* cababarant *

Thursday, November 09, 2006

Crash course: Dutch hospital care

As a relatively healthy expat, having a baby means a sudden familiarity with hospital care in your current home country. Not only did I have a baby in the Netherlands, but we got an impromptu baptism by fire, of sorts, into hospital care when our two-week old baby (Little D) got horribly sick with a high 102 (38, in celsius) fever and had to be hospitalized for four days.

After having a cesarean at Bronovo, which went swimmingly, Little D and I stayed in the hospital for four days. I felt like I recovered a bit quicker because they left the epidural in for much longer than when I had a c-section back in Seattle, and I didn't have to take any oral painkillers afterward (in Seattle, after giving birth to the little guy, I was on codeine for a good week and a half). Other than that, basically the care was the same as back in the States.

We ended up at the children's hospital the following week, after calling the nurse hotline number. We told them about Little D's fever, to our surprise, they said "Go immediately to the Juliana children's hospital-- we'll call and let them know you are coming." This was especially scary because it is totally not a Dutch reaction to things-- we're used to the typical "tough it out" response for everything. We went straight away and noticed that the emergency room was empty and he was sent to triage right away. This is completely different from my experience at Seattle's children's hospital-- the middle-of-the-night crammed petrie-dish of a waiting room that is best avoided, in my opinion. The Juliana Kinderziekenhuis is really small, which I think is preferable for a children's hospital. After a botched lumbar tap by a resident in the ER (something you don't want to experience with your newborn!), Little D's treatment went much better, even though he had to stay four days. I had never been more worried; they kept him for meningitis tests and just to make sure the virus wasn't something life-threatening, which at two-weeks-old, any virus can be life threatening. (And there's nothing more worry-inducing than seeing your two-week-old with tubes in his nose and a giant IV in his little hand.)

The nicest thing about D's hospital stay is that we all basically got to stay with him: there is an eight-room Ronald McDonald house right in the Juliana hospital. This meant I could still breastfeed D in the ICU, and not have to be separated from my other kids and Kyle. Nothing makes you feel more separated from your family back in the States than an expat hospital stay-- it makes you feel really alone, especially if you have close relatives (my sis and my niece) and friends (our Seattle practically-family, my buddy Kay) in your hometown. So it helped for Kyle and the kids to be with us.

Lots of worried tears and prayers and four days later, we got to go home. D was diagnosed with an enterovirus that was not life-threatening (his first present from his older brother!), and we got to go home.

Recovering baby

The girl in the RMD House

Links:
Donate to the RMD House (a foundation I hadn't really considered until we needed it!)

posted by sheryl | 1:46 PM | comments (3)