THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON ALUMNI MAGAZINE |
Part Three: No Such Thing as a "Risk Free" BabyAlthough detecting medical problems after the adoption is imperative, most of Bledsoe's work, and the trickiest part, occurs before parents ever meet their adopted children. Each week Bledsoe reviews between 10 and 20 sets of records for prospective parents. Since medical standards and procedures vary from country to country, she must interpret medical terminology that the average pediatrician is unfamiliar with. "You have to take everything on the medical record seriously, but everything is also suspect," Bledsoe says. In many cases records are missing, inaccurate, or simply false. Often vaccinations have been given incorrectly or ineffectively. Bledsoe does what she can to fit together the available jigsaw pieces into a picture of the child's health. The best news is that with experience comes knowledge. "The more we do it, the more we know what to look for," Bledsoe says. For example, she knows that fetal alcohol syndrome is prevalent in the former Soviet Union and that Chinese orphans may have low dietary iodine and develop hypothyroidism. If measurements of a child's height, weight and head circumference over a period of time are provided, pediatricians can plot a growth chart to gauge normal development. A growth chart provides great clues, but you have to know what to look for, Bledsoe explains. "You should use a growth grid appropriate to the child's ethnic background," she explains. Chinese heads, for example, are smaller than Caucasians'. Growth patterns plotted on the wrong chart might seem to indicate problems where none exist. "What I always worry about is a family turning down a child on the basis of incorrect information," Bledsoe says. Families looking into adoption are asked if they will consider a child with serious illnesses, such as AIDS or cancer, birth defects, or retarded physical, mental or emotional development. Some parents chose these harder-to-place children, as Bledsoe and Johnston did. Their son, Sean, has a cleft palette, requiring several operations to correct.
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