Christina's still not healed.
Now, this is not an epic crisis. She is healthy, has all of her strength back and most (not all, for reasons I'll describe shortly) of her mobility.
But her incision, from a February 7th surgery, is still not healed. She has a slice into her lower abdomen, about 10 cm across, that runs about 3 cm deep. It is not connected to the organ cavity (or whatever they call the area inside you where all the important stuff is). She's in no danger of bleeding to death, or having her organs damaged or their functionality limited.
She just has a big hole in her.
So, after said hole was infected (twice, even), the doctors decided open the wound up a bit (the skin had started to heal even though it was open inside) to clean it out. And then they decided to attach her to a wound vac.
Now, a wound vac looks like the picture above. A small device that she carries on a strap over her shoulder. From that device comes a tube, which connects to a suction cup, which is connected to a sponge which fills the incision. The sponge and suction cup are taped over her abdomen, with tape everywhere to create a nice seal, so the suction passes through the sponge, and only affects the wound.
Since she has to carry a machine around that makes odd sucking and gurgling sounds, which has tubes that basically have blood pumping through it (not much, but still), Christina feels a bit like going out is limited. Thus, the not quite full mobility. She could (and does) get around just fine. She just prefers to stay home.
But that's not the bad part. That started before the vac was attached.
You see, the doctor told Christina she'd need a wound vac because the wound wasn't healing. We went to the hospital, they cleaned the wound, inserted the sponge, taped her up, attached the cup, taped that, and then sent her to short-term recovery.
Where she (eventually we, when they let me upstairs) had to wait an additional 6 hours because... get this... the wound vac wasn't covered by our health care plan.
Now, we are freelance writers. We buy our own health care, no employer provides it. We buy into the best plan Kaiser Permanente offers.
But this device, which the doctor says is needed to treat a complication from a surgery they performed, which WAS covered, is somehow not in our plan.
So they say we'll have to pay for it ourselves. The doctor has been saying 3 weeks of wound vac. Kaiser is saying it costs $123.00 per day.
You do the math.
Almost $2600 (okay, I did it for you) for a device that is necessary, to take care of the complications (not her fault, most likely not theirs, it just happens) from a surgery that was covered in our plan.
And they don't tell us this until she's in the recovery room, with everything but the suction pump already attached to her wound.
Needless to say, there was much in the way of fit throwing.
We also offered to switch plans to one that did cover it.
Guess what? There is no such plan.
Not for self-providers. Only plans provided by employers are eligible.
Because being self employed prevents you from having wounds, I suppose?
The people at Kaiser, doctors, nurses, administrators... they all understood the ludicrousness of this. They all were doing their best to help. But the system had what seemed to be a fatal flaw.
But, to their credit, they made it happen.
We were sent home with the device, with assurances that Kaiser would cover it. We had to apply for financial assistance so that Kaiser will eat the costs rather than just bill us later. But we've now received calls from Kaiser, checking on Christina's state of mind, and assuring her those forms are a formality. They are paying.
But for one night, we were living in Michael Moore territory.
Now, we're back in a world that makes a bit more sense.
It's just filled with intermittent sucking sounds.
