Emergency! Kind Of. Not Really.

Sophia hurt herself. Again.

Many of you know we ended up in the hospital one week before our big Costa Rica trip with Sophia’s forehead split open. It was an awful experience. Eight hours in an overcrowded waiting room with her bleeding, crying, not able to see from the congealed blood in her eyes, and no one helping us. I cradled her with a dirty paper towel pressed to her wound, afraid to remove it and see how bad the damage was. It took four hours for someone to offer me a sterile pad. When we were finally brought to a room, we sat for another two hours before a nurse came in. I won’t say her bedside manner was terrible, just hurried and brusk. She informed me they had an emergency room full of Covid patients to deal with, and my already panicked brain and adrenaline fatigued body seriously considered leaving. Another traumatic two hours later, we went home with her head stitched up and a vow to keep her in a padded room until she was twenty-five. Welcome to US healthcare.

Jump forward two months. We released the hounds from their padded cells and let them loose to run and be free. Of course, my daughter was going to get hurt. She’s three. That’s her job. My job is to fret on the inside but pretend like I’m a cool mom who knows she needs to fall down and get up and learn by doing. So she smacked her hand on a brick wall and refused to move it for two hours. She doesn’t refuse to move anything on her little body for more than five seconds, so we knew something was wrong. The only other time she refused to move something was when she dislocated her elbow.

We hesitated. We are in a small beach town in rural Costa Rica. We had been told the clinic was good. Still, I had flashbacks of our previous experience and not having a good grasp on the Spanish language, hell or the English language most of the time, wasn’t sure I could communicate effectively. Finally, her tears won out.

The clinic is down a long, bumpy, gravel road rutted by large potholes filled with muddy water. I can’t imagine how the ambulances manage. For some reason, this was not reassuring. We entered a pristine and empty lobby and were immediately greeted by a gorgeous triage nurse. She was even smiling. She looked like she could have a starring role in a medical drama. We were checked in, seated comfortably on a stylish white leather couch, and offered water within five minutes. Only three minutes later, we were brought back to the x-ray room by another smiling nurse. Thirty minutes after arriving, we were back in the lobby—X-rays taken, consultation with the doctor completed, and course of action laid out.

I was stunned. Amazed. Tearfully appreciative. Back home, without health insurance, this little outing could have cost hundreds of dollars, if not over a thousand. At this clinic in lovley Costa Rica? Sixty. Sixty dollars and thirty minutes of our day. The only person disappointed with the whole adventure was Sophia. Her hand was not broken, just badly bruised, and she didn’t feel the doctor did enough to make it all better. She abused him the whole drive home.

The girls are now free to jump, climb, and bang their extremities to their heart’s content. We have every confidence in our little clinic and the gorgeous superheroes who work there. US healthcare—take notes.

And because I don’t have any other pictures of the experience, here is a video of monkeys we saw at breakfast.