Quick Check-In

Yes, I’m still here. I’ve been busy and not feel­ing very well. Thy­roid stuff, I guess. And the Fibro’s been flaring.

The Daughter’s an emo­tional wreck — a com­bi­na­tion of hor­monal issues (recently started on thy­roid meds for hypothy­roidism and birth con­trol pills for severe PMS issues) and the stresses of being a HS senior try­ing to get all of her col­lege appli­ca­tion ducks in a row for early appli­ca­tion dead­lines. Plus she was out train­ing for her next triathlon and severely twisted her ankle; it’s a big, swollen, bruised mess.

The Son is doing well in school but the hon­ey­moon period seems to be end­ing and he’s expressed ris­ing stress lev­els. He’s acutely aware of his dif­fi­culty in read­ing social cues and is wor­ried about it. And he can’t fig­ure out whether his class­mates are being nice just because they’re nice peo­ple or because they really like him. [I wouldn’t go through my teen years again to save my life; I can’t imag­ine how much more dif­fi­cult this stage must be for some­one with Asperger’s.]

The good news is that I’ve made it to the third round of inter­views for this job I want. I’m not sure how many more there are to go; I’m just grate­ful to still be in the game.

The bad news is that our insur­ance agent called on Fri­day and reported that the sec­ond insur­ance com­pany, Aetna, denied all three of us cov­er­age [if you recall, Blue Cross denied The Son about 6 weeks ago]. I’d been advised that we could try to fight Blue Cross’ denial based on the fact that Gilbert’s is con­sid­ered a benign genetic syn­drome but our agent doesn’t think it’s worth the effort espe­cially since we prob­a­bly wouldn’t win in the long run. He advises that we all three go with the state plan. He’s prob­a­bly right. Any­way, looks like health insur­ance for me and the kids will run us about $900/mo. Add to that the fact that we each have a $2,000 deductible [total $4,000 out-of-pocket cap] and our pre­scrip­tions are under a co-insurance not a co-pay arrange­ment, we’re look­ing at prob­a­bly over $1,000/mo.

No, increas­ing our expenses by $900/mo doesn’t faze me a bit! :-p

Easy peasy, right?

Related posts:

1. Day 213: Woot, Lavage, Gas, Book, Star­bucks, and Bad News
2. $$: Doc­tor Co-Pay
3. Play­ing Catch-up: Gro­ceries & Get-Well Wishes
4. Day 131: Speech Ther­apy and Gospel Music
5. Day 235: Din­ner & The The­ater, etc