Hands up if you hate insurance companies

Well good news and bad news regarding Isaiah's hands. We could possibly be having his first surgery as soon as 12/24, bad news is our specialist will no longer be with our insurance after the new year which poses a pretty big issue since our insurance currently has a 70/30 $20,000 deductible for our of network providers and that only covers the 'usual and customary' rate so anything Coventry deems above the UCR is our responsibility 100%. We're trying to see if Coventry will allow our speicialist to be considered in network for him due to the fact there aren't any other doctors locally that can handle this type of surgery, but that could take a few weeks. We do have a possibility of getting into the Shriner's Hospital in Philadelphia (their hand center) and the doctor that would be doing the surgery is the one that trained our specialist here so we know he is a good doctor. We're still early on and ultimately trying to keep it local if possible, but we do have other options. We probably won't go through with the surgery on the 24th if we can't use our surgeon here since its best to keep the same surgeon for all of the subsequent surgeries. We can do all our follow up appointments here with our specialist since he can negotiate some of their costs in their office somewhat, but he has no control over what the hospital charges him to do the surgeries there, which is what would really hurt us financially.

As for the appointment on Tuesday it went well. He had another set of Xrays done and the the phases of surgeries were planned out (before all the insurance fun).

The first phase is to fully separate the thumb and pinky fingers on his right hand and to separate only the bones that are fused at the tip in the other 3 fingers so that his hand can grow a bit flatter. The left hand they would only be separating the fused bone tips at first since there is no evident thumb to separate out right now. With separating the fused bones the fingers will still be fused over with skin for the time being, but it will allow the bones underneath to grow straighter and help prevent more problems down the road and allow for the next phases of surgery to happen.

Phase two (which would occur approximately 3 months after phase one) they will fully separate out one of the fingers on his right hand, (either the ring or pointer) and separate the pinky and thumb or pointer of the left hand.

Phase three (again 3 months after phase two) they would look into seeing if its feasible to separate the last two fingers on the right hand and separate out at least one more on the left.

All of the further phases depend on where his blood vessels are and a number of other items do have an effect as well. basically if he's only got one blood vessel serving two fingers you can't seperate them since there will be no blood flow to one of the fingers.

His hands in general will always be a bit stiff and not like yours or mine and the ultimate goal is to get him a minimum of three fingers and a thumb on each hand. Sometimes trying to get that fourth finger can be done, but if its not functional, its really not worth it.

Plus who knows, they way things are working in the medical industry now he may be able to get a full hand transplant when he's fully grown.

All I care about right now is that he eventually have the opportunity to grasp things on his own and be able to feed and clothe himself in some manner, rudimentary or not. If we have to travel to Philadelphia, so be it. Are we angry about the insurance coverage here, most definitely! All I care is my son's hands get taken care of.