First of all, I would like to thank the Ružinov hospital for taking care of my wife and son. The staff was professional and tried to help us in every way. We are glad that our son was born there. Well, the real “rodeo” started when we were looking for answers to the questions about our son’s diagnosis, how it will develop, or which method in medicine and ortho-prosthetics will be the most effective for Leo.
The first fears flew away, the results looked quite good, and the mom and the baby were allowed to go home from the hospital. We were the happiest that we are finally together at home and the parenthood has begun to the fullest. We still had many unanswered questions in our heads, so we started the next stage.
We went through orthopaedics at National Institute of Children’s Diseases (NICD), which did not give us many answers, since it does not have experience with such cases. Unfortunately, what surprised us the most was that no other institution in the health sector could give us any complete answers. Through the Internet and some acquaintances we learned that we should not expect help from the Slovak health care system and we decided to go our own way. But in addition to orthopaedics, we had to go through many other doctors’ visits in Slovakia, focused on different organs of the body (our son is a high-risk patient).
On the other hand, at NICD we were pleasantly surprised by the approach of a paediatrician of high-risk children. We also had a very good paediatrician in Trnava. So I do not want to sound disrespectful about everyone who is part of the health care system in Slovakia. We have experts and professionals here who know a lot and try to help as much as they can.
We searched the Internet and there were a few supportive voices with a similar story and also some advice which we had to consider with my wife. As I already mentioned, our son is a high-risk patient, so we chose carefully, when and where we decide to go for a check-up, not to overwhelm that sweet little baby body. After weeks or months it was clear that we would seek help abroad.
Two countries with common border came into consideration, in particular, Czech Republic and Austria.