Let me tell you guys something about living in Poland. It is HARD. Most of the time its not so hard, and then sometimes, its UBER hard. Like when your kid has been diagnosed with a rare disease that affects 1 in 20000 and your dr’s have no idea where to send you, like when you have to randomly google and try to find where to go and call and be hung up on by people who are scared to say they don’t speak english (Im sure they don’t mean to be rude), like when your husband is in Dubai and cant help because all the calls are long distance and many places don’t answer when they see a foreign number calling.

Like when you are texting instructions to your Polish friend and she spends literally days on the phone making phonecalls for you. DAYS. So far 4 physios do not want to see us. They are scared they will hurt her and they have never dealt with EDS. The dr we already saw is researching other more suitable drs, but his receptionist hangs up on you because I can only say hello and his name in Polish… the rest is english!

I have been looking (not so actively admittedly) for a genetic specialist since October, and the private one says the testing is not available at all in Poland, the private lab says they can do the genetic testing but its 6500zl. We have a referral to do it in public health which would be cheaper, but seems there are no genetic specialists? Or there are and they are hiding. Our dr. said forget it, you will wait years, go private. So do I go directly to the lab and get results that I wont understand? Go to the private dr that wont do the test? Or take my now probably expired skierowanie to all the NFZ places and hope they will help? There is an EDS specialist in Warsaw, one of our dr’s (dr S, THANK YOU for your absolutely amazing dedication to us) has been emailing him, but he is not replying.

Thank God for Daria. She called the NFZ Head office and got two numbers from them to call, tomorrow we will try again. I say we, because while she makes the calls I sit and fret and drink to much coffee (again) and try to keep more hairs from going grey (unsuccessfully I may add).

As a backup I also posted in the expat group and got a link from there for a genetics place, it says they mainly look for other things but surely they can do EDS too? Lets see. Fingers crossed InshAllah!

Must go drink more coffee. Number 7 I think? Its only 4pm 😀