My Kid’s Vietnam Hospital Bill Was Less than Travel Insurance Cost — But I’m Glad We Bought It

A story of a concussion, socialized healthcare, and peace of mind

(This story has content warnings for mentions of throwing up.)

A month and a half later, what sticks is this: “Use your brain, kid. I know you have it. I’ve seen pictures.” But there were bigger concerns in the moment.

We’d gone to Vietnam for my brother-in-law’s wedding. Getting there involved fighting my kids’ school administration about keeping their places in the dual language program, and a stopover in South Korea, where my brother-in-law and his Vietnamese wife live.

The timing of wedding plans meant that we needed to leave South Korea for Vietnam several days before the wedding so my siblings-in-law could finish preparations. Wedding guests were on their own for a few days, which was honestly kind of nice after a whirlwind trip sightseeing in Seoul.

When we booked the trip, one of the hardest parts was deciding where to stay. Between American and Scottish relatives, we had ten of us arriving in Saigon at three different times. We wanted to be close to one another, and all had different priorities. For my kids, it was a pool. For my father-in-law, in-unit laundry.

We had a group chat going, comparing options, thinking through plusses and minuses. Eventually, we settled on an apartment complex where we could all get rooms. My sister-in-law wasn’t certain. It was far away from her family and from most of the touristy things in Saigon. We wouldn’t be able to get many places by foot. But it was the closest we’d gotten to an agreement, and grabbing a car is fairly inexpensive there, so our lodging was settled.

We arrived in Vietnam late Tuesday evening for the Sunday evening wedding. On Wednesday afternoon, the kids begged me to take them swimming in the apartment complex pool. So that’s what we did. But between the pandemic and my own general dislike for swimming, we hadn’t been to a pool together in a long time. Thus, neither kid is a competent swimmer. We hung out in shallow kids’ pool and had an absolute blast.

But my youngest is a little reckless and a lot ADHD, and his only speed is fast. He clambered out of the pool, slipped, and hit the side of his head just behind his ear on the concrete.

I got him to a pool chair and set him down. No open wound, no blood, no confusion. Thank God, I thought. Still, pool day was definitely over. We dried off and went back to our apartment on the thirty-ninth floor.

My kid was exhausted, and I checked up on concussion science to be sure it was okay to let him nap. It was, so we settled him into his bed and hung out until the rest of our group texted they were ready to go out for dinner. Since my oldest was hungry and we figured the youngest should eat, we woke him up and walked to the restaurant my parents-in-law had chosen.

He was still a little out of it, so he stayed close to my husband while I sat with our oldest and my aunt-in-law on the far side of our table for ten. Right as the food showed up, though, my husband picked up our son and ran to a bathroom.

When they returned, our son fell asleep on his lap, and never ate his dinner.

The next morning, he didn’t get out of bed. When he finally did, he barely made it to the bathroom before throwing up again. For hours, if he was horizontal, he was okay, and if he was upright, he was puking. We knew we should get him checked out. After all, head trauma followed by frequent vomiting isn’t exactly a reassuring combination.

We just had one problem remaining. Some research showed that it was likely he had vertigo and nausea as the result of his concussion… and we were on the thirty-ninth floor. The elevator moved so quickly it felt like being in an airplane, with ear popping and everything.

He’d made it up to the apartment okay the night before, but now, somehow, we needed to get him down thirty-nine flights when he couldn’t be upright without vomiting.

All in all, my kid threw up about seven times over the course of several hours. When he’d made it more than an hour without throwing up, we gathered a team. My husband picked up our tiny six-year-old, I took our eight-year-old, and we braved the elevator.

For once, I was more than thrilled that our six-year-old is so small. It was easy enough to keep him horizontal, and we managed the elevator incident-free. We met my mother-in-law outside the lobby, since she was staying in a different building. Then we walked across the street to a private hospital.

It was sad we never got to have Saigon street food, or explore downtown the way we could have if we’d stayed in a different district. But I can’t bring myself to regret where we were. We needed a hospital for a kid with severe vertigo, and there it was.

They took him into triage immediately, and set his little body onto a hospital bed, hooking up a heart monitor to his toe. My kid who’s always wiggling, always asking questions, always fighting the rules, lay there with glassy eyes, staring at a wall.

Studying Vietnamese helped for this trip, for sure, but I wasn’t prepared for this situation. Not really. We talked to the nurses mostly in English, with some help from Google Translate when we had more complicated things to say.

They made sure he was on the ground and not in the pool when he fell. Asked about open wounds, asked what the symptoms were. We got by. We waited, but not as long as we might have in America.

My mother-in-law left the ER with our oldest child so they could eat and be out of the way. My husband and I stayed. About half an hour after we got there, a nurse told us the doctor wanted him to have a CT scan to check for brain damage. Then they explained how much it would cost.

With COVID, a bunch of moving parts for getting to certain places at certain times, and the number of people involved in our trip, travel insurance was a no-brainer before we left. We wanted comprehensive coverage for the most expensive trip we’d taken thus far in our lives, going farther from home than either of us had been before.

Everything feels more uncertain now. Having a little bit of financial insurance gave me peace of mind. It was an easy $250 to spend.

We agreed to the estimated cost for a doctor’s visit, CT scan, and the time spent in triage. Then we got our kid into a wheelchair and through many hallways and elevators to go to the imaging floor.

He was seeming more coherent now, less likely to throw up at a moment’s notice. We weren’t too worried about him in the elevator, as he sat in the adult-sized wheelchair with his tiny frame, holding his favorite stuffed blue dog.

The nurse left the three of us on a bench outside a room that noted the CT machine inside. Not long later, a doctor came out to get him, looked at us, said, “Father,” and motioned inside. I waited on the bench.

My sister-in-law was in the middle of an appointment and couldn’t get to us, but asked me to keep her informed, to make sure that we didn’t get ripped off for being foreigners, and promised she’d send her brother if we needed someone before she could reach us.

The CT scan didn’t take long. Everything there was efficient and easy and clean and sterile. He came out talking — more than I’d heard him say since he fell the day beforehand. Told me how they put a pillow around him to make it not so loud. How cool it was to be inside the machine.

He got put back into a wheelchair and we followed him to triage again, where he poked at the wall and started talking about how much he wanted to eat cereal.

We had to pay the bill before we could talk to the doctor. I showed them our travel insurance, but they said it wasn’t a company they had a relationship with, so we needed to pay up front and then submit the receipt for reimbursement. We could manage that; it’s what credit cards were for.

It came to just under five million Vietnamese dong. I paid the bill. It showed up on my credit card at about $180. For an ER trip and a CT scan and a doctor’s visit.

The CT scan came back normal and the doctor talked to us about his results. He told us to return if any of the symptoms continued, noted he didn’t need any special medication, and sent us on our way.

We got back up the elevator to our apartment, met my mother-in-law, and gave him some crackers. When he kept those down, he got the cereal he’d been requesting. We made sure to keep him hydrated, and within another day, he was back to annoying me with questions and fights and what-ifs — I was blissful.

Our claim was submitted and approved, but in the end, travel insurance cost more than the hospital would have alone. I’m still glad we did it.

It was easy to take him to the hospital instead of waiting it out. It was so easy to say, “Do whatever you need to” when they suggested imaging. And even though his brain scan came back clean — and now I know for a fact he has one — the peace of mind it brought was more than worth it being a precautionary trip instead of a life-saving one.

Three days later, we were at the wedding, the youngest in his suit basking in the compliments he received, drinking Pepsi and water simultaneously from two different cups. All was well.

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