Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Good News with a Bombshell

Karen's doing well. Really the title of this post should be "potential" good news with a "potential" bombshell.

The good news is we have a tentative date of November 26th for surgery at LIJ. We are "penciled" in for that day. This is further out than we had hoped but we'll take it. My parents have rescheduled their flights to better coincide with the surgery.

The bad news or potential bad news came this evening when I called our insurance company. Long story short it came to light that whilst LIJ hospital is in network, Doctor Ravikumar is not.

This news came despite me checking and double-checking BEFORE our first consultation. After a few phone calls our insurance company located the record of when I spoke to them on August 27th and luckily it contains documentation of the call where I was explicitly told that both LIJ AND Doctor Ravi are IN network. So this proves they screwed up.

Thoughts of switching Doctors at this point are not really an option. We're out of runway and committed to this team. The situation has been escalated to a supervisor and we will hear in a few days whether they're going to cover it. Trust me I will be all over this one.

Obviously the money is not the issue here, we will find it somewhere. Cancer is stressful enough on a family. Despite all precautions on our part, can nothing in this ordeal be simple?

Karen has her 2nd colonoscopy tomorrow to check the status of her primary tumor. Tonight she must drink a full four litres of let's just call it "fluid".

5 comments:

vasantha said...

francis,
Which insurance do u have? You can try and have your employer also put some pressure on them to cover this for you. We had gottent them to consider and eventually cover when my ob/gyn was supposedly not included. You can also use the reason that this surgeon was specifically referred for his expertise and it is possible atleast with cigna and aetna
hope it will work out for u too

Anonymous said...

Hey Francis

Chilling my taste buds with ice water between swigs of the prep helped me get the stuff down.

I’m thinking there will be good people at your insurance company working hard to support the team & defuse that potential bombshell.

Hold Fast

Don MacLeod

Francis Shanahan said...

Hi Vasantha, we have Aetna Choice POS II and so far they've been great. I am going to do everything in my power to ensure that streak continues...

Julia said...

Aetna Choice POS II...same here! What a coincidence! I have my PET scan Friday to see where my colon cancer stands. I feel comppletely and thoroughly normal. I have to remind myself that I have cancer.

Hang in the Karen and Francis! I think about you often, as we're in the same boat.

Anonymous said...

You write very well.