The pharmacy and health care

I was surprised that I could get penicillin without a prescription. The pharmacist here doesn?t take your prescription after each time you get medicine. Sometimes they read the script, sometimes they don?t. I?ve been using the same prescription for a medication I need to get every month for a year and a half and only once did they read it and say that I needed a new one. I just took it to another pharmacy and they filled it. Now the woman working at our local Sensi-Blu pharmacy recognizes me and she just asks me if I need my medication and I say yes.

While standing in the line at the pharmacy, or to pay the phone bill (the banking system doesn?t use checks here, so you can?t pay your bills by mail or through the Internet), you are bound to be bumped, brushed, pushed or if things get really ugly, hit by someone in the line. It annoys me, and I think most Americans, to be bumped, pushed, or even touched by a stranger when standing in a line or walking on the street. Here it happens all the time and people usually don?t even say excuse me. The senior citizens are the worst, because they tend to be the least educated, and because they expect respect and special treatment because they are elders. Usually, there isn?t even an orderly line because everyone is trying to crowd to the front, so it is three or four people wide, rather than single file. If you try to be courteous and leave a little space between you and the next person, then it is likely that someone is going to try to jump in front of you to fill that space.

At the hospital to have the baby

Ema?s pregnancy went very smoothly for all nine and a-half months. She had regular check-ups at a private clinic, Bio-Medica, with a nice doctor. Of course, we gave some extra money to the doctor at each visit. At our last check-up at nine months, the doctor told us that he had to go away to a conference in Australia when the pregnancy was to occur. This of course made us a little apprehensive because it took us some time to find and build a good relationship with this doctor. He recommended us to a colleague at the Pantelimon Hospital where he also worked.

So, we scheduled a meeting with both doctors at the hospital where they had a very good echo-graph machine so that we could better determine the exact date when the baby was due and to determine the sex. The clinic had a good echo-graph machine, but not one that could resolve the baby?s sex. So, we were traditional about knowing the baby?s sex, but not really by choice, until just before the baby was born. The hospital was all the way at the opposite end of the city from us, but we had picked it because we were going to have this good doctor. The new doctor was nice and seemed knowledgeable, but he didn?t know us yet. We gave him a bottle of Scotch at this visit as a present, so that he knew that he would get more when it came time to deliver the baby. The doctor told us that the baby would be a girl! We had a name picked for a girl ? Maya. If the baby was going to be a boy we had decided on Andrei, after my great-grandfather. The doctor said that Ema would give birth at the end of the week, on Friday or Saturday, so we should come and check her into a private room that they had available in a new wing of the hospital so that she would be ready for the delivery.

However, little Maya had her own plan for when she wanted to be born. She thought that the next morning, on Tuesday, would be better to come into the world! My wife thinks that the labor was induced the evening before when she went to visit a friend and the elevator was broken so she walked up the stairs seven floors. Ema went to bed that night with bad pains in her lower back, but Ema has problems with her back normally, so we didn?t think it was labor. I noticed that she was in pain and not sleeping well that night, but she never woke me up to complain. When I got up to go to work I realized that she was in a lot of pain. She got up and came in the living room with me and I could she that she was in so much pain that she was going to cry and she was grabbing the edge of the couch in pain.

All the pain was in her back, but I realized that more intense waves were coming every ten minutes now. She said to me that she couldn?t believe that it was going to hurt worse than this when she would go into labor. I said, I think that maybe you are in labor now! I said, we should call the doctor and see what he says. So she called the doctor and when he heard that the pain had started the night before he said to get to the hospital right away and he would meet us there.

It was the eighth day of April. When I went down stairs to hail a taxi from the street there was a light snow on the ground and the streets. I literally ran in front of a cab in the middle of the street and jumped up and down saying it was an emergency that my wife needed to go to the hospital to have a baby! We didn?t have a car yet. So the taxi was the best solution for getting to the hospital. Ema?s best friend, Vio, came to ride with us to the hospital and to help us once we got there. It was a very bumpy ride through the streets of Bucharest at 9:00 a.m., when there was still a lot of traffic from people going to work.

Ema was crying by the time we got to the hospital and I helped her out of the car and through the halls of the hospital and to the elevator to the third floor where the obstetrics ward was. The doctor wasn?t there when we got there.