Clinic visit part 2

Log of our visit to the clinic

8.02 arrival at clinic

8.10 clinic staff arrive

8.12 card put in queue

8.14 start to read Quran and Qum Baby falls asleep

8.25 man arrives in excruciating pain and needs iv drip. Nurse shouts at him for coming alone?! Weird

8.36 catch up on emails

8.50 friends come in with their kids for vaccinations- yaaay for the company

8.45-10am a lady wearing a turquoise scarf hovers outside the room waiting for her turn even though 10 other people came before her

9.06 the lady whose card is in front of mine in the queue has gone in. Decide to hover by the door of the clinic as it should be my turn next.

9.30 our name is called

Have to tell turquoise scarf lady 3 times to move out of the way so we can go inside

It wasn't too bad. Usual questions about feeding, how many dirty nappies a day etc and a height/weight/head circumference check. Qum Baby doing quite well alhamd!

The only complicated thing was that they wanted mine, The Husbands and Qum Baby's dates of birth in the Iranian calender, which I had worked out before hand. We were given the usual advice about feeding and not using a pacifier blah blah

By 10.00 we were done and Turquoise scarf lady still hovering at door

The set up was quite strange for us westerners who are used to a bit of privacy during medicals. There are 3 nurses/midwives/health visitors sitting behind a table, seeing 3 people at the same time. The nurse at the end does the pregnancy consultations while the other 2 deal with the babies (weighing, vaccines etc) So if a lady comes for a midwife appointment, she lays down on the bed for the heart beat check while 2 other ladies are in the same room having their babies checked out too! But I guess that's the way things are done here. And they spend half their time telling the ladies who are hovering at the door to go and sit down and wait their turn (you have to put your card in the box when you arrive so they know who came first)

The nurse didn't make a fuss when we told her we weren't getting vaccinations in Iran. It's not that we are anti-vaccines, rather we we told that there are a couple of extra vaccines given in the uk that are not given in Iran, so we consulted with the practice nurse at the local surgery in the UK and she came up with a vaccination schedule for us that fitted in with our travel plans :)

So now we have to go back in a couple of weeks for weighing again, but at least we have registered at the clinic so it should be straight forward.