Sadly, I have to give 1 star to the hospital…read more
We were on vacation in Cancun are and our toddler needed in urgent care assistance - he had blood coming out of his mouth (which was very scary - I'm sure every parent will understand - especially in a foreign country). He was also generally unhappy and fussy for a couple of days prior to that. It also felt like he has fever.
Seeing the blood makes you have to think very quickly! After a quick research, we found Galenia - it was highly recommended by multiple sources, including this Yelp page.
Of course, we went there and our son was admitted in the ER. He was seen about 30-40 minutes after we came in, which was acceptable. Luckily there was no new blood coming our of our son's mouth... We were told in advance that we would need to pay around $350 for ER services. It felt like extremely high for Mexico, but we didn't have a choice so we decided to stay and wait.
When a nurse was ready to see us, turned out they DON'T have any pediatrician on staff at the moment. Whoops! Well, ok, a "regular" doctor should suffice since it's an emergency for us. Hopefully the doctor will apply common sense to the situation.
The nurse has taken vitals from our son... Another 20 minutes and the doctor came. He spent about 5 minutes looking at our son and concluded that the blood in the mouth may be related to an extreme allergic reaction to pineapples that our son was eating when that happened. Nothing life-threatening. Ok - good to hear! There was also fever and the doctor concluded that it'll just go away and nothing needs to be done, outside of giving him fever reducing medications. We got a few medications prescribed. Paying $354 for that felt a little high, but that's alright, we've taken the time from someone else's time in the Emergency Room, so it's understandable.
Next thing I did is picking up the prescribed medicine. It wasn't very cheap, but that was ok...
Fast-forward to the late evening of the same day; I'm unpacking the medicine and seeing that each of the 3 different medicines that the doctor has prescribed are strongly NOT recommended to be taken for children under 3 years old - it said that straight up on the package. Yikes! Well, we are definitely not giving that to our son. The doctor hasn't mentioned anything about it. Chances are, he just does not know what can and can not be prescribed to children, since he is not a pediatrician...
We avoided giving the medication to our son. However, his condition wasn't improving much. Three days later, we arrived back into the US, went straight to our pediatrician. Turns out, our son has (1) thrush, and (2) ear infection. Thrush was bad. Ear infection was REALLY BAD. We had to be taking two different types of antibiotics for the length of 25 days afterwards for it to treat! I wish the doctor would look into the ears, which I know pediatricians normally do when children have fever, and notice that it's REALLY BAD. None of the medications were originally prescribed to treat neither thrush nor ear infection. And of course, our pediatrician confirmed that the medicine that was prescribed would make our son ever more miserable if we gave it to him, since it wasn't made for toddlers. The doctor was just NOT qualified to see our son.
What a waste of money and time; it made our lives truly MISERABLE for the following 2-3 weeks. I wish they had a pediatrician on staff to see kids; or were upfront about it so that we had time to go to a ER that would have one.
Be on the look out for that, and definitely try to find an urgent care somewhere else first if it's not a life-threatening situation, since this place charges tourists an arm and a leg.
