioner - my Bulgarian friends and students were giving me a guilt trip for not having my surgery in Sofia.

I explained that I was going to Massachusetts General Hospital, the hospital for the Harvard University School of Medicine, undoubtably one of the best on Earth. If nothing else, Mass General was the first hospital to conduct surgery with the use of ether, painless surgery where the patient was knocked out and ignorant of what was happening to him. My kind of surgery.

Furthermore, I'd heard the horror stories.

There was the British guy in Veliko Tarnovo who despised all things British, especially the UK's National Health Service. So he had his appendix out in VT. Everything went well until, while recuperating, the nurses forgot to refill his morphine drip. In agony, with the pain level rising, he pushed the button to call for help. But no one came. The button didn't work.

No one heard his cries. Hours passed before anyone bothered to check up on him. That night his pals gave him a whistle so he could call the nurses, who were not particularly thrilled to come running at the command of a whistling foreigner.

One of my students was especially galled at my insistence of going home for treatment. Her parents are doctors. Was I questioning their competence?

I received an email from her while recuperating in the US. She suffered from a terrible lung infection soon after I left. Relationships matter in Bulgaria, she wrote. Her parents arranged for her to receive help quickly. At the hospital in Rousse, a doctor asked if she was his colleague's daughter. She said yes, and he proceeded to give her an injection. She was baffled. Why was she receiving a shot for a problem with her lungs? The doctor's eyes widened. Oops. He thought she had something else.

Luckily my student is OK, bringing a pleasant end to an otherwise unpleasant story.

Other than the two-inch scar on my back, life has almost returned to normal. As part of my physical therapy, I need to walk as much as possible. In years to come, I shall say I remember Sofia, strolling everyday in Borissova Gradina under a sun that always shined except when it was grey out, along paths that could have used a bit of landscaping, past graffiti that celebrated CSKA and Levski.