Ok, well I originally intended to stay blogging, but with all the business of taking care of a wife with C-section and visiting a baby in the NICU, things kinda get passed over. I do not, however, want to forget this experience and want to share it all with Kai, therefore I'm going to recount the events of certain important days. No one else may care, but we care.
Day 5 - Monday Oct 3. Time to go home, to an empty house... My wife leaves the hospital with an empty womb, the car with an empty car seat, and us both with a vacancy sign blinking in the window of our hearts. How is that we have passed through the past 5 days with all the excitement and emotion of having a child only to go home without the bundle of joy for which we waited almost 9 months in utero and almost 1 1/2 years of attempting to conceive? No words can truly express the feeling of leaving your child behind, in an unfamiliar location, with unfamiliar people, trusting only in God to take care of him. I realize now what it is that many parents go through each year with preemies, birth complications, etc. We are not alone in this venture, but it sure feels like. Not everyone understand what goes on in your mind and heart, especially in those lonely moment at home, when you think about the joy of birth yet don't have the physical presence of what causes that joy.
After 4 very difficult days, Lisa finally got to leave the hospital, ready or not. With Kai at the other hospital across town, there was no reason to stay admitted, racking up an even larger bill. We both got up early in order to start the process, get out, go home to drop off stuff, and take mama over to see the baby for the first time in more than 48 hours. What should have been a rather simple process turned into a nightmare.
Living overseas has certain benefits and difficulties. Insurance and health care fall under both categories. Health care is very cheap and therefore that makes it easier for taking care of things, but when it comes to working with insurance from overseas and payment, that equals big ole fat headache. But the payment process wasn't the only headache we experienced this wonderful Monday.
I went to the nursery early because here in El Salvador we have to have a document from the hospital with the footprints of the child, signed by the attending physician and nurse, in order to register the child and obtain the birth certificate. They also needed this paperwork at the other hospital to prove identification of parents and child and officially, legally register him as a patient. Well, in all the excitement of the first few days, the prints never got taken and he was transferred without it. The head nurse called over there and they gave her a long list of protocol to follow. Instead of simply allowing her to send over the signed paperwork and let THEM take the prints, they told her SHE had to come over, prove her identity, show hospital credentials, and take the prints there. EESSSSH!!! So, I would have to give her a ride over to the hospital that afternoon to take care of this. Ok, whatever. Enter headache number 2....
After this fiasco in the nursery, I went to talk with payment about releasing my wife. We had (supposedly) worked out with the insurance company to pay the bill directly with the hospital without us paying it and getting reimbursed. They typically don't do this, but with the situation they were going to directly bill and pay without us getting involved. Supposedly! The billing department told me that they were not in fact going to do this, that nothing had been arranged, and that the way it worked with our companies clients was we paid the bill and got reimbursed. After 2 hours or so on the phone, we figured out that I would have to pay because there were complications. Running low on minutes on my pre-paid phone, I sat on hold with the credit card company, seeking to get them to wave the foreign transaction fee of 5% because I was getting ready to max my card with a payment from the hospital. Finally, after passing through I don't remember how many people, they agreed. Now, the bill was $12,000 and I did NOT have that kind of limit on my card. How would I pay the rest? I called our headquarters to see what we could do.
My next 2 options presented themselves: they would advance me the money (overdrafting a health account against my name and wait for the reimbursement to pay it back) or they could wire the money directly to the hospital account. I chose door #2. So, we had to work that out with client services. Meanwhile, as I sit in the office hashing through all the details, Lisa, having already checked out of the room, is sitting downstairs, alone, in a wheelchair, waiting for me in pain. It takes over an HOUR to get this part done. The hospital agrees to the arrangement, but they want a letter of guarantee for payment from our headquarters. No problem, I'm told, but there was one, or a couple. First, the appropriate hands from which a signature was required on a document were occupied in a meeting. Second, after receiving said signatures, we discovered our name had been misspelled on the letter, which the hospital would not accept. AGAIN the meeting was interrupted to acquire the John Hancock of a few VIP's in order for us to leave and see our child. Then, the letter had to be sent over to the board of directors at the hospital for authorization so we could leave. They as well were in a meeting. We started this whole marathon process at 7 am and now it is 11:15 am. Keep in mind that visiting hours at the other hospital are from 10-12 only!
So, after finally getting the discharge and the ok to leave, I gingerly speed over the notoriously horrible roads of San Salvador, careening past pot holes and speed bumps with the greatest of ease, heading to the house to drop off our stuff from the hospital because the children's hospital is in a bad part of town. Then we make our way across town, through lunch traffic, swerving past buses and taxis, arriving at Hospital Nacional de Niños Benjamin Bloom, the new home for Kai, and Lisa's first sight of the facility. Now, being a government-funded hospital it has the best staff and the best machines; however, apparently the funded part of the hospital only goes that far because aesthetically it looks like a nightmare: peeling paint, graffiti, stained walls, missing/stained ceiling tiles, broken sheetrock, etc. Yeah, this place needs Extreme Makeover Hospital Edition!
So, Lisa and I make our way through the maze of people in order to get upstairs so she can see Kai for the first time in 60 hours. Another hurdle we have to go over, which isn't really that big of a deal, is that we have to go through a social worker to get our permission card to enter the hospital. In order to obtain said card, we have to have that foot print document (which we don't have yet), but they had talked with the other hospital and were making an exception for us. One small problem: when I admitted Kai on the previous Friday night, they only took my information and not Lisa's. The social worker explains to us the odd curiosity of having a father's name on file but no mother's name, something unheard of and impossible for a newborn. Typically, she says, we have the mother's name and have to figure out the father (possibly a comment on the social situation in El Salvador?), but here we have the father's name and no mother. Obviously we are the parents of the only WHITE child in the hospital, but officially we don't have Lisa on record as a parent. At this point we're both thinking the unthinkable: they aren't going to let her in because she isn't listed as a parent. Thank God that didn't happen. I just have to bring that paperwork back over first thing in the morning to make the name changes.
So, we finally get in to see Kai and Lisa is ecstatic. After spending quite a bit of time there with Kai, we reluctantly pull ourselves away to go home, to our empty house. That is quite possibly the hardest thing to do. After being in the hospital and having visitors, going home without a child to an empty house is rather difficult.
Well, we arrive home and I had called to some friends in order to borrow a couple twin beds. You see our house is 2 stories, with all the bedrooms upstairs, and Lisa can't climb stairs for a while. Solution? Put twin beds in the living room and have a husband/wife camp out downstairs for a couple weeks. Perfect! So, we settle down into our beds and finally find some sleep after a VERY long day of pure craziness. What in the world can the next day hold?
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