October 15 was supposed to be just another ordinary day. But even before dawn I had a sense it will turn out to be a forever life-changing day in a significant way.
I was tossing and turning in bed well into the early hours of the morning trying to fall asleep. Eventually I drifted away, and that’s when this strange dream that seemed all too real was the first hint of what was yet to come.
I was dreaming that I couldn’t fall asleep and in the darkness of the night I could feel these nasty bugs crawling under my skin biting and stinging my hands, slowly spreading up my arms to the rest of my body. At 2am I suddenly woke up and stood up in bed with a sense of urgency.
At this point I could not yet tell if this was real or if it was still a dream. I ran to the bathroom to check myself in the mirror. To my relief I could see nothing unusual under my skin though I still had this uneasy anxious feeling that something is just not right.
No sooner than I drift away again, my phone starts ringing.
Dazed and still confused about what’s real and what’s not, I could see my cousin’s name on the call display. I tried to answer but I kept tapping the wrong button on my phone. The ringing stopped and that uneasy feeling suddenly came over me again thinking: nobody calls you at 2:30 in the morning with good news.
On the same day, 5,000 miles away in Romania, my sister had a later morning than usual. She got up at 10am in a bit of a panic wanting to go to the other room and check on my dad who’s been half paralyzed from a serious stroke 30 years ago. She got up and turned on the light...
...and that’s when it happened.
There were three people in the house when the explosion happened, my dad Eugene, my sister Gabriela, her boyfriend Lori, and her little dog Sofi.
Turns out, two days earlier the garbage truck backed up for it’s normal pickup and hit the gas meter on the side of my sister’s house. The gas company was called in to fix the damage. They replaced the gas meter and left. In their haste, it doesn't seem they performed the necessary tests to ensure the gas leak has been completely fixed, or if they did, perhaps they did not pay enough attention to it. As a result they failed to discover that a crack in the pipe they thought was now repaired extended below ground.
Over the next two days the gas kept accumulating in my sister’s basement slowly creeping into the rest of the house. By the time she turned on the light that morning, there was enough gas in the house that the tiniest of sparks created by the light being turned on caused such a powerful explosion that a good part of the roof was blown right off and those heavy clay shingles were sent flying more than 100 feet in the air.
What’s astonishing is what happened only moments after my sister got blown right off her feet.
She got up from the rubble and ran straight to my dad’s room. He normally needs help to get out of bed, and he certainly can’t run out of the house. Gabriela who’s only about 130 pounds soaking wet picks him up, all of about 220 pounds of dead weight, and carries him out to the street where they waited for the fire trucks and ambulance to arrive.
Miraculously, my dad got away from it all without so much as a scratch, as did the little dog. And like any other stubborn old man he even refused to let the paramedics take him to get checked at the hospital.
He was only concerned with the well being of his 'little' girl. He was so happy to see her talking to the paramedics in the ambulance and after her superhuman feat he thought she was going to be okay.
What he had no way of knowing was that only moments after the ambulance took her away, she collapsed with 3rd degree burns on over 30% of her body, and never fully regained consciousness.
She was placed into a medically induced coma to make her treatments possible without the immense pain that was sure to follow.
Her prognosis went from promising to hopeless, then to the point where she had to be hooked up to a heart and lung machine as her organs began to fail one by one.
Her condition remained unchanged for several weeks. Then one day she opened her eyes, scanned the ceiling of the hospital room for just a few seconds and fell asleep again.
In hopes of stimulating her recovery, my nephew Dean—my sister’s son and I sent a couple of video messages to one of the nurses who agreed to show them to my sister the next time she opened her eyes. She recorded my sister’s reaction to the videos and it really broke my heart to see her struggling to understand what is happening around her.
Even though her eyes were open, she didn’t seem to respond to any kind of stimulus.
Two more weeks go by before we get the great news that she could finally breathe on her own, only to have our hopes dashed again as she deteriorated back to a critical condition only a day later. This seemed to be the pattern, one step forward, two steps back and that went on for 82 days.
On January 4th, after just having fought off a bout with sepsis, the infection came back, but this time her body was too weak to fend it off again. Gabriela had succumbed to her injuries and passed away only three months before her birthday to the exact day.
An official investigation is ongoing and criminal charges are to follow but after speaking with the lead investigator this entire process will take another six months to a year.
Nothing in the house was salvaged. My dad needed daily care far beyond my 79-year-old uncle’s ability where he ended up staying temporarily.
