is turning into a pain in my ass. Carter has a small, hard lump under the skin on his upper lip. It’s probably a fatty deposit or an overgrowth of skin cells that should be a quick slice, extract and stitch, right? Not when dealing with our military heath insurance. Sure, they’ll cover it, supposedly, but I have to be willing to jump through 36 different hoops to get to the prize.
First an appointment with his primary care provider. She looked at it briefly and put in a referral to our insurance to have him seen at a local hospital (we only have a clinic here that does routine care and have to be referred out for anything beyond that). Go back to insurance company a few days later to find that they will only approve a dermatologist to look at it, not do anything to it. Yell at people on the phone in Germany. No luck because policy is policy and all that garbage. No matter that I live in a foreign country and it’s during Ramadan and no-one has normal working hours as a result. Sure, ask me to drag my kid all over the country to have various people all agree that this thing needs to be removed — when I could probably pay to have it done myself for under $100. At this point it’s the principle that they should pay for it and I’m not going to let them get out of it by making things difficult for me.
Go to the dermatologist at the local hospital a few days later. At 7:30 on a Saturday night, because Ramadan. 30 seconds into the appointment she can see that it needs to be removed and spends 3 minutes writing a report to take BACK to our insurance office with the recommendation that a plastic surgeon handle the removal. The doctor spent more time writing than looking at his face.
Another hoop jump successfully completed, I head back to the insurance office the next morning. The agent gets ready to scan the report and send it off to Germany so they can approve it, until I casually mention that if they had just agreed to have it removed like I wanted in the first place, then they wouldn’t be on the hook for paying a plastic surgeon to do it. The agent froze and repeated, “plastic surgeon? Oh, no. That requires a separate referral. I’m glad you mentioned it before I sent it off.” She then instructed me to go back to the doctor and ask her to write another referral to get plastic surgery approved. You’ve got to be kidding me.
Our poor pediatrician is overworked as it is, but she was quick to submit the new referral as we both laughed and agreed that if she had requested a plastic surgeon in the first place they would have denied it anyway. What a great system.
Wait 3 days and come back to the office to pick up the authorization. Not back yet. They promise it will be in tomorrow. Go in the next day and they are closed for lunch. I give up. Thankfully, I was able to hand that task over to Carter and he went into the office later in the afternoon, picked up the paperwork and scheduled the appointment. For the 4th of July. It’s a regular work day here.
Since Josh had the day off, he went with us to see the plastic surgeon. Just what he wanted to do on his vacation day (the base has a holiday, but the rest of the country has work as normal — well, as normal as it gets during Ramadan). The plastic surgeon looked at it for about 30 seconds and said it was easy to remove, but in order to do the very best job possible, he needed more information. He said they would need to do an MRI in order to know whether to approach it from inside the mouth or externally. Oh, please, won’t someone get me a Swiss Army knife and just let me hack it out myself? I can’t take it anymore.
Make an appointment for an MRI the next day. Pledge eternal gratefulness to the pediatrician for including an approval for imaging in her referral so I didn’t have to go back to our insurance again. Wait forever at the hospital (since it’s still Ramadan and everyone is running in slow motion). They do the MRI and a sonogram. Carter did fine and said it was just loud and hard to hold completely still for 45 minutes. Now we’ve been waiting for the plastic surgeon to call and schedule the appointment to finally have this thing removed, but it’s Eid. Yay for Ramadan being over, but no one works over Eid.
We have 2 weeks to get this done before we fly or I’ll be blogging all about my surgical attempt with a sharp stick, guided by YouTube.
