Swelling Faces, Insurance Woes, and Tether Ball...Oh My!

 Life is just never dull around here.  There are days when I try to have a down day to see what it might be like and then I wake up and find that my kid's right cheek and neck are swollen and we have no idea why and neither do the advice nurse or doctor she talks to at Kaiser and they insist we come in.

That was yesterday morning.

We got there right on time for his appointment to be told that it was $135 to be seen because he was no longer covered.

Um, excuse me?!?!?!  I just paid a good chunk of money to our COBRA company for all of us to be covered and my older two boys just got shots last week and this was not mentioned so what are you talking about?

Cue hysterics on my part and total freak out.

Ok, calming down....slightly.

They do a lot of checking and basically it comes back that the rest of us are covered but Jon was terminated 10/1/12...or in other words, his COBRA coverage never went through.  I had Mark call COBRA and they said that they are showing that he is covered so there is some screw-up between the systems which they are supposed to sort out but which will inevitably require several phone calls, faxes, and emails on my part to make sure it is actually taken care of properly.  In the meantime, the poor office lady who is dealing with me agrees to bill the $135 so hopefully things will be sorted out before we get that bill and it will just be for our co-pay.

Now we can actually go see the doctor.

He examines Jon and thinks there is either a small calcium stone blocking the saliva duct or an infection in the saliva gland itself.  Either way, antibiotics and he should suck on sour citrus candy to increase saliva production.  He's pretty happy with this news.  I'm not when we go to the pharmacy and find out that since he is currently listed as not being covered it's $153 for his antibiotics but once we get things straightened out, I can go through a huge hassle to try and get refunded.

Gee thanks.


At this point, I just want to get out of there and get on with my day which includes a shopping trip at Costco and then a run into Safeway (I know, exciting right?).  It is worth mentioning that you should never, ever, EVER go shopping at either of these places when tired, stressed, and cranky.  You spend waaaaaay more than you have budgeted.

But you also get your kids a tether ball and become the world's best mommy when you set it up the next day so I suppose it's all worth it in the end.