The Hospital Experience

So... the hospital.

      1.It smells like a shady gas station. Smoking is allowed in all the lounges, but not in the rooms.

2. It's... cleanish. Most rooms aren't swept and haven't been in a while, but you'll always see people mopping. Yesterday I saw a cleaning lady come and do a very poor mopping job of a very unswept floor and just push around cookie crumbs and leave the floor really wet. So- I'm not sure how much good that really did.
3. The clothes. In America nurses wear clean scrubs of unassuming colors- blue, green, purple, etc. Here the nurses wear bright red scrubs- also clean, and you can see them coming from a mile away. :) Everyone else, EVERYONE ELSE is in pajamas. People look way more classy on the street than in the hospital- even the professionals. In America doctors wear scrubs with lab coats, or nice slacks with a button up shirt and tie. Here- they wear legit bathrobes- dirty bathrobes, and pajama bottoms. They are obviously pajamas because they have that random print of cats or something silly- and they're flannel. I was trying to get creative for a while and rationalize how the robes could be some sorts of lab coats- not bathrobes. I can't do it. They are way too obviously bathrobes, with stains. And- all the patients wear pajamas too- the hospital doesn't provide any gowns or anything- and people just want to be comfortable.
4. Everything is very very ghetto. The drawers in rooms are these metal things with paint seriously peeling. I was looking at the walls- and the very tops of them by the ceiling were all nice and white, but the rest look like how walls might look... in one of those outside bathrooms of a shady gas station where you have to ask for the key from the cashier- tons of paint peeling with a yellow color underneath, lots of darker marks everywhere. The beds and cribs are all made of metal that was once painted white... probably 50 years ago, and are now half white, half dark brown in patches where the paint has come off. They look the same as the little cupboards. I thought to myself, “Prisons in America are better kept up than this specialized hospital for children in the heart of Romania's second largest and most industrialized city.” The cribs really do look like cages with rusted metal bars- sometimes there is even metal netting- also with paint peeling.
5. Privacy. Non-existant. In America each patient usually gets their own room, and if not- at least a nice curtain. And the doctors and nurses aren't allowed by law to tell one patient who the patient is on the other side of the curtain without that patient's consent. In Romania, there are 3-4 beds to a room, as many as they can pack in there- and there's one bed to each patient (so, each child at this children's hospital), and at least one parent will often stay with their children during their time in the hospital- but the family doesn't get extra beds- so it is very common to have three parents with their three children in the same teeny room, and the parents are sleeping with their children in their cribs. There's not seats either, so when you first walk into a room, usually you see three parents all sitting in their cribs with their babies. Just chillin. On top of that- for all the rooms on the same side of the same wing of the hospital, instead of solid walls between all the rooms, there are big windows between them all- so you can look down and see all 10 rooms on that side of that wing with all of 3 families in each room. And- they all look at you when you walk into a room and eye the free diapers you are giving the orphans. Mothers nursing their babies don't care about modesty- and they don't use blankets or coats to try and cover up. Exposure doesn't seem to bother them. All 30 families down the wing can see them- but they seem to neither try and flaunt their breasts nor try and cover them up. It's like it's nothing. Just another body part like your hand or your nose. So crazy.
6. In America, once you're healthy enough to run around- you can go home. Here, parents with unexplained conditions for their children come in with enough clothes and food to last a week, and they end up staying for anywhere from 3 days to multiple weeks. There's no assurance that the doctor will get to them every day, so some have been mutiple days in the hospital with a kid that seems all better, but they're not quite sure because the doctor hasn't gotten to them yet. It's not uncommon to see the hallways lined with parents standing at their doors, asking why they haven't been visited yet. They just keep staying, even though it might just be an unexplained wheezy cough. Some children are severe, but many are not. It seems sometimes like a bunch of out-patients that just like staying the night. I wonder if it costs them money.
7. Records. In America- it's all computerized, and just admission into the hospital takes a good 40 minutes to get a history down. And it's probably gotten longer with Obamacare. And if you want a detailed record of your health history, you can go down to a hospital's records department and request them to pull your file out of an organized file cabinet from a shelf. In Romania, there's a Secretary's room on every floor- that makes me stressed just looking at it. There's shelves alright- with stacks and stacks and stacks of white printer paper with information written on it at one point or another, stacked horizontally and rubber banded when the stack got about 2 inches thick. Then laid horizontally, flat on a shelf, and other stacks are stacked on top of that. I couldn't see any labeling. And the entire room is shelves of these papers. I never want to be asked to find a paper in there.
8. Sanitation. In America, even if you are just delivering 3 cups of water to 3 patients 2 rooms in a row, you have to sanitize your hands when you enter every room and when you leave it- so 6 hand sanitations. Here- well- with 3 sick babies in the same room they're bound to get what the other has. And then the shared bathrooms are splattered with water from a disfunctioning shower, smell like urine, and don't have any soap at the sink. Bottle nipples are exchanged a lot- and they try to wipe it off in between kids. It's just so different.

But- at least they have a hospital. Americans are so spoiled. :) I couldn't help but be so grateful I'll be giving birth to my children... not here. But in a clean, private, hospital room. I'm really looking forward to the clean part. :) And the baby part. More on that in a few years.....