Finally! Minsy Visits a US Doctor

Dr. Jeffrey Karls
The BEST

Oh how we LOVE our doctor!  He is the absolute best doctor in the world for our family, and the best thing ever is that we don't have to leave the area to find him.  And the double best thing ever is that his nurse is one of my very favorite people and best friends on the planet.  Bonus!  We have had Minsy home for over a month and a half, but we have not been able to get her in to see a doctor yet because we were unable to get her added to our insurance until right after Christmas.  I promise not to make this post a diatribe against the evils of our US health insurance system, but I will simply say that this system is not the best system to navigate as an individual insurance purchaser.  Insurance was a piece of cake when Herman worked for the schools.  They have their own full time lady to figure out insurance premiums, copays, problems, whatever.  Now, because we are small business owners, we have to figure the whole thing out on our own.  Let me just say . . . it is a complete mess.  We really are easy people to insure because we hardly ever go to the doctor or hospital, and yet we get hassled right and left when working with insurance.  Erg!!!!

But that is not the point of this post.  The point is that Minsy was FINALLY able to be seen by a doctor.  Poor Minsy does not like doctors offices.  I wondered if she would even recognize it was a doctor's office because in China the doctors we saw wore those giant light bulb contraptions on their head.  Seriously!  Like this . . .

And the nurses looked like they were straight out of the 50s.  Like this . . .

So I thought that the experience today would be enough of a difference that Minsy wouldn't freak out.  Well, Minsy didn't freak out, but she really doesn't do 'freak out.'  I would almost describe her reaction as shutting down.  She sits super quietly and doesn't really move.  That's what happened today.  She sat during the exam and just quietly took it in.  If I hadn't known her as well as I do I wouldn't have thought much about it. In fact, I might have said that she was amazingly well behaved.  But although Minsy is not the most outgoing of our children, she does bounce around a little bit or try to talk to us somewhat.  Today she just sat there.  

Dr. Karls checked her out and found that she was doing great for the most part.  The very best news that he gave was that Minsy does not have was could be called classic club feet.  He said that she would need to have physical therapy to fix the pronounced inward turn of her foot, but she would probably wouldn't need surgery or casting.  Yea!  He will schedule an appointment with the physical therapy department here in town (hurray for that!), and then if things don't improve sufficiently we'll head to a specialist to see if she will need something like casting.  As for now, Dr. Karls thinks that she is doing well enough that it won't come to that.  

He did talk about her size a lot.  He asked a radiologist if an x-ray would be able to help determine her true age.  The radiologist said that he could accurately find her age within 18 months.  Well, that isn't going to help us much.  We know that her age can't be more than 18 months off, so the radiologist would be making a guess about as accurate as ours would be.  He instead will be sending us to a pediatric endocrinologist.  This doctor would be able to look at her size and see if there is some sort of hormone treatment that might be warranted.  It could be that the doctor will simply say that she appears to be younger and not do anything.  But if she is truly four we may need to help her growth a bit.  I'm still going to do some research on this because I don't want to mess with hormones unless it is absolutely necessary.  But at the same time I don't want to have Minsy suffer because of enormous growth delay due to possible malnutrition or even some sort of underlying hormonal issue.  So we'll wait until we get our appointment with a specialist, and then we'll go from there.  Funny how we traveled to China believing that we would primarily be dealing with problems associated with club feet, and now today it appears that the main problem will be with a slow growth rate.  Either way, we're ready to handle things as they come!

Poor Minsy held in her fears until the very end.  Then as we were leaving Herman stopped to talk to the head of the clinic who also serves with him on the school board.  My friend and Dr. Karls's nurse, Amanda, took Minsy around the corner to pick out a sticker.  I think that really freaked Minsy out because when Amanda returned she had a little tear falling from each eye.  She wasn't crying.  She didn't look like she was sad at all.  But she had those two tears going down her cheek.  She did the same exact thing when we went to do her medical exam in Guangzhou while we were in China.  At the time I thought it was an allergic reaction of some sort, but now I realize that it is her nervous crying -- no sound, only a tear or two.  But she made it through and has earned a seriously huge ice cream cone.  Hopefully she'll get more comfortable with doctors since she'll be seeing them often in the next few years or so.  At least it doesn't appear that she will have to be seeing any for surgeries.  Hurray!

One more time, I have to say it . . . We have the best doctor in the world.  We love Dr. Karls!