A 19-year-old London woman managed to fulfill her dream of being a doctor without actually going to medical school simply by walking into a hospital and posing as a physician.

Kreuena Zdrafkova, a Bulgarian-born woman living in West London’s Ealing district, had always dreamt of becoming a doctor and recently decided that she wasn’t going to let a minor detail like lacking any medical training stand in her way. Earlier this year, she put on a white robe and rubber gloves, confidently walked into Ealing Hospital and started acting like one of the physicians there. Throughout the day, she was seen examining medical instruments, getting into an ambulance and even administering an unknown substance to a patient, without anyone noticing that she wasn’t really a doctor. She was so confident that she could pull off her dream job long-term that she came back to the hospital three days later, this time with a stethoscope around her neck.

Photo: Alexandr Polvany/Unsplash

Zdrafkova carried out her short stint as a doctor back in April before getting arrested when she showed up for her second day at “work”, but she was only recently sentenced to 12 months of probation and 15 days of rehab activities. She was also banned from entering any NHS (National Health Service) facility except in case of a health emergency.

The woman’s lawyer tried to paint her as a young migrant who simply wanted to fulfill her lifelong dream of being a doctor, without really endangering anyone, which may have convinced the judge to go easy on her in his sentencing.

She’s talking to him, leaning down, almost reassuring him and providing the treatment,” Zdrafkova’s lawyer said about her interaction with a patient. “At one point she even has a tissue and is wiping his face. It really is almost living out her dream of being a doctor.”

Photo: Ani Kolleshi/Unsplash

During her day as a doctor at Ealing Hospital, the 19-year-old woman, who introduced herself as ‘Dr. Christina’, treated a patient who had been brought into the hospital under arrest and was under the supervision of two police officers. That didn’t intimidate Zdrafkova in the slightest, though! Hospital CCTV footage shows her administering a syringe of an unknown substance into the patient’s mouth. Luckily, the substance didn’t have any negative effects on them.

We have covered similar cases before, such as that of the fake doctor who used YouTube tutorials to operate on patients, or the South African youth who became a TiTok star by impersonating a doctor.