It’s been a while since I have updated on Baby Covington, mainly because it’s been quite a while since we’ve seen an actual doctor.  Today I finally got to meet my new doctor here in Fayetteville.  It was great to finally deal with all of these things in English, and also have the assurance that they are doing everything they should be doing.  I think that before today I had already had at least twice the number of ultrasounds that the average woman has during her whole pregnancy in the States, but they went ahead and did another one, just to make sure that they were getting the same measurements and estimated date of delivery that the doctors got in Bulgaria, and to confirm that the baby is indeed a boy like the Bulgarians said (yes, he is still a boy).

We were very pleased to get some great pictures this time around.  Although we always saw good images of the baby on the ultrasound screens in Bulgaria, the doctors always chose the strangest pictures to actually give us.  We have quite a few pictures of the baby’s heart, a picture of the top of his head, and his rear end.  Today we actually got a nice profile view.  He’s coming right along, and is actually in the 50th percentile as far as size and weight go, which the doctor said was great, since that means he’s right on target and not too big or too little.

Here’s the face.  It’s a little harder to make this picture out, but if you look closely you can see one of the eyes pretty well, and I think the nose, too.

And I really liked seeing his cute little feet.  He seemed to be just chilling out during the ultrasound.  He was laying on his back and had his arms up above his head and his legs crossed at the ankles, like he was just lounging and having a good old time.

And finally, confirmation that Baby Covington is a boy.

And finally, the long-awaited picture of the belly.  It has been a long time coming, because honestly, there hasn’t been a whole lot to show off.  It’s still pretty small, but it has changed a lot in just the past couple weeks.  This picture was taken last Thursday, at 23 weeks.  I will be glad when it gets a little bigger and I stop hearing questions like “Where’s your baby?” and “Are you sure you’re really pregnant?”.

In remembrance of Bulgaria, I thought I’d do a little comparison of the experience here versus the experience in Bulgaria.  Like James said, the differences in medical care are like night and day.

Language: This one’s pretty obvious, but here I am able to understand 100% of what my doctor says.  None of the doctors I saw in Bulgaria (and I saw three different ones) knew hardly a word of English.

Waiting Rooms: For one, waiting rooms actually exist in all clinics in the U.S. (as far as I know), and these waiting rooms can be pretty plush.  In Bulgaria, a person typically just waits in line right outside their doctor’s door.  At the second hospital I went to, I actually did have to make appointments and there was a waiting room (though very simple), but this confused some of the Bulgarian patients, who didn’t seem to understand that they couldn’t just run up to the doctor’s door and cut in line.

The Basics: By the basics, I mean weight, blood pressure, pulse, medical histories, etc.  No doctor ever took my weight or blood pressure in Bulgaria, and I never filled out any sort of information about myself or my medical history.  The doctor never asked me more than a question or two either.  As far as I know, the hospital in Bulgaria only had my name and Bulgarian ID number on file.

Medical Files: I just alluded to it above, but I don’t think the doctors in Bulgaria had any sort of file on me.  If they did, the only thing it would have had in it was my payment history and name/ID number, because I never gave them any other sort of information.  This created a slight headache when coming back to the U.S., because the clinic I was originally trying to go to (where I had been a patient before), would not let me get an appointment until they received my medical records from Bulgaria.  I explained that the doctors there didn’t keep records, but they still wanted me to scan everything I had (ultrasound pictures, test results, etc.) and send them in before they would consider setting up an appointment.  This was slightly humorous to me, because everything I had was written in Bulgarian, so it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway.  Thankfully, we were able to get into another clinic here that didn’t make me go to all this trouble.  But, that just goes to show that there is a lot more to the system here in America.

Knowing your name: The doctors never, and I mean never, spelled my name correctly in Bulgaria.  I realize it’s not a Bulgarian name, but I did get a little tired of seeing my name spelled a different way every single time (Alisan, Alasen, etc.)  They also put me on file as Allison Covington Kidd, instead of Allison Kidd Covington, and when I went to get this corrected, they changed it to Allison Kidd Kidd.  At that point, I just gave up and decided I would deal with it later.

Ultrasounds: The Bulgarians were crazy about ultrasounds.  That was the standard procedure for every single appointment, and that was just about all they ever did.  We were glad about that, though, because it did allow us to see our baby at a lot of different stages.  My doctor in Bulgaria also did echocardiograms with all her patients, so we got to have a special ultrasound that took a close up look at the baby’s heart.  It was interesting, but neither of us understood much of what the doctor told us, because they were words we wouldn’t even necessarily know in English (like words for specific arteries and chambers of the heart).  Luckily, we did understand that everything looked just fine.  When the nurse here found out they had done an echocardiogram, she looked both shocked and scared, because they only do those here when they suspect a problem.

Costs: Medical care of any sort in Bulgaria was dirt cheap in comparison to the U.S.  Just to give you an idea, an appointment in Bulgaria, including an ultrasound, was about $15.  Here, an ultrasound alone is nearly $300, and the technology is not really any different.  I am not complaining, though.  I am just super thankful to have good medical care and to be able to understand everything that is going on, so the cost is well worth that.

These are just some of the differences that really stood out to me.  I wouldn’t say that my experience dealing with this overseas was negative, just very different, and a little scary since it’s all new for me.  It does make me very thankful for good health care, something I probably took for granted in the past.

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