Last week we finally got our butts in gear and went and saw an ear doctor at the hospital. I know. She's already 6.5 months old, but since she obviously can hear, we suddenly didn't feel it was super urgent. I didn't want to not do it though, as perhaps her hearing was only at 50% or 80% or something, and early corrective action could help her increase it to 100% or something.
Anyhow, we were number 26 in line for the afternoon, got there around 2:30 pm ... and subsequently waited three hours until we got to see the doctor (!). That is incredibly long in Taiwan, but the doctor was new and so quite meticulous perhaps. Anyhow, she looked in Eliana's ears and confirmed that they were jam-packed with ear wax (something I had noticed earlier, when big pieces can out of her ears). They didn't have the testing apparatus though, so she just gave us some ear drops and told us we could come back in a week to have her ears suctioned.
We went to plan B, which should have been our plan A.
See, one of Judge's really close childhood friends is a ear, nose and throat doctor at a big local hospital now. So we asked her if we could come see her, got the day that worked best for her, made an appointment, and she told us to arrive at 11:30am and just come straight up to where she sees patients, knock on the door to let her nurse-assistant know we were there, and then wait a few minutes, as if we got to go straight in the other patients waiting would get upset (prime example of guanxi). So we did.
After suctioning out huge gobs of ear wax from her ears (we had used to ear drops we had gotten from the previous doctor), we proceeded to try and get Eliana to sleep, as she was due for a nap and Judge's friend had told us to try and make sure Eliana was tired and could fall asleep quickly for the hearing test.
No such luck. I mean, Eliana is 6.5 months old for goodness sake. Too interested in her surroundings to be able to just nurse and sleep in a new place, even provided the dim lights and calmness the test room gave us.
So we had to resort to some sleepy-meds. She was not happy about it. At all. Cried, and then promptly fell asleep when I nursed her right after, before the meds had time to take effect.
The hearing-test-technician-doctor (not Judge's friend) did her magic. Result, not a direct pass on her left ear. After several more tries she finally passed. However, the doctor wanted to do a more in depth test to be certain, and so got out some electrodes and doo-dads.
As she was preparing, I chatted a bit with her. She said she worked upstairs, and they only did these tests on newborns to 3 month olds, but Judge's friend had asked her to do this one favor. Wow.
Thankfully Eliana passed both ears this time, though one her left side there is the potential that she won't be able to differentiate between certain small sounds that are common in English-related languages, so we should go for another check in 6 months to a year, and then keep our ears out for when she develops her language skills to see if there are any issues.
We went in to complete the check-up-visit with Judge's friend, and the technician-doctor came in too. This is when we found out that the technician-doctor wasn't on duty today. She came in specifically just to help us out. Kazillion-wow. This is another even deeper example of guanxi.
Anyhow. Eliana still doesn't have her national health insurance coverage as it takes about 6 months to get it since she wasn't born in Taiwan (and so we've just been collecting our receipts from her doctors visits, as we can apply for reimbursement later...just a pain in the arse is all). So because of this - having to pay for it all up front, or perhaps I should say because of guanxi?, Judge's friend and the technician and nurse just didn't enter anything into the computer system nor put the reports from her hearing tests in her file. We thus walked out without paying even the regular self-pay-portion of doctor's visits (running at about NT 150 if one has national health insurance, or I think NT 500 without it), not to mention not paying for hearing test itself. We walked out a bit shell-shocked.
Now what is this guanxi I keep mentioning, you ask? Actually, you most likely are not asking this question, as it is common knowledge that guanxi is one of the pinnacles of Chinese culture. But just in case, it is 'relationship' or 'connection'. How does it work? How does it play out in society? Well, re-read the above :P
Coming back to our little sleeping Eliana, who was supposed to sleep for 2-3 hours due to the sleepy-meds. Well, she woke up right before we went in to see Judge's friend before we left (so after sleeping about 20-30 min). She fell asleep in the car though, slept one more sleep-cycle (25-30 min or so) and then woke up again, ready for play. Judge on the other hand:
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