Elizabeth had her two month checkup today.

Due to the doctor shortage here in Ontario, finding a pediatrician in Ottawa has been a challenge.  I started looking in my last month of pregnancy, which was really much too late.  It's my experience that there are only three ways to find a doctor in Ottawa:

1. through a walk-in clinic
2. through the list of doctors taking new patients on the Ontario College of Doctors & Physicians Doctor Search
3. by having an existing patient (preferably a family member) beg on your behalf

Initially I was going to follow the third option and contact my old pediatrician or one of her colleagues, since they were completely amazing and I still haven't found a family doctor that I like as well.  Unfortunately, they retired from office practice to concentrate on their respective areas of interest.  Sigh...

My backup plan was to talk to my family doctor or Brendan's family doctor as I am quite sure one of them would take her on, but since I was a sickly child I really want Elizabeth to see a pediatrician at first in the hopes that we can keep her healthy!  Since Elizabeth is female, I also was looking for a lady doctor.

So I started searching on the Doctor search.  New doctors show up here every couple of weeks, so when they did, I checked them out on the various Doctor rating sites.  It turns out that most pediatricians here in Ottawa only accept new patients if they are less than 48 hours old, and even if they accept new patients, they have a quota of new patients they can accept per month.  Since I was calling so late, I was turned down by each doctor I contacted.  I'm not sure how it would have worked even if I could have been put on a waiting list since Elizabeth and I were still in the hospital during the first 48 hours and we were then under midwifery care for the next six weeks.

I did eventually hear about a Dr. Russell who was pretty highly recommended and taking new patients.  Since she is working out of the AppleTree Medical Centre, the receptionist told me that all I needed to do was call after Elizabeth was born and we'd go from there.

It turns out that Dr. Russell is very nice and seems to know her stuff.  Elizabeth was extremely well-behaved, cooing and smiling at the nurse who measured her at 9 pounds 11 and a half ounces and somewhere over 60cm (we didn't see the exact figure and got distracted so forgot to ask). 

The two month checkup includes two vaccinations - one for Diphtheria/Tetanus/Pertussis/Polio/Hib and the other for Pneumo conjugate.  We checked that the nurse knew to give them in the least painful order (she did) and then Brendan held Elizabeth down while I trembled in the corner.  I think I found the process at least as traumatic as Elizabeth did.  The first needle didn't really bother her, but after the second she really howled.  Actually she was so upset that she held her breath and turned bright red before letting loose some of the loudest wails I've ever heard her make.

After she regained her composure our brave girl was all smiles again for the doctor, but diaper change time has been a bit of an ordeal ever since.  It seems that she isn't sure whether having her clothing removed means more needles or not.

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