Keep swimming
- bethnorth
- Apr 27, 2017
- 2 min read
During my time in Japan I've encountered different customs, interesting people, and eclectic little habits that don't seem important to the native eye, but either dazzle or confuse me.
I can't say that I'm comfortable with everything I experience, even if I experience the same thing time and time again. Sometimes it brings me down to a point where I forget what I do enjoy about this place. That's a different story for a different day, but basically what I'm trying to say is that today one of my gripes caught up with me today. Before getting pregnant, it was simply a little irk that would get mentioned in conversation and debated about lightly. Now it's real. Now it actually affects my life!
I've been looking for a maternity hospital for August. The cheapest and most convenient hospital is at Nagoya Station, but unfortunately, it is fully booked. Kengo and I checked many other hospitals. A handful of them are private and therefore quite too expensive, the others are cheaper but a little difficult to travel to. What with the expense of the private hospitals, we don't have much choice but to take one of the more distantly located hospitals.
It's a straightforward decision, right? Wrong! None of the affordable hospitals even offer pain relief. If I want pain relief, I have to go to the expensive places, and then of course pay extra for the medicine. As a British person, I've been trying to get my head around the billing of maternity care etc, but paying thousands simply for the choice of having pain relief sounds like way too much for me.
I took a little look at American bills, and it seems quite common to have a cheap epidural (of course depending on your insurance, in my case it's not covered). Comparing it to my situation is kinda useless. But... in some cases, people have to make a pretty big money decision for pain relief, right? I really don't know if it's worth paying possibly 250,000 yen more (at least) for a better hospital and therefore an epidural.
I really don't have the money for that (ha no one does) and I can't get maternity leave with my company so I need money to keep living at my place. I'm not in a great financial position, but here I am terrified about not having pain relief and being very unable to sleep. It's not even just the lack of epidural, it's the fact that there is no choice.
I knew this was a thing in Japan and even when I thought about it a month ago, I figured I'd get around it somehow. But it's happening. Oh yes. Story of my life recently~
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