The baby’s arrival is imminent–my due date is less than two weeks away. Everyone keeps telling me Baby Owl could arrive at any time, but I’m trying to convince her to stay right where she is until at least the 25th, since my mom is scheduled to arrive in Riyadh on the 24th, and I very much want her to be here for the birth.

We’re making weekly visits to the doctor now. The last time we saw the doctor, she said, “I spoke to Iman”–our midwife–” today about you. We’re expecting to see you in the delivery room any day now!”

This proclamation has made Mr. Owl especially nervous, because he has two major work-related exams coming up in the next few days, and he has to leave his cell phone at the entrance of the testing center. So he’s worried about the tests themselves, as well as the possibility of me going into labor while he’s taking them. (When he expressed his nervousness about the tests, I patted my tummy and said to him, “Well, think of it this way–at least you’re not me. You know exactly what’s going to be on your test. You know what day it will happen. You know what time it starts, when you’ll have a break, and what time it will end. But me, it’s like for nine months, I’ve been preparing for this huge test. I don’t know exactly when it will start; I just have to wait and see. I don’t know how long it will last; it could be hours or days. And no matter how much I study for it, I don’t really have any clue what it’s going to be like. I don’t know how bad it’s going to be, or how much it’s going to hurt. Does that make you feel better?” Somehow, this did not soothe him. I can’t imagine why. The eighth month of pregnancy has turned me into a pretty unsympathetic confidante.)

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We chose our doctor because she had a long list of credentials, including board certifications in the U.K. and France. Both of those maternity care systems are more encouraging when it comes to natural birth than the U.S. and Saudi Arabia’s maternity care systems, which are similar in that they are both very medicalized. And it may sound silly (or not silly at all, depending on your perspective), but I really wanted a doctor who was highly fluent in English. This generally isn’t a problem when it comes to doctors in the Kingdom; they all speak English to some degree. And I certainly don’t think that speaking English is in itself an indicator of a good doctor. But we figured that since she had U.K. board certifications, she must have spent at least some time training in the U.K. and would therefore understand my questions more clearly and be able to articulate clear responses to those questions and thus help put me at ease (after all, this is my first baby!). Although we don’t plan to deliver with her unless there is an emergency (as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, we hope to deliver with a British midwife in the same hospital), there was also the added bonus of knowing that if I ended up in the delivery room spewing half-cocked profanity at her as I demanded the best drugs the hospital had to offer, there would be no confusion.

When you go to the doctor’s office in Saudi Arabia, you literally go to the doctor’s office. It’s not like in the States, where they take you to a generic exam room and you wait for the doctor to do her rounds. Here when we visit the doctor, we are escorted into her actual office, where she sits behind a huge desk, and usually at least two nurses are standing behind her, ready to do her bidding. With the huge desk and the nurses attending the doctor, the whole thing makes you feel like you’re visiting a mob boss to ask for a favor on the day of his daughter’s wedding…which is why our code phrase for “going a doctor’s appointment” is now “going to see the Godfather.” (Me: “I’m hungry.” Mr. Owl: “We’ll get lunch after we go see the Godfather.”)

Despite her somewhat sinister nickname, our doctor is very nice. She tells us that everything looks good with the baby (so far, thank God), and she asks how I am feeling. She asks if I have any questions or concerns. Although waiting times are long and our appointments are very short, I feel like she knows what she’s doing and simply doesn’t waste time going over things that could go wrong, things that would leave me unnecessarily panicky.

It’s all very simple, mostly, and very unlike what the Internet trained me to expect from a prenatal appointment. Insurance seems a lot more simple, too, although occasionally there are glitches that require waiting. See, here, the insurance approves or rejects requested treatments almost immediately. The receptionist submits the request for approval, and a few minutes later they know if the insurance will cover it, and then you pay the small amount required. It’s not like in the States, where you pay your copay at the doctor’s office and then wait a few weeks until you get the Explanation of Benefits in the mail from your insurance provider that tells you exactly what the doctor billed your insurance and exactly how much the insurance paid–and of course, they insist that THIS IS NOT A BILL (always in caps lock), just to let you know that although no one is asking for this massive chunk of change right now, in another couple of weeks you are going to get a bill for this amount from your doctor, so you better start putting up your eBay listings now, buddy.

Here it’s not like that, although as I mentioned before, there are glitches sometimes. After our first appointment, our doctor prescribed a pretty basic battery of prenatal tests. We tried to get that taken care of before we left the hospital, but it took so long for us to get an answer on our insurance approval request that the receptionist just told us to come back later that afternoon.

So we did. But when we showed up, we were told that the insurance had rejected our request. We asked the receptionist to re-submit the request, as there was no reason for it to be rejected. This time, a very quick rejection followed. So she sent us back to a different section of the hospital, the insurance approvals desk.

When we got there, Mr. Owl explained what was going on. The man pulled up our file and reviewed the information. It turned out that some confusion had been caused by the fact that our doctor is the head of the Fertility Unit as well as the OB/GYN Unit in the hospital, because he said, “Your insurance won’t cover fertility treatments.”

Mr. Owl looked confused, then surprised. Then he said, “Fertility treatments? No, no fertility treatments. We um, got this baby, uh…the all-natural way.” Mr. Owl turned red as he said this, and while the man behind the desk got the insurance approval done quickly after that, he looked amused but embarrassed, as well. Apparently a frank disclosure of exactly how you made your baby makes some Saudi hospital administrators a bit uncomfortable.

How did you choose your doctor?