Doctored

It's come to our attention the She-Blob will need her own doctor. That I can't simply drag her along to my own appointments, and just ask for smaller doses of anything I'm getting. Babies, apparently, have unique "needs."

To that end, Bree and I began our search for a pediatrician. Contrary to what those lilting insurance company ads will have you believe about finding a new doctor, simply going on their "Find a Provider" website tells you diddly squat about the actual physician. Sure, I can find out if the otherwise-anonymous physician speaks Farsi or Mandarin Chinese, if they have offices in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills, and (most importantly) if they're taking on new patients, but in terms of picking a doctor that will match your personal philosophies, and keep your child relatively alive, the websites are about as useful as throwing darts against a board of names. To truly learn about a doctor's personality, you need recommendations. But who to ask?

Let's face it - though we have friends with children, we spend very little time actually talking to them about their offspring. Besides, they all live close, but not THAT close to us, and we're told proximity is key when your screaming infant is burning up of a 104 degree fever at 3am.

Fortunately, we had an epiphany - our Breathing Instructor seemed to have lots of opinions on everything while we were in her class, and didn't always tow the company line, so we decided to call her. And she recommended the pediatrician who had taken care of her own kids.

The meet-n-greet was set. We arrived at the conveniently situated office building prepared to interview and be interviewed. The only catch being, I had no idea what to ask. "So, have any of your patients died recently?" or "Any pending malpractice suits we should know about?" sounded like they might start things off on the wrong foot. And past that, I had nothing.

Again, the universe intervened, and when we sat down with Dr. Helen, she instantly made us feel comfortable, offering up all kinds of information about her background, education, medical philosophies and love of dogs and dog rescue. This was a woman after our own hearts. Though there was no talk of random patient deaths, we left feeling reasonably reassured that She-Blob would survive her care.

The universe is a funny thing, the world is small and serendipity abounds, if you just look around for it. I didn't want to go to breathing class, and learned little about breathing there. And in fact, since I'm C-Section bound, will likely not use any of the skills I acquired there. But in return, we found a woman who led us to our future child's doctor. What's more, turns out that the guy who runs the rescue where we got our other, dog child (and whose opinion and outlook we trust) takes his kids to Dr. Helen too.

Looks like we found our doctor.
Image by takomabibelot