Halfway down the Danube

Key experience

Alan swallowed a key yesterday.

I'm sparing you the grisly details of choking, Heimlich maneuver, desperate searching for a key, not finding a key.

I have to admit I was feeling quite helpless. I mean, a key is such an odd shape - a marble or a coin I wouldn't have freaked quite that much over, but a sharp, pointy little key? (Not such a little key, either - about 4 cm long and 2 cm wide - and please, don't ask how he got hold of it in the first place!)

I called our American health insurance for expats which has a 24/7 emergency service. They put me on with a nurse and a pediatrician. Both recommended to bring Alan to a hospital and have him x-rayed, to make sure that the key wasn't stuck in the airways or in the esophagus.

Hah. Easier said than done. We (i.e. the nanny Valli, David, Alan and I) rushed to the GRIGORE ALEXANDRESCU Emergency Clinical Hospital for Children which is only a few blocks away from us. We should have walked, not taken the car -- parking was wishful thinking only. I ended up parking on a "reserved for Citibank" space, huffed at the guard who wanted to shoo us away and carried Alan off to the hospital.

What a hospital. The Camera de Garda (reception) was dirty and run down, there was a lot of construction going on everywhere which mainly meant dirt, more dirt, potholes and little actual construction work. We jumped over puddles, stepped into puddles, skirted puddles. Asked four doctors for help, were sent around to three different little "pavillions", were turned away, sent somewhere else.

I have to say that the emergency room was really nice - clean, modern, nicely decorated, light green or blue walls, doctors in green garb like on TV - nice. They didn't want us there, either. What a pity. (Now, it wasn't as if they had bleeding and screaming kids there -- the doctors were lounging and drinking coffee, clearly not overworked. I do believe they could have taken a look or two at Alan.)

Finally, I had enough and shlepped my little entourage off to BioMedica, a so-called Romanian-American clinic. They advertise with Western standard medical care, English speaking staff and state-of-the-art medical equipment. I had looked at their website when I researched for such an emergency and I was sure this was the place to go.

Let's just skip talking about traffic and parking.

Bio-Medica was much less impressive in reality. Nobody spoke English. We didn't get past the receptionist who also didn't speak English. Although the website lists three pediatricians, she insisted on sending us back to Grigore Alexandrescu because they "don't do children at Bio-Medica" and anyway, they didn't have an x-ray machine. The only helpful and nice person was another patient who offered to drive us back to the Children's hospital. Sorry, but I didn't feel like going back there.

Off to the next clinic I knew of - the Emergency hospital around the corner on Floreasca. Same thing there ("go to Grigore Alexandrescu").

I was getting slightly flustered. Doug had been working the phones from the office, trying to find a clinic that would actually have an x-ray and be willing to use it on Alan, and he did. That would be Med-Sana, close to the Opera. I was getting more and more frustrated, so it was a good thing that Doug joined me and we could leave Valli and David at home. Doug has a soothing effect on me. I might have just physically assaulted the next doctor, who knows.

At Med-Sana, they were friendly, partly English-speaking and helpful. We were immediately whisked off to the x-ray room. Alan, my curious never-afraid little boy, screamed hell and high water as we wanted to put him on the x-ray table. No way he was letting go of me. We had to hold him down with sheer force. As I turned to get the lead aprons for us (since it was clear we'd have to stay with him as they x-rayed him), they took the shot. Nobody bothered to give us protective aprons nor did anybody ask me whether I might be pregnant as they always do in the West, nor did anybody actually bother to tell us that they were shooting us with x-rays. Well.

We now have a nice picture of the key which, it turned out, currently resides in the stomach:

(Click on the picture to see the larger version.)

The pediatrician was a bit freaked (and how's that for reassurance?). She said she didn't expect the key to pass on naturally and that we should go back to - aha! - Grigore Alexandrescu and have an endoscopic retrieval done. She tried to call up the expert for endoscopies but the number was busy. So she told her secretary to arrange for us to meet this doctor and have him perform the endoscopy later this day. Then she left for her afternoon off.

Ten minutes later, the secretary came back and informed us that Grigore Alexandrescu doesn't want to perfom endoscopy on Alan. It was one of those second-sight diagnoses since they made it without seeing Alan or the x-ray. We were told to go home and wait for two days, then have another x-ray done to determine whether the key has moved on or not.

Well...

Soon in this theater: What goes in must come out.

Posted by claudia at October 22, 2003 10:33 AM