THE YOUNG DOCTOR | ELLIE ILIEVA
Ellie picks up the phone and her bright big smile fills up the video call screen. She is wearing her bright yellow stethoscope around her neck and her Mickey Mouse uniform. This morning she woke up at 5:45 am to leave her house and travel to Pleven for her morning shift at the emergency room in one of the local hospitals.
“I wear colorful uniforms because kids like them. They feel less scared when they come for treatment,” she says.
Ellie Ilieva is a second-year student at the Medical University in Pleven. She is only 19 years old, but since the coronavirus outbreak, she volunteered in a European project to be an intern in a local ER.
“The emergency room is so much more fun than the other departments. It’s very exciting because you never know what is going to happen when you come to work, and it’s usually all kinds of crazy scenarios,” she responses with no doubt at all.
Ellie is walking down the grey corridors of the hospital and smiles at everyone around her. She enters a patient’s room. There is an old man, who fell in the bathroom and broke his head and Ellie needs to stitch up the wound with a suture. Cases like this are regular but Ellie’s prior experience helps her do the job with precision.
“Internships are only done after one’s third year in medical school, but even though I was the only first-year back when I started, I had the experience to treat mild traumas and perform the basics,” she says proudly after she was done with the patient.
The Bulgarian hospitals are in heavy demand for staff in emergency rooms. Especially now, as the country is going into its second lockdown, Ellie is needed more than ever. Her passion for assisting people in their hardships urges her to balance successfully both her studies and the 8–12-hour shifts.
“It’s not easy,” she sighs, “indeed we receive poor protective equipment, and more and more people who are COVID-19 positive visit our ER, but that doesn’t stop me, because the healthcare system is struggling. My second year is important and hard, but I manage.”
The video chat is disturbed because Ellie gets a call from a nurse — there is a mother seeking help for her 1-year-old baby in the ER. Ellie rushes back inside the hospital to meet the panicked mom. The baby had swallowed a coin and Ellie must think fast on what to do next.
This is what an emergency room is like every day — stressful, dynamic, and intriguing. Sometimes decisions need to be taken fast, and often even the most experienced doctors do not always know what they are doing — they just try it out and hope it works for the benefit of the patient.
“I was so scared for the baby. In a moment like this you realize you are holding the life of a child in your hands and that child is so helpless and it counts on you to do the right thing,” Ellie shares after the baby is safely taken for treatment and its life is out of danger.
Еllie wants to be a neurosurgeon one day. “It‘s addicting to read about neurology because the more you explore, the more you realize how little you know and that‘s amazing,” she shares while staring at a human body poster in the ER room.
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Monica Boyadzhieva studies a double major in Journalism and Mass Communication and Political Science and International Relations at the American University in Bulgaria. She met the interviewee subject by chance and was truly inspired by the passion of the young doctor so she wanted to tell her story.
