Dallas Trip Day 3 recap

The preop appointments went well for the most part. We do have a bit of a worry though. Apparently the hospital is not considering themselves in network right now because Coventry did not pay them according to their contract for the last surgery (something like only $2000 out of the $35,000 they should have gotten) While we understand why the hospital is leery of getting a letter of agreement worked out again especially since Coventry didn’t honor what they signed last time, but it would’ve been nice to know this before the trip. Instead we learned this at check-in when they asked how we’d be paying the $10,000 out of network deductible. Well we haven’t paid anything other than the deposit to Dr. Fearon and we’re sitting in the surgery waiting room as I write this at 8:45am on the day of surgery. Dr. fearon’s office is making some calls and hopefully it all gets worked out, otherwise we may have a fairly big bill in our future. Before that ever happens we have a bunch of different options like an appeal, negotiation with the hospital ourselves, and Dr. Fearon even offered to call the CFO of the hospital if he had to. He’s got some pull since he pretty much gives them a surgery a day and lots of bed nights resulting from them. All in all, if we do have the pay much of anything it would probably be about a year before we exhaust all our options and would have to pay.

So besides insurance, Dr. F says his hands look great and that we did a great job with the bandages and that there is a good thumb hiding out in his left hand. It’ll have only a small nail because of how things worked out, but he’ll have a good thumb. He also measured his skull circumference at 45.25cm which still puts him just under the 25th percentile which means no immediate head surgery is needed. Yeay!

Needless to say we were a bit stressed last night so Angie offered to watch Isaiah while Rachel and I went to dinner and had a drink to calm our nerves some. It was a much needed break after a long day.