A Day in the Life on the Phone

October 21, 2020 Nathan

Getting my health back is basically a full-time job.

This is just one day’s worth of calls, emails and tasks (from yesterday).

TL;DR — Who has time for anything else?

The drink I need costs about $1000 a month, so I’m trying not to stock up on it until I get insurance coverage. I’ve run out today, so I’m going to be a bit hungry until more arrives (hopefully today).
Emailed the primary care doctor (again!) about the paperwork for getting my nutritional supplement drink covered by insurance. Did they send the paperwork yet? Yes.
Called the nutritional drink company. Did they receive the doctor’s paperwork? No. I need to contact the doctor again.
Emailed the primary care doctor to ask her to send the paperwork AGAIN, and to send me a copy so I can submit it myself.
Got the paperwork from the primary care doctor and emailed it to the nutritional drink company. Next step is to work with a medical supply company who will work with the insurance company. So I should expect quite a bit of back-and-forth delay and hope that I get approval.
The latest order of the drink arrived this afternoon. Yay! I have something in my stomach!

Called the company again, explaining how I paid for dental retainer a year and a half ago and still don’t have them. They assure me that they’re on the way. That’s what they said the last 3 times I called.

Gutter guy came and took a look today. They’ll get back to me soon, but their schedule is backed up 8 weeks and they can’t get to it until the end of December. A lot of rain is going to fall between now and then — because this is Portland, Oregon. Gonna have to get a tarp to keep water out of the basement.
Drain guy came and took a look at the gutter drainage system today. The dry well for the gutter is clogged and will have to be excavated and replaced. Will have to call another company to rip the bushes out of our landscaping, dig up the well and fix everything. I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with that, so we’ll have to put that off a few months. I’ll need to run to the hardware for a drainage pipe to re-route water away from the front of the house.

Emailed the Connecticut (CT) surgeon’s office (again!) about getting a phone consultation scheduled. It has been a week without any word.
Got a call back from CT surgeon’s office. It’ll be 2 weeks until I can get a consult and will cost $250 out of pocket just to talk to him. In the meantime, I should get a celiac plexus block (CPB) done. They sent a list of doctors to call for the CPB. It’ll take 3-5 months to get a CPB done, and then surgery will be about 6 months after that. So 9-12 MONTHS BEFORE ANY RELIEF.

Called doctor #1 on the list. Dead number.
Searched the internet for doctor #1. Found a different phone number. He’s no longer practicing medicine.
Called doctor #2 on the list. It’ll take her 4-5 weeks to even review my case, then another 2-3 months to get a celiac plexus block scheduled. I’ll need to have my primary doctor and the surgeon send over paperwork. She’s not covered by my insurance.
Searched the internet and found doctor #3. It’ll be 1-2 weeks to get a consult after he gets my case files, then another 1-3 months to get a celiac plexus block scheduled. I’ll need to have my primary doctor and the surgeon send over paperwork. Good news is that he is covered by my insurance.
Contacted the primary care doctor to get referrals to the celiac plexus block doctors. She hopes to get that done sometime this week and will get back to me.
Contacted the Connecticut surgeon to get paperwork sent to the celiac plexus doctors. The surgeon isn’t willing to do that until I have my phone consult in 2 weeks. So we’re at a dead end with the celiac plexus block for now.

Had a video consult with him yesterday.
His office called me today ready to schedule me as early as November 19th. I don’t want to fly to LA that close to Thanksgiving when everyone else in America is also traveling—during a pandemic. So we’ll look at the first week of December as an option. I’ll need to get an ultrasound doppler study, a chest x-ray, an EKG and maybe some other tests done.

Called the Los Angeles (LA) doctor to figure out where to get the vascular ultrasound done. I need to call the imaging center that did my CT scan.
Called the imaging center. They don’t do a doppler ultrasound. I’ll need to call the hospital.
Called the hospital. No answer. Had to leave a message.
Hospital called me back. I was on the phone and missed the call.
Called the hospital back. Waited on hold until the system hung up on me.
Called the hospital back. They can get me in for the ultrasound tomorrow! (Finally, some progress for one day!)

I had a vascular doppler ultrasound this morning at 8:00 AM. Pretty easy process. A little painful and uncomfortable as the technician had to press the ultrasound wand right in my gut for about 15 minutes—right in the spot that gives me such pain. But it was easily bearable.
The ultrasound took images and audio of a bunch of my arteries. I think they measure the blood flow / pressure to see how much restriction there is. Then they can compare that after the surgery.
It’ll be 1-2 days to get the results of the ultrasound. They will send that to the surgeon as soon as it is ready. I’ll also order a CD with the imaging on it. I’ve learned that it’s much better to have a copy myself that I can send to surgeons / doctors as needed. It’s much faster than jumping through the hoops and dealing with delays by having the hospital do it, especially when the doctor is out of state.