sjukvård

Beth is sick today. Well truthfully she’s been sick for a couple of days now. Fever of 103F (39.5C here), listless, won’t eat (except prunes, it’s been a bit messy), getting two new teeth, throwing up and all she wants to do is cuddle. It’s very hard to see her like this, she’s so sad. There’s not even enough language to reassure her right now, she just blubbers and whines. So today I decided she needed to see the doctor. Not for any emergency, but just to make sure we weren’t missing anything.

 As you may have read yesterday, we don’t have our personal numbers yet, so we don’t have healthcare. But no fears to my parents, I have been a responsible adult and purchased insurance for our first 2 months here. We have to call them first for permission, no problems they provide a collect number to call directly, except you can’t call collect from Sweden. Really there’s no way as far as we can tell. Now my daughter’s sick, but I am still a frugal woman and loathe calling on our mobile for billions SEK/minute and ask Kevin to figure out how to make phone calls on Skype. We buy credits, read the how to, and call...and they can’t hear us. We think that our furnitureless, rugless, pictureless apartment is a little too echoey for our poor laptop’s microphone. I finally yell slowly and loudly enough for the poor woman at the insurance agency to hear me and she offers to call me back. Hopefully incoming international calls are only millions SEK/minute (I am still frugal afterall).

 We get the ok, go to the doctor prepared to pay and fill out the long reimbursement forms and.....they don’t charge us. Seemingly the promise that we will get personal numbers is enough for them to assign us a temporary number and examine our daughter (children are completely free of charge for medical care in Sweden). Lovely. So different from Mexico where it was a 100 USD to sit in the doctor’s office. They even had toys for Beth to play with, took a swab for strep and tested it on the spot, were lovely to her, a bit condescending to the paranoid first time parents and generally very laid back. Still don’t know what’s wrong with Beth, but we left armed with more Baby Tylenol (Alvudin here) and a lovely sense of their healthcare system and how it works well (Mr Harper may want to read that sentence again). The sad bunny went to bed hugging her bear, bum in the air asleep and all I can is wish her sweet dreams and a long restful night to help her feel better. And the same to all of you.