Doctors, August, and the ER

First sorry for the lack of updates. It’s been a very busy 3 weeks since my daughter was born. She just fell asleep after her 6am bottle, which gives me some time to update the site before I drift off into unconsciousness.

Doctors, August, and the ER. What do these three things have in common? Quite a bit actually.

At 8 days our daughter had diarrhea pretty bad, over 6 times a day. The next day it continued and we didn’t know if that was normal or not so we called our doctor. The message on her voice mail said she was on vacation and gave the name of another doctor who was filling in for her. So we called him, he wasn’t there (a secret vacation maybe?). So we called our family doctor, she’s on vacation. Ok, her usual replacement. She’s on vacation too. Darn. Look up pediatrician in the yellow pages. The other one in our town is on vacation.

At this point I walk down to the pharmacy. The usual pharmacist is on vacation too. Her replacement is from the neighboring city and gives me the name of a doctor there who is supposedly not on vacation. I asked her if I could buy what I call “fake milk” which is actually a milk replacement for babies with diarrhea. She tells me that we can’t take chances with a 9 day old baby and that we should go to the emergency room. So I take the bad news back home. We call the pediatrician but of course she’s not in. While I was gone my wife located another replacement doctor and she tells us to go to the emergency room.

We get there and the place is totally empty. There was one kid being treated but other than him there was nobody there. Kind of cool. Cool that no kids are sick or injured, but very cool that we don’t have to wait! So after the kid is let go our daughter got the attention of the entire staff. And at 9 days old she was bringing them in from all over. I didn’t know it took 3 nurses and a mom to give an IV to a baby but it was quite difficult to find the vein. And instead of crying our daughter fell asleep during the process. Amazing.

They weighed her and she hadn’t gained weight (we couldn’t say if she had lost weight cause we hadn’t weighed her since we left the maternity). So they did a suite of tests (urine, poop, blood) and gave her an IV. Then they said she’d have to spend the night until we get the test results back.

Now here I will point out my conspiracy theory as this isn’t the first time I’ve seen a hospital here keep someone (a few times it was me) for a few days when you know in the US you’d be kicked out the door as fast as you came in. During these vacation periods the hospitals are empty. Normal because Paris is empty, everyone is of course.. on vacation. So the hospitals keep you a few days because then they can bill you for it. Now the bill is paid 100% by the social security and insurance, but the end result is money flows into the hospital. Money that wouldn’t be there had they not kept you.

To make the rest of the story short, the tests were all normal but they wanted to keep her a second night so they could do more cultures on the urine tests to be sure there wasn’t an infection. They let her go after 2 nights. We took advantage by getting full nights sleep at home. Yes we felt like terrible parents for leaving her “alone” at the hospital but we were on zero sleep. I slept a record 16 hours that night. The pediatrics ward was mostly empty so our baby got lots of attention and wasn’t “alone” at all.

They sent us home with a prescription for a milk without cow proteins. Yes the fake milk I asked for in the first place. This seemed to help a lot. It is expensive but of course it’s paid for by the insurance which is very cool. We could afford the milk but some families couldn’t so I think it’s great that the French system provides it free of charge so that families in need don’t have to make the difficult decision of buying the special milk or buying other necessities. And in an indirect way our taxes are paying for the milk so we don’t even have to feel guilty about getting free milk.

So the lesson in all this: August 15 is a big holiday here, I think it’s the holiday where Mary goes up to heaven although I don’t remember that story from my Christian childhood. If there is one week where people use up one of their 7 weeks vacation it’s the week of August 15. The city is totally empty. It’s like a scene from a science fiction movie. But luckily the ER is empty yet adequately staffed. And once again, France has made us grateful for its wonderful health care system.