Our efforts to get hold of the appropriate visa continue. The most recent step was to have a medical. In our innocence we had just presumed this would be a quick chat with the doctor, possibly a blood pressure measurement or two and off we would go, declared healthy with the appropriate boxes ticked. I even thought that we might be able to do this whilst the boys were in nursery, surely they wouldn't want to examine the boys?
How wrong can you be? 6 hours, 6 Doctors, many nurses and quite a lot of cash later we finally got our signed bit of paper.
The following are my top tips for anyone else considering embarking upon the application process (especially those with children).
1. Make sure that you call someone who knows someone who knows someone in the hospital. This can help ease your route through the process and bumps you up to the front of many queues. This also means you must arrive at the hospital (children in tow) at 7.15am before any queues have yet to form in order to be able to jump them.
2. Find a doctor who knows how to take blood. Let him practice first upon an adult to get his eye in and ensure that if anyone is going to have a bruise from bicep to forearm it is an adult. Female doctors are much better at taking blood from wriggling, screaming children.
3. If you give an un potty trained toddler a urine sample pot, it doesn't mean that you will get a urine sample from him. It you write his name on the lid, it doesn't mean he is anymore likely to pee in the pot. Remember, if you can get unpottytrained toddler to pee into the pot, the mother might well kidnap you and take you home until you train the toddler to pee in the potty.
4. Potty trained toddlers are also going to find peeing into a tiny urine sample pot difficult. They aren't going to be able to repeat the attempt to do so either.
5. Neither toddler will stand still long enough to take a chest x-ray without their mother in the room (and even then it is not guaranteed). The toddlers will also take off any special apron thing put around their waists.
6. It is impossible to keep toddlers behaving well for 6 hours. At some point they will leap off the waiting room chairs and run screaming at the top of their voices into a consulting room. They will repeat this several times.
7. They will also crawl under benches, chairs and generally roll around on the floor. They will probably take down giant cardboard displays and use them to build a fort. It doesn't matter how many times you tell their mother that the floor is dirty, they've been there for 6 hours and it is playing on the floor or running screaming into adjacent consulting rooms. You choose.
8. Please don't ask the mother of a toddler if she gets headaches as the toddler is bashing her over the head with a train.
9. Don't ask if she gets enough sleep either. What do you think?
10. At some point the children will have to be fed and given something to drink. This should not mean that they lose their place in the queue.
For me the highlight of the day was when we were given a psychological test. Seriously. It felt like something out of Joseph Heller's Catch 22. If you are applying for a Bosnian visa you must be mad. Therefore we deny you this visa on the basis of insanity.
The quest continues...
Friday, 3 April 2009
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6 comments:
Children in a hospital for six hours? Children willingly (or not so willingly) giving blood?
It makes any recent dealings we have had with the NHS seem like a walk in the park ... with buns.
I can't even pee in the pot (the one thing I hated most about all the ante-natal check ups was weeing on my hands every time), so how a child can do it is beyond me. Although, they are smaller so maybe it's easier?!?!
Well done for surviving.
Sorry, WHY do you want that visa? I was getting a very creepy Kafkaesque feeling through that post and although I complain constantly about Stepford and wanting to be somewhere else more exciting I had a sudden rush of enormous gratitude for the ease with which things like that flow here. Ah, the service culture..
You poor thing. How incredibly ghastly. I remember having to get a urine sample from my daughter when she was about 18 months and the doc had to stick a special plastic bag onto her vulva and wait for her to wee and she kept trying to rip it off (like a brazillian for toddlers - ouch!). She talked about it anxiously for years. Never want to repeat that.
AWNTYM - I dream of the NHS. I'm sure I'll be rudely awakened when we use it on our return to the UK, but I do look at it with great fondness.
Mummy - I KNOW! And getting small boys to pee into the pot is impossible. AND they had a hole in the ground loo rather than a sit down one which made the whole process much more tricky. Especially as Adam kept trying to open the door....
MS - I don't know why we want the visa. Your poor daughter. Apparently there are nappies out there which will take urine samples for babies and toddlers. Now they tell us...
Blimey!
This reminds me a little of when we lived in Spain and I broke my wrist. We were waiting around for a similar amount of time and were seen by numerous doctors and nurses, all of whom had cigarettes hanging out of their mouths. In fact, we saw doctors operating while smoking cigarettes. On the plus side, they thought I was very cute (no idea why) and didn't give us a bill.
I found a bunch of good articles on this subject here. Thanks!
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