It is curious to read that so many visitors are coming to Bulgaria for medical tourism. The thought of recovering on Zlatni Pyasutsi (Golden Sands) from a round of plastic surgery is amusing to say the least.

The healthcare situation for Bulgarians and long-term residents is a reality far removed from the dazzle of the plastic surgeon’s knife. Indeed, what I have experienced of the Bulgarian health system was shock to my system. It resulted in me preparing healthy, life-sustaining meals, so that I no longer needed a tummy tuck in a swish private clinic.

The surgery in need of surgery
I went to register at the local doctor’s surgery in the next village; we had only been in the country a couple of months, but with two young children to care for, it seemed like the responsible thing to do.

It took me an hour to find the surgery. I drove round in circles foolishly looking for a red cross or a sign with the word “doctor” or “lekar”. How ignorant of me to expect such sophistication. The doctor’s office was a small house set back from the main road in an overgrown garden. A donkey grazed on the “lawn” adjacent the building and my sons found a dead mouse on the path. It was very different from the modern red brick surgeries of the UK.

I entered through a gnarled door, which was once white, but now clearly in need of emergency treatment: it had turned to a sickly cream. I tentatively looked around for a reception desk, but a fellow patient pointed to a rickety chair in front of another worn out door. I had not expected classy consulting rooms and neon info boards, but I certainly had not expected a damp, dingy corridor to double as a waiting room. I began to miss the lack of ancient waiting room literature, something I had always scorned for being tattered and out-of-date back home, but it had served its purpose and allowed you to hide your identity and illness behind the pages of a My Weekly. Here, I was left staring at more damp patches and peeling paint on the ceiling, while other attendees stared at me trying to imagine what ailed me.

When the doctor came out of her room, the next patient in line stood up and disappeared into her cabinet, while she chatted in the corridor with some of her regulars about their illnesses.

The door closed again and I listened to the doctor shouting at the poor man who had gone before me. I had no idea what she was saying, but his illness must have been self-inflicted, because she did not sound happy – so much for a calm bedside manner.

Meeting the doctor and the dentist
My turn came all too quickly. I entered the room, to find that I was not alone. The doctor’s sidekick, another female, stopped folding papers, smiled and started to listen to my conversation about my family’s registration. The doctor was very nice; she reminded me of a female Dr Barnard who had studied hard at medical school to pursue a career helping Obrochishte’s sick and unfortunate, rather than sell her soul to a private practice where she could earn three times her current salary.

She tried to explain that my children needed certain tests to enter Kindergarten, but the linguistic challenge was too much and she lead me out of the surgery into a neighbouring room where a woman sat smoking over some dental equipment. The smell of stale nicotine hung in the air; a tarnished metal ashtray was overflowing with cigarette butts. “Hello I am the dentist, the doctor cannot understand you,” the buxom young woman said in English. She was a great help in explaining the ins and outs of the Kindergarten registration scheme, but was she really qualified to poke around in people’s mouths?

Returning home, I was left with thousands of unanswered questions; what would happen if I have an embarrassing problem, would the whole village hear about it within minutes of me entering the surgery? How would my husband cope if he had to expose himself to an audience that included a nicotine-addicted dentist and the doctor’s secretary, who turned out to be one of the mums from school? If one of us needed life-saving surgery, would the operation theatre be hygienic enough to stop us catching a disease, or would my husband be able to puff away while the surgeon scrubbed up?

Dentistry to the sound of MTV
My first encounter with Bulgarian dentistry kept me putting off our usual six-month check-up. In the end it was two years and the need for a filling that forced me to seek out the services of a dentist. Rather than go local again, I decided to try the dental tourism route and opted for one of the private practices belonging to a Swiss company called Dentaprime.

An attractive multi-lingual girl greeted me and told me that the dentist would be able to see me in 10 minutes if that was ok, then she showed me into a plush open-plan waiting area, where I was bowled over in amazement. This wasn’t a dental surgery; it was a work of art. The laminate flooring toned perfectly with the exquisite, cherry red leather sofas, the soothing earth tone walls surrounding the light airy waiting area gave a sense of calm to the experience. There was a selection of up-to-date reading material in a variety of languages and a plasma screen TV, which was tuned in to Cartoon Network to entertain my little angels.

Inside the consulting room, no fewer than three people gathered round to peer into our mouths. As the senior member of the party looked into my younger son’s mouth, she asked if he ground his teeth in his sleep, to which I replied, “Yes, he says it makes him feel like a horse.” She checked my eldest son and commented “Hmm, another teeth grinder, but no caries.” Then, after a thorough inspection, which incidentally was free, she informed me that one son needed a filling and an immediate orthodontic brace to stretch his jaw before his second teeth came through. My other son needed a protective coating of fluoride on his adult teeth and a support for a front tooth, which may protrude as other teeth grow. Both sons were in urgent need of gum shields to protect their teeth from all their night grinding.

Panicked by the thought of this dental nightmare, I asked what the costs would be to put everything right. I needed a heart specialist after I received the quote: 171 euro for each gum shield, 55 euro for the filling, 125 euro for the front tooth support and 24 euro per tooth for the fluoride. Thirty-five euro seemed very cheap for the scale and polish I needed and I couldn’t think about how much the orthodontist would cost for the jaw brace. All in our entire quote came to a staggering 721 euro; in real money nearly 1500 leva, or the cost of a decent plasma screen TV.

I left in a hurry, mumbling something about making an appointment and checked into a local dentist in Balchik.

Dentistry to the wail of bTV
The Balchik dentist was amiable and spoke some English. Her surgery also doubled as the reception desk and office and you could watch TV while she fixed your cavities. Even though the cavity in need of fixing was a milk tooth, I asked for a white filling for my little boy – standard in the UK now, but it caused a few raised eyebrows here and I’m sure someone in the waiting room mouthed the words “lottery winner”.

Standard treatment is free if you have an EGN and pay national insurance, but it was somewhat like my experience with the construction of Bulgarian roads – it looks great once the tarmac is laid, but subject to holes a couple of weeks later. My son had his tiny cavity drilled and filled three times. When the third attempt dropped out, we decided not to return. There’s only so much drilling a kid can take without a pain-numbing injection.

So now I’m back where I started, in need of healthcare, yet not daring to use the state system and too poor to join the leagues of medical tourists.