The house itself is also not salvageable, and I learned that they had no home insurance as the premiums were unaffordable especially once my sister got laid off from work due to Covid-19 lockdowns and she was too proud to ask for help.
In order for my dad to be able to collect his pension or medication he needs to have a new set of IDs issued but the bureaucracy makes even this task monumental for him. Just picture my uncle—one old geezer—trying to take my dad—the other old geezer to get new IDs issued, only to be told by a jaded bureaucrat who hates her job that he needs at least one piece of photo ID to have his photo ID reissued—and this, after having explained to her that they lost everything in the fire.
Eventually the gas company picked up the cost of having my dad placed in a care home. What I didn't know was that this is an institution where old people with dementia and Alzheimer's are placed when they become unmanageable and too hard to care for by their families. Furthermore, the care contract is very limited to daily living and medical related outings (when Covid-19 safe). This of course makes my dad feel like he is in some sort of prison without freedom of movement, simply because the terms of the care contract don't allow for that type of expense. This is also prohibitive when it comes to our efforts to engage with lawyers and other necessary paperwork preparation that requires him to leave the care home.
There are at least 10 other people in each room, no privacy to mourn or to even have any thoughts and prayers in silence. To top it all off, any personal items as seemingly insignificant as socks and underwear, toothbrush and toothpaste that were my dad's only newly acquired possessions after the explosion went missing from his drawer. When he complained, the staff simply said the only thing they could have: "These are people who don't know where they are or what they're doing, do you really want me to take the underwear off of them and return it to you?"
The last time I called him he was crying because he was cold and wet. The line to the bathroom is too long and most of the time he can't make it in time before he urinates himself. There are times when he can't get out of bed because of being paralysed so by the time he gets any help he ends up urinating in bed. If that's not enough to take away a man's dignity, not having had the bed changed until the end of the day due to staff shortages is downright demoralizing.
I need to find a way to give him his dignity back for whatever time he has left with us at least until we come to some sort of resolution with the gas company.
My dad was a single father and raised me and Gabriela all on his own. He was so strong, so loving and so caring that not for a single second growing up did we ever feel like we were any less of a family.
This should not be his fate.
One choice would be to bring my dad here to Canada, but given his medical history and inability to get any type of health insurance, this would be an enormously expensive proposition that only successful litigation against the gas company can bring about.
My sister divorced her husband after about 30 years of physical and psychological abuse that she hid well from everyone, and she only met a new wonderful man (Sebastian though he likes to be called Lori, who was also a victim of the explosion) in the last couple of years. She finally found happiness and as it turns out she barely got to enjoy any of it.
This should not have been her fate.
The gas company is a multinational, multibillion dollar corporation based in Germany and has more than 55 million customers throughout Europe, yet the extent of their cooperation stopped with covering six months of care home expenses for my dad. Also, the threat of even this being taken away by the end of this month becomes very real when it is used as a preemptive bargaining chip ahead of any litigation against them.
The fact that several months have now passed and I have yet to hear from a single representative of the company with so much as a "Sorry for your loss" is perplexing to me. It would have been such a small gesture, yet it could carry so much weight.
I have contacted lawyers both in Romania and Germany, and from talking to them it looks like we'll have the battle of our lives ahead of us against an army of corporate lawyers. This too has an upfront and quite prohibitive cost.
The feeling of helplessness being so far away can be overwhelming at times and the time zone difference makes for many sleepless nights just trying to get anything done over there with any efficacy.
Life can be full of surprises, not all of them good, but we are all connected in so many ways. We have the same red blood running through our veins. We experience love, joy, and pain the same way. And we all want for us and our families to have a good life. That morning at 10am when my sister turned on the light, it was 2am here in Canada, the exact moment I woke up from that ominous and all too real dream.
I apologize for rambling on this long, but if you can help in any way, perhaps making a small donation or perhaps help share this with as many people as possible, you will forever have my humble gratitude and appreciation.
Any funds we can raise will go a long way in changing my dad's living situation for the better if available at the same home care or finding a better one, at least while all legal avenues take their course; mitigating the threat of the gas company pulling the funding for covering the cost of the home care in the face of litigation; retainers for attorneys both in Romania and Germany to take on this gargantuan battle, and perhaps if the Covid situation improves, to allow me to go there and stay long enough to oversee, testify if need be, and to accomplish anything of use.
Thank you and please know that it is a privilege to be able to call you friends.
Sincerely,
Zoltan
