What I learned from my 8 year stay here in the US is that whenever possible stay away from the ER as far as possible. But with 4 young kids that is not always possible. Like Saturday night when our two month old baby suddenly showed a fewer. Our pediatrician told us to go to the ER immediately. After my wife waited a few hours they finally started to look into it and pretty soon they were sure that my baby had the meningitis. That meant that my wife was more or less arm wrestled to agree a spinal tap. Of course it turned out that it was clear and even the blood and urine tests were negative. So nearly 12 hours later our baby was pocked at lot but the doctors did not have any clue what it was. At least Tylanol took care of our babies fewer.
I do understand that meningitis is a dangerous illness but beside the fewer there was no other sign that would indicate meningitis. He was smiling, eating, alert and sleeping making me thing why would all these smart doctors just grab the worst possibility rather than applying common sense and trying the most obvious things first like a flu. But that would mean that they defy their lawyers which will never happen in SoCal. It is so funny that here we have all this well educated, smart doctors which cannot give a good advice because of the liability thread by their lawyers. At the end parents have to decide by themselves if they don't want their kids being treated to death. It seems that to deal with doctors one needs to carry a laptop with a high speed connection to Wikipedia or WedbMD because they contain data for us to make a founded decision.
Back in Europe I always thought that the movies about someone getting educated about a medical problem were a hero but now I figured out that this is the only way to understand what is going on and what is appropriate. So when I heard from my wife that they suspect meningitis I checked the web to be better informed and if our baby were older than 3 months we would agreed to a spinal tab. At least for now our baby still has a little bit fever but with Tylanol we keep it under control and he is happy and looks good.
The is nothing more important than the health of our kids; so shouldn't that be more important than the fear of our doctors
- Andy