Saturday, July 23, 2011

Hospital hunting

They say that babies take possession of your time. That the first 40 days after their births you would hardly have time to take a shower. That in the first two years of their lives you would forget what sleeping eight hours in a row means….


By keeping on repeating it to us, we started resigning ourselves to that idea. ‘Ormai la frittata é fatta’ (now the damage is done) - we tell each other with resignation…


But nobody actually told us that babies take possession of your time even before they are born! And that the more you do, the more still needs to be done!


We have just (finally) found him/her a nursery*, and we just bought him/her a baby carriage** - thinking: ‘Ok, the most of it is done’ - that people start asking us: ‘Have you decided where you will deliver?’.


We were suddenly confronted with a number of dilemmas and choices to make. Initially we thought that the choice was simply between a public hospital and a private clinic. That is true, but not as simple as it may sound. Soon we discovered in fact that you can deliver privately in a public hospital (sounds like an oxymoron, but it is not). But that at the same time, that even if you decide to deliver privately in a public hospital, you are not guaranteed to have a spot.


The alternative, a private clinic, seemed at this point a more straightforward solution (you pay, you get a place), until we discovered that, as many business concerns in Italy, some clinics close in August. Vacation.


But even for those that remain open, it is not easy to understand how much they cost. Each clinic has a different agreement with each insurance company and offers different ‘packages’ - and between deductibles, ceilings, eligible expenses, ineligible expenses, etc. etc., it is practically impossible to understand how much you eventually are going to spend…


Surely we’ll end up solving this issue as we did for the nursery and the carriage, but already knowing - in the deep of our hearts - that as soon as we have solved this issue, there will be a new one to face…


(*) By the way, and for the records, not the one described in one of our previous posts.


(**) Well, you would say, what’s the problem: you enter in a shop that sells baby carriages and you purchase one. Well, believe us, that’s not that easy…

4 comments:

  1. Time for yourself (and for yourselves), sleep...and MONEY! I am not sure which is the most painful loss, but all of them occur when you get a baby. Eventually time will come back as well as sleep (provided you don't get insomnia or you do the crazy thing of a second baby). What will NOT come back is the third one.
    Please note down how much you saved last year (August 2010-July 2011). We will review next July and you'll see the effects on your wallet...and the following July and the next twenty years until you get them out of the house...
    ...Tic Tac Tic Tac...
    e.

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  2. hi emanuele, you involuntarily anticipated the topic of one of the next posts: i have been for the first time in one of these bimbo-shops, and... oh my god: how much baby is going to cost me!

    but i have already a plan: if baby is going to be a baby-boy, he will become a professional football player, and will sustain the whole family :)

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  3. on your purchases, I hope you didn't fork over as much on the pram as some of our friends recently did - $4k, which is more than their car is worth!

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  4. i wanted to, unfortunately (or fortunately), the only baby carriage that fitted in our elevator costed only a few hundred dollars...

    (ref. http://www.matteoandmathilde.org/2011/06/habemus-incunabula.html)

    ;)

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