Day 1: Meeting our referral - Sept. 4 9/8/2007
Our “referral” is a little girl named Anna. The couple of pictures we had seen of her were really cute (one in particular). But we were a little scared about the CP diagnosis on top of the deafness. Well, late on the night of the third we were provided with the official “medical conclusion” for her. Wow, it was scary. It had long lists of things she was diagnosed with at birth; more things she was diagnosed with later on, and a “current diagnoses” list that was frighteningly long. We spent some time researching as much of it as we could so we were prepared to ask questions about it when we met the orphanage head doctor.
Our schedule called for the driver to show up at the hotel at 8 AM. We thought this would feel early but since we were so jet lagged we ended up waking up at 5 am and not able to go back to sleep. So we got up and did what we needed to do to prepare to meet little Anna. Then we went to have breakfast with our new friends. That was actually quite enjoyable until we realized we’d talked too long and we had to run out without actually having eaten much of anything. Thankfully, we packed granola bars to eat on the road.
There were multiple stops along the way. First to meet Tanya to pick up a printed copy of the translated medical conclusion (thus far we only had an electronic version), then to buy some water. The orphanage was a 2 hour drive from the city, and we were beginning to see some of the obvious differences between here and Ukraine. First of all, it would appear that everyone has cars (the previously mentioned used Japanese cars). They have no emission rules here, and all the vehicles, especially the trucks that are hauling stuff everywhere, and buses and such, are always spewing horrible amounts of exhaust. Anyhow, I’ll skip the pollution treatise here, and just summarize by saying that as much as I love Russia, I’m really grateful for the cleaner air in the U.S. I know it’s not great all over, but ten minutes driving in Vlad and you’d be wishing you were in L.A. instead!
Ok, so back to business… we had a driver and an interpreter going with us to the orphanage. We drove the 2 hours to Ussurisk on crappy roads but we were feeling pretty good. Very much at peace, though aware that we were headed into something huge. When we arrived at the baby house, we were ushered into the head doctor’s office. She was very nice and very open about information regarding Anna. We got a rather thorough history both medically and regarding her family history. As we were still asking questions, Anna was brought in. She was so little and so cute, but at the same time we were pretty emotionally guarded throughout the visit. We were constantly watching her movements to see how the CP manifested itself. All in all, our first visit was good. Steve played with her and the nesting cups while I continued to take notes on the information we were being provided. Anna seemed quite happy with the attention. She definitely smiles a lot!
After awhile we went outside with her and pulled out a ball that she gladly played with, though she didn’t seem to get into chasing it around. Based on what we observed when the children are brought outside it is not to run and play on the playground equipment (of which there was very little), but rather to put them into small wooden pens where they can play with one another and select toys without wandering off. These wooden pens are about 10 feet by 10 feet, barely larger than a small room. So it’s no wonder Anna is so physically underdeveloped. It is definitely not just the CP, it is because she gets so little exercise and activity. It’s not that it’s a bad orphanage or that they don’t care for them, but it is a very small “campus” and it just doesn’t have good outdoor play equipment. Very unfortunate. We went into one of these pens to play with Anna because the asphalt was so rough and dirty (and the only other place to interact really). Here we pulled out the nesting cups again (Steve had played with these with her in the head doctor’s office) and she really liked them a lot. She would move them all around and appeared to be making sure each cup was placed on a flower petal or in the center of a flower. (The flowers were painted on the floorboards of the wooden pen.)
It wasn’t very long before it was time for us to go. I think our visit was about an hour and a half total, so not very long. We were mostly liking what we were seeing. Oh, the other thing we did at some point was pull out the one musical toy we brought to see if she responded at all to the sounds. And we clapped our hands and things like that to see if we could observe any reaction to sounds. Nothing. They had her hearing tested last December and it shows severe-profound in one ear and profound in the other. We actually wonder, though, if it is possibly profound in both now.
Anyhow, we then grabbed lunch at the grocery store deli (it is so funny to say that because it is so NOT what any American would imagine by using that phrase) to eat in the car because our interpreter and driver were needed for another family later in the afternoon.
Steve and I processed what we could from the trip on our way back to town. We were exhausted from being so focused. We were trying hard to capture video that we could show our doctor so he can do the appropriate evaluation of her and just generally observing and analyzing more than anything. It is important to us that we know what her issues are before committing. Her medical diagnoses were so many and some of them were rather scary.
Our ride with Vlad (Vladimir, Volodya, Vova - pick your name for him) ended at another hotel, the Vlad Motor Inn, where he and our interpreter, Elena, were needed by another family, who was preparing to meet a sibling pair. It was a family I had hoped and planned to meet while here, so it worked out nicely that we were able to be introduced. The Vlad Motor Inn is where most adoptive families stay when in Vlad. It is run by Canadians and is more western than it is Russian. The staff all speak English, and it also really caters to adoptive families. They have an indoor play area for the children as well as a recreation room for families to “hang out” in (with a pool table). They also have a playground outside, and the hotel is nestled in the woods so the surroundings are very peaceful and somewhat isolated. For our first trip, we really wanted a more Russian experience, so we’ll save the Vlad Motor Inn for trip #2.
So, we returned to our hotel in the city and spent the remainder of the day working on an uploadable video for our doctor to view as well as gathering all the various medical information together in an e-mail for him. We were feeling pretty overwhelmed by Anna’s needs and while we really liked her and thought we will probably say yes to her adoption, we felt her medical required some analysis by someone more qualified than us. We hoped he would offer her a positive prognosis even given her many diagnoses, and if he did, we were prepared to say yes.
We breaked for a bit to have dinner at the “Messroom”, which is the restaurant they have on the 4th floor of the hotel where we were staying. Our new friends Besty and Steve joined us and the four of us had a really nice time enjoying the food, stories about our adoptions, and much more. We laughed a lot, too, which is really important in the adoption process, which can be a lot of mental and emotional effort at times. Once done with dinner, we headed back and worked some more. We have some stills from the Day 1 Visit, but they are mostly pulled from video, so they will look decent on a computer screen but are not high res. We finally got to sleep pretty late. Oh, I forgot to mention that at some point today they told us we could switch rooms to the bay-side of the hotel. We were very excited to do this, so we were also now enjoying our new room with a fabulous view of the bay. Watching the sunset over the water was breathtaking every time we saw it and we got some nice pictures. We also had a much nicer breeze on that side of the hotel, so that eased us a bit from the heat. We did eventually get our e-mail sent out though it was much later than we’d planned and finally we got some sleep.
It had been a long day, and we were glad it was finished. We hoped to get good news from the Dr. in the morning.
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