Staying At The HK Sanatorium With The Rockstars

HK Sanatorium is generally seen (by friends and colleagues anyway) as quite a local hospital – nurses etc will prefer to speak in Canton where possible, though everyone I happened to converse with could speak English if they had to. I have American friends who’ve had their babies here too…

And The Mens brought flowers!

The hospital has done quite a bit of renovation since our last stay here, resulting in “deluxe” and up rooms that look like hotel rooms but with all the hospital facilities. With Rockstar around, I’d planned for ages to have a “Hospital-hotel family stay,” hoping involving him in everything I could would cut any potential jealousy to a minimum.

Rockstar (touch wood) has been on his bestest behavior in the hospital, just for the opportunity to get to experience the whole thing with us – we explained to him the official policy is no kids below 11 or 12 staying overnight so he is here only if he really really doesn’t bother anyone. (And kudos to the hospital for being kind and flexi enough to let us have him here…) We keep him in the room at all times, and it’s fortunate he still has school which he enjoys so he leaves from the hospital every morning and does his regular school schedule, which I hope is a comforting pleasant routine for him, and then after cleaning up at home comes over… We slowly mix the baby into his old routines…

They should call this easy chair the Child Entertainer, because Rockstar is probably the one who knows how to work the positions on this chair the best of all of us. AND he gets a kick out of hospital food – he loves their porridge and yes, getting the fruit from my tray.

The hospital itself is much more comfy than the first time we stayed, and there are so many newish additions – they really must’ve been doing lotsa renovation for this year (though I heard they will again undergo a bit more renovation in another month – we are so blessed on so many levels!)

“Barcode” Baby – This “Kisses” thing is quite hi-tech, the nurses demonstrate that it gives off a little electronic tune when our tags sense each other (and later they tell me it costs more than HKD 100,000) – apparently to keep from say, the wrong baby being fed by the wrong mother!

Standard issue hospital onesie - no "made in China" siah!

Not sure what this is... more baby security type stuff?

We were also asked to triple check the blue tag I’m wearing (and Baby Rockstar wears on her other foot – before the birth they then discovered we couldn’t read Chinese and came back shortly after with English labels to stick on the tags…) In fact it seems the hospital may have beefed up their manpower since last time we were here, in anticipation of this Dragon Year, because except for rooms being booked solid, staff are so responsive it’s hard to tell when you’re in the room that the maternity ward is actually heavily booked up for many months in advance… And the security makes me wonder if there has been a recent rash of babynapping/ swapping I don’t know about haha but in all seriousness if you’re having a baby and it’s really crowded of course you’d want things to be extra careful and secure…

(You can tell from Rockstar’s mismatched clothes that Kings has been picking out his clothes from home… Fortunately he goes to school in a uniform haha)

View by my bed:

Hopefully will get round to blogging about my emergency-ish c-section a little later… that takes more time and umm, “consciousness” to write, can’t just post and blab like I’m doing now…

Oh here’s my favorite pic of The Mens:

Kings still looking a little tense because he finds Baby Rockstar so tiny, Rockstar leaning on Kings' knee but otherwise concentrating on the pics and videos or Baby Rockstar that he's taken...

And here’s Baby Rockstar, whom Kings has already proudly posted superfast on his Facebook…