Big Week

This was a really busy week. On top of having Aria's first day of kindergarten, orientations at Evan's preschool and the craziness of trying to cram 5 days of work into 4 days because of Labor Day weekend, we also had a lot of medical things to take care of.

We called the Epilepsy / TSC Dept. at UCLA and talked with them about their surgery process. UCLA and NYU have very different philosophies regarding this type of surgery. NYU's is very aggressive - the most aggressive in the world, taking patients no other hospital will consider, although this is not Evan's situation. UCLA's approach is a less invasive and gentler approach (if you can call brain surgery gentle) relying more on pre-surgical testing and not doing invasive monitoring. Both are excellent hospitals and doing revolutionary work in this specific area of neurosurgery. UCLA was wonderful to talk to and we sent them Evan's records and CDs of scans -- they will be presenting Evan's case to their Epilepsy team on Monday.

We finally received the Letter of Medical Necessity from NYU to submit to our insurance company for our final pre-approval appeal for the cost of the MEG scan Evan will be having on Monday, 9/17. It took a little time to get the letter because Evan's file was not in the office while his case was waiting to be presented to the Epilepsy team at NYU. I have been working with the HR rep who deals directly with the insurance company and she is getting the packet of information to her contact who will escalate Evan's case so we should have an answer before the end of the week. Nothing like waiting till the last minute to get this taken care of! It they deny the appeal we will start the fight all over again with the claims dept. after the test has been done. We will see Dr. LaJoie on Friday, 9/14 during this trip to NY. We'll be staying at the Ronald McDonald House again and will bring Aria with us on this trip. The up side is that we'll be in NY for the weekend and will be able to do some fun stuff with the kids.