Another newborn

It's just 16 months after my first child is born and now came another baby girl. That's a bit close but how could that happen? To put it very bluntly, I've misfired (damn! I should have practiced more on the withdrawal method). Anyway, it's nice to have a complete family album, a parent with one boy and one girl, just nice to replace both myself and my wife to maintain our country's population (holding that we will not migrate).

It's a 3.05 kg baby girl born in Pantai Hospital, much more heavier than my first baby as it is a full term baby, unlike my first baby who is born premature (4 weeks earlier). There are many difference between a full term and a premature baby as a full term baby can suck better, which mean it's easier to breastfeed and more breast milk (can save on milk powder) and develop faster too. My baby girl is now attempting to lift her head and occasionally says "ah-goo" after 3 weeks old. Such signs were only evident in my first child when he was 4 months +.

Anyway, the baby girl is fine but my wife is not so fortunate again. For our first baby, she had some complication as mentioned in the earlier post. Hence, we have decided to get a more experience gynae, who charge a lot more expensive and is only based in Pantai Hospital, which is located near a rich man area, Bangsar. For my first child, the bill for everything was only RM6,000 while at this hospital, it's close to RM9,000. But the best of all, even though it's much more expensive, the service is still very unacceptable.

First of all, the hospital recruited plenty of foreign nurse, who speak in another version of English, I believe they were from India. I came to understand later that our country is suffering an acute shortage of nurse, apparently, the local experienced nurses are lured to work in Middle East which offer better remuneration. I came to wonder why our country is now suffering from such low employment income scenario, not just nurses but also accountants, as seen in my line, and I believe this is another worthy discussion which I may post one later. To make ends meet, the hospital have also student nurse who are very inexperience and at times, unable to attend more complicated duties.

But the worse part of all, my wife had another complication, but a minor one, not at the surgical area but on her leg. She went into the operating theatre with her leg perfectly fine and somehow, when she was pushed out from the theatre, there was a blister with the size of 20 cent coin develop on her left leg just her knee. I believe it was caused by chemical burn as there were another 2 small drips which had inflamed the skin. We had pursued the hospital to treat this wound without any charges and surprisingly, after 1 month, the wound had not fully recovered and still following up with the hospital's ER Dept for changing of dressing.

We did not stop there and expected reasonable compensation. Unfortunately, the hospital kept denying that this was arising from their blunder and only offered RM300 as goodwill gesture, not compensation. Obviously, we do not have any evidence to support our claim as my wife should have been knocked unconcious by the GA before the caesarean section, so anything could have happen to her and she wouldn't feel it. We are still undecided whether to accept their offer but should there be a scar after the wound heal, we may resort to the Consumer Tribunal or the Small Claims Court.

I'm getting disappointed by the days feeling how worthless our currency is in obtaining reasonable quality of service. It seems that for the worth of work we provided and remunerated, the amount of money we got is not sufficient to afford a reasonable quality of life, compared to people of the same qualification in another country. Well, undoubtedly, there are many other factors to consider when comparing one country to another but as proven for the last 50 years since our country has achieved independence, our currency is eroding in value and our peer competiting countries have moved up the value chain. We seems to be now competing with the upcoming lower liner countries for the same but limited amount of foreign direct investment. Is our country addicted to the FDI or what?