On the whole we are very fortunate to have such a healthy baby. In her two and a half years, aside from the usual scheduled visits to the medical centre for her vaccines, we have only had a small bout of chicken pox to contend with.
Even though we all have private health insurance we have been fortunate enough to never need to make a claim against anything, and whilst this is a good thing, it also means that we are completely clueless if and when we do have an emergency or anything like that to deal with – and that we will just need to play things by ear as and when it should occur.
Last week our daughter started with a bad cough and a sore throat, which we initially put down to her teething, and then a few more of her friends at nursery started to have the same problem. On Thursday of last week her temperature rose a bit and the cough seemed to travel down to her chest.
Fortunately our nursery is quite forthcoming with giving out good advice (after all, they have experinece in looking after hundreds of babies over the years – we have just 2 years experience of looking after 1 Baby) and advised us to take her straight to the Medical Centre. This was mainly a precautionary measure because the following day was a Fiesta, then came the weekend, and then came yet another fiesta ! Naturally we didn't want to have an unwell Baby for following 4 days and be unable to treat her with anything so we hurried straight up to the medical centre in the next town.
Unfortunately most smaller Towns & Villages only offer health centre facilities at certain hours – and even then the process of getting an appointment is “Typically Spanish” (Which you can read about in my 1st Blog)
However, the medical centre in the next, larger Town not only has a dedicated Paediatric Nurse, but also has a 24 Hour Emergency service – so we were confident that we would be able to get her the required treatment without any problems.
We caused a minor upset when the Nurse asked us if we had been giving her any medicines because she did not understand the brand “Calpol“ and it's medicinal properties, but other than that we were able to get the required prescription.
Almost every village has it's own Farmacia, and many of Villages have an arrangement so that between them they can offer cover on Evenings, Weekends and Fiestas – and the rota is displayed in the window (and usually also listed in the local newspapers) so you always know where there will be a Farmacia open. Her prescription was for 3 different types of medicine and in total it came to just 3-60 Euros - I'm pretty out of touch with what prescription costs in the UK are, but I didn't think that was too bad.