When I left for work this morning, I realized I already had a voicemail! It was from the Infusion Center at Stanford saying they had scheduled Phoebe for her "next" Remicade infusion for MONDAY and her second infusion for May 3rd, and to call back if that needed to be changed. Holy crap, that's so soon, I thought! Would that be enough time for the insurance approval? I definitely want to make sure I have that in writing, so I called them back as I drove along, but it went to a hospital menu. Of the Children's Oncology department, because, you know that's where infusion stuff happens a lot. It being super early, they actually weren't even open, so it just went to voicemail. But just hearing "children's oncology department" first thing in the morning definitely freaked me out and I'm feeling pretty scared of going to the infusion center and seeing a bunch of seriously ill children. I don't know how my heart will take it. 💔
But I am just getting ready to suck it up and go through with all this. And quite likely by myself too...
Monday at 1 pm would be a rather complicated time. Jason and I already are taking some time off at the end of next week as his parents are on their trip. I could possibly take Cordelia to school Monday morning, leave after a few hours and then drive Phoebe to Stanford, and have my mom pick up C at 1 pm..... Jason would like to come with me, but he is having a very busy time in his office and getting more time off would not be ideal.....
After work, I started making more calls to Stanford and getting sent to different people's voicemails. Even though the menu took me to Oncology, an oncology person called me back and sure enough, I needed to be talking to rheumatology people, but the phone menu did not give me that option. She was very kind and helpful though and took a look at our insurance and was optimistically predicting that since an infusion is "outpatient procedure" that our insurance should cover it. She gave me a several phone numbers of people to call to find the right task team and scheduling departments. I tried calling one person, but she was out of the office all week, so then I just called rheumatology and they connected me to scheduling. That person was less optimistic about us getting insurance approval and said that we would need to wait and that it would take several business days to go through. I said that was what I figured, so was my appointment on Monday too soon. I didn't want to get stuck with a denial and a big bill. She said that if we did treatment and then got denied, the hospital would cover it, but then we would not be able to move forward with subsequent treatments unless we appealed and got approval. She asked to call me back in an hour.
Later, I got a call back from some other man, Will, who was handling our case. I think he was the other lady's super visor. He'd been emailing with Dr. B all morning about arranging our appointment. Dr. B had requested that we get an appointment, which usually takes a while, but there was a cancellation, so the schedulers just gave us the very first appointment. So even she was shocked they gave us an appointment so quickly, which would not really be enough time for insurance approval. So Will was asking for Dr. B, if we were ok with moving our appointment to later date. Um, YES! How about a week later, when Jason's parent's are back to help out? :)
From there, I called rheumatology scheduling to ask for a different date and the only thing they had available was two appointments, one at 5 pm and one at 6 pm. I said those times sounded a little bit rough to me, for a 1 year old, and she agreed. The lady said that she was going to ask if they could get another room that week and is going to call me back tomorrow. So we will just have to wait and see what she says. Stay tuned!
Even if she does find one for the week of the 23rd, Jason's boss is gone all that week, so it will still be just as tricky for him to make it out. The first infusion appointment is going to be super long (4-6 hours) because they will want to observe her afterwards to see how she reacts.
I kid you not, when I was done on the phone, I had seven post it notes with NINE different hospital phone numbers.
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