The "do it yourself" mentality needs buy-in at least from your team and a spirit of frequent refactoring otherwise you're being difficult... I think if you can get one reviewer to ok the merge, then merge it, fix followup issues subsequently (as new tickets you can pick up or someone else) but if you can't even get one other person to sign off... that's a problem if you then merge anyway. Ultimately what is merged without signoff can be reverted without signoff, but hey, you might at least get someone to take a look at it then.
Just getting to code reviews at all is a huge win for a team, every process after that (including "definition of done" for reviews as well as tickets, merging without signoff (I do it for small trivial things) and the post's "be nicer" guidelines) should be discussed as a team in retros. Something that's worked for me (mostly on remote/distributed) for making sure reviews don't stay in limbo is as an author to be a bug and aggressively ask specific individuals for a review, even going so far as to schedule time to hop on a video screen sharing call if some background context and walkthrough is helpful. But the team needs to be accepting of this, otherwise again you're being difficult...
At a team level another successful practice was for everyone to block off a convenient (not identical) chunk of time once a week to dedicate to making sure you have no pending reviews waiting on you, and also letting you say "please wait until [time] or see if someone else is free" when you're busy and the author bugs you. Sometimes a good review of a large change takes more than a focused hour or two -- it's fine to push back for smaller changes, but if you just block off some time, you can plan for it and just do the big review and then a limbo period will just be at most a week.
Just getting to code reviews at all is a huge win for a team, every process after that (including "definition of done" for reviews as well as tickets, merging without signoff (I do it for small trivial things) and the post's "be nicer" guidelines) should be discussed as a team in retros. Something that's worked for me (mostly on remote/distributed) for making sure reviews don't stay in limbo is as an author to be a bug and aggressively ask specific individuals for a review, even going so far as to schedule time to hop on a video screen sharing call if some background context and walkthrough is helpful. But the team needs to be accepting of this, otherwise again you're being difficult...
At a team level another successful practice was for everyone to block off a convenient (not identical) chunk of time once a week to dedicate to making sure you have no pending reviews waiting on you, and also letting you say "please wait until [time] or see if someone else is free" when you're busy and the author bugs you. Sometimes a good review of a large change takes more than a focused hour or two -- it's fine to push back for smaller changes, but if you just block off some time, you can plan for it and just do the big review and then a limbo period will just be at most a week.