Made in Richmond

We were supposed to have our 50 billionth follow-up appointment with the specialist tomorrow morning at 8:30am. An appointment we’ve had scheduled for two months. An appointment that 1) involves putting to rest the likelihood of a potential “issue” and 2) means seeing this wiggly child on screen (TOES!!!!!)

You may remember that I’ve switched jobs. Switching jobs usually involves switching insurance. When you go to a specialist, there’s all kinds of “authorizations” that have to happen before you can be seen, otherwise you might get charged a ridiculous amount of money. Yes, insurance is a very confusing animal, made even more confusing when you go from being a dependent to an employee with her own health plan within a month. But still, you’d think staying on top of paperwork and getting everything in super early would alleviate any confusion and delays.

NOT SO MUCH.

At my regular OB appointment last week, I checked with the office manager at my OB’s office to see if we had gotten the appointment reauthorized under my new insurance. She said she would check on it and call me right away. Which she did, because she’s awesome and does her job very well. And do you know what she said when she called me?

“I looked up your social security number in the system and they are showing you have no active coverage. I knew that since you’re 35 weeks pregnant, you’d probably want to know that.”

And after thanking her for being wonderful and realizing that information like that is, oh I don’t know, IMPORTANT, to someone who could realistically go into labor AT ANY SECOND, and proceeded to explode.

And we all know how pregnant ladies explode. We cry.

After spending yesterday trying to get the whole not having insurance thing sorted out, my day ended with a phone call saying that my insurance was now active and I should be fine.

AGAIN NOT SO MUCH.

My OB’s wonderful office manager called me this morning to say that I’m still not showing up as active and that authorization requires 24 hours. 24 hours after she called would put us at 10am, a time very much after our 8:30 appointment.

Again with the exploding, mostly because I know how hard it is to get appointments with specialist, and also because DAMMIT.

So, then the sweet, sweet office manager advised me to call the specialist and explain the situation. Hopefully we would be able to get another appointment late this week or early next week - she would hate for us to show up at the appointment and not be covered.

Taking her advice, I called the specialist and explained what was going on. I sensed some hesitation in her voice. And then my voice got wobbly. As soon as she heard that she said, “Ok, honey, we’ll figure this out.”

I managed to get another appointment for 1:00pm on Monday, a good 5 days after our original appointment but hopefully far enough away that this stuff would be well sorted out by then.

Finally our insurance person gets back in touch with me. She says it takes 48 hours for me to appear in the system. Something she probably should have mentioned yesterday during maybe 1 of the 18 times I mentioned that I had a specialist appointment on Wednesday morning. And then she said, “You could always just go to the appointment, pay, and then file a claim to get reimbursed.”

Yes. Yes, because THAT WOULD BE SO EASY. While I’m at it, I will also solve world hunger and figure out exactly why anyone cares about what Kim Kardashian is doing. Equal levels of difficulty but realistically with a higher probability for success.