It started with a phone call from the woman at San Ramon Regional Medical Center to discuss prep for Thursday's SpaceOAR procedure. I politely told Gloria that I'd be happy to listen but it was 2 in the afternoon and I'd heard nothing about if it'd been auth'd or not. She assured me that there was just NO WAY that if she had it on her schedule it wouldn't have been auth'd. I politely said, well you still might just wanna double check with your business office.
Gloria did check with the business office and lo and behold there were no auths from United OR the hospital/physician network. Imagine that! (heavy sarcasm intonation intended) This led to almost 3 hours on the phone with doctor's offices, United, John Muir Hospital/Physician network and a couple of other offices thrown in for good measure.
Finally, right at 5pm, as I was holding for the UHC rep that actually tried to take ownership of the issue, my doc's office called and I clicked over and the nice young woman who has worked very hard on this, said good news, we have an auth......you're on. I breathed a sigh of relief, got the auth number from the UHC rep and made a margarita.
It's not enough to have to deal with a deadly carcinoma growing at a rapid pace in one's body and taking treatments you really don't want to to keep from hurting more. No, you have to deal with the potential ineptitude of everyone involved, particularly that of the new MORE EXPENSIVE insurance company. The wonderful woman at the Doc's office said if I had not been diligent in calling and recalling UHC, we probably wouldn't have know anything before late tomorrow which would have meant another rescheduling.
Where do I bill for my roughly 8 hours on the phone since December trying to make this happen? My Frustration on the Phone and Doing Your Work For You hourly rates start at $560 an hour.
OK, rant off.
Now I have to eat light and mentally prep for this. I'm in a pretty good place now that the bureaucratic BS is done with. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't anxious about this whole process. I am. But it's what I gotta do and I'll be unconscious so no one will get hurt :) . Additionally, I trust Dr. Kenneth Chao and it's a relatively safe procedure. The gel and markers should take about an hour (I can't imagine I even considered being conscious for that long during something like this! lol.....NO! NO! Oh HELL NO!) to implant and I come out of anesthesia like a kid waking up on Christmas morning, so with a 1pm start time, I should be good to go by 3 at the latest I'm thinking.
Then I have to decide on 5 ICBMs with high yield warheads fired at my lil' friend over 2.5 weeks or 40 cruise missiles with smaller warheads fired 40 days over 2 months. I still don't know the right answer and I need to make a decision soon.
Thanks for everyone's kind wishes and does anyone know how to measure/talk in terms of radiation taken into the body?
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