We just heard from the nurse, that the surgery just started. It will be 3-4 hours from right now until they finish. Keep praying!
Prayer request
Blue Cross is currently denying the spring surgery, stating that it is too new or “experimental.” Please pray that they would reverse that decision. I have been on the phone with them for the past few minutes, in search of some answers.
If they refuse to cover the spring surgery, we will go ahead with the other, older surgery that is more invasive, more time consuming, and more expensive. The other surgery is called the “180 Switch” and involves removing the back of his skull and rotating it 180 degrees, and putting it back on. As I said, it is a much more invasive surgery, will require a longer stay in the hospital, and a possible blood transfusion.
We are hoping to do the spring surgery, and will find out tomorrow when we show up what they are doing. Surgery starts at 8:30 AM.
Pray specifically that the BCBS physician would call back our surgeon, and reverse the decision. Thanks. I’ll keep you posted.
Financial Cuss Words
We just got a phone call from the folks at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, specifically the folks from anesthesiology who will be putting Benjamin down for his surgery on Wednesday. They asked us to if we were going to be able to pay the full amount of the 10% not covered by our insurance company. Then they told us the amount.
$480.
I’m better at writing than math, but if 480 is 10%, that means it is costing more to put my child to sleep for 45 minutes than we paid for our 2000 Ford Minivan. Does that seem wrong to anybody else?
What does that money go toward? The doctors deserve to get paid well, sure. But for 45 minutes of work, I think nearly $5,000 is pretty excessive, unless there are 15 of them. Even then, that would be more than 300 bucks per hour, according to my calculator.
We’ve got the money to pay the bill. That’s not the issue, here. I am not asking for the government or for anyone else to take care of us. All of the people who support our ministry financially and prayerfully already have funded this, for which we are extremely grateful. The issue is that somewhere somebody is getting far too big of a cut. I’d love for someone with more of an understanding of how this stuff works to explain to me where all of that money is going. Please. Someone explain this.
This post is filtered.
Got this from Rich Kao’s blog.
Holy cow, Tina Fey IS Sarah Palin. Pardon a few “adult” themes. But that junk is hilarious.
Sleep-Redecorating.
Some people sleep-walk. Pretty amateur, if you ask me. I take it to the next level and icorporate useful activities with my unconscious meanderings. I am the Michael Phelps of sleep-activity.
Last night, for example, Jacqueline got up to take care of Benjamin at some point, and when she came back, I was taking the sheets off the bed. Walking? that’s easy. Try doing laundry in your sleep. When she asked me what I was doing, I said “just trying to help…” and got mad when she made me stop “helping.” Eventually I went back to bed.
I have a long career in sleep-activity. In college, my roommate Matt woke up one morning to find me comfortably asleep on the couch underneath my lofted bed. I had taken the sheets off of my bed (which was tough to do awake) and neatly tucked them into the cushions of the couch.
But the glory days of my sleep-activity were back in the mid-80s. I would “wake up” and walk across the room to the “toilet,” which happened to be whatever random peice of furniture I got to in my bedroom, and pee in/on it. This included peeing into a drawer full of my neatly folded clothes, and (on a seperate occasion) peeing onto the antique cedar chest in my room. We’ve still got that chest, and it still has a spot on it where you can clearly see the pee-stains. Good times.
I’m working on more extreme forms of sleep-stuff (incorporating flaming darts, penguins, and hot pockets into my sleep routine as we speak), and petitioning the X-Games to make it an official sport. Then, the olympics.