Saturday, February 20, 2010

Million Dollar Baby



I know it's been ages since I posted. February has been a rough month. Some respiratory viruses made the rounds of the family, and although I held out the longest, I was eventually sick along with everyone else. Between trying to take care of all the patients and get better myself, the blog was neglected.

For most of Andrea's life to this point, I've said that the only way to get through this experience is to stay positive, and laugh when we can. As the saying goes, if you don't laugh, you'll cry. We continue to be extremely lucky that Andrea's health is doing so well. She has continued to sleep all night without oxygen support. The PulseOx has not alarmed, and Andrea seems to be adjusting to sleeping with nothing taped to her face. It's much easier for her to move in the night, now that we leave the upper part of her body unswaddled. It's wonderful to see her roll over on her side, and position herself however she likes. The down side to that is her current favorite position; she likes to sleep on her belly, with her face pressed into the mattress. VERY stressful for us!

All that being said, all the craziness outside of Andrea's continued good health will make us insane. In the mail the other day, Ken got a letter from his insurance company, telling us that they are "investigating" the charges from the hospital for Andrea's 102 day stay. The amount they are questioning is $1,183,226.74. Yes - ONE MILLION, ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY THREE THOUSAND dollars, and 74 cents. Heaven forbid we don't reimburse that 74 cents! Now, we know this is mostly an insurance SNAFU. Babies in NICU with NO insurance get the same care as Andrea did. She is, and has been always been, covered under policies provided by both our employers. However, actually SEEING someone mail you a bill for one million dollars is somewhat scary. The vast majority of the costs should be covered by one or the other policy. I just think it's going to take YEARS before the dust settles from all this. Potentially, we could be left with several thousand in uncovered costs, but I refuse to stress about it. And of course, in the meantime, we continue to generate expenses from vaccines (currently being denied coverage by Ken's insurance), doctors' appointments, prescriptions, x-rays, blood work and sleep studies. So, she was already a million dollar baby by discharge, but I think we'll hit the $2 million mark before she graduates from high school!

We are in the final count down to Andrea's first birthday. In less than a week, she will have been here a whole year! We originally wanted to have a huge blow out party, but the doctor advised against it. Until April, it's really better to limit the number of people who come into contact with Andrea. She had a long run of good health (about 2 months) before her recent illness, but the last one resulted in a trip to the emergency room, a chest x-ray, antibiotics, oral steroids and breathing treatments for 10 days. We'd like to avoid doing THAT again soon!

I promise a picture and a post on February 26, 2010. It's the very least I can do to thank Andrea's fan club.

"God will not permit any troubles to come upon us, unless He has a specific plan by which great blessing can come out of the difficulty."
Peter Marshall


2 comments:

  1. And worth every cent of it... :^) sue x

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yikes!

    Love,

    Charlie and Janice

    ReplyDelete