Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Holidays, Shopping and Surgery...OH MY!

It’s been about 6 weeks since my last post. Busy with holidays. We hosted Thanksgiving for my mom, brother, Aunt, Uncle and Aunt’s son. It was perfect. Small but wonderful crowd, great food, and wine. We had no plans on going out Black Friday but guess what? We did! Who were we trying to fool. We didn’t get up at the ass crack of dawn. We mosied on out around 10:00 and went to Best Buy. Not crowded at all and no line. So we scored big without having to wait in crazy ass lines for hours. We hosted Christmas for my dad’s side of the family at the beginning of December.

Among getting ready for the holidays, John was scheduled for his surgery to repair his vericocele vein. It was scheduled for the beginning of December and was canceled days before due to insurance issues. Surprise surprise! Story of our life. Basically it came down to that John’s Urologist was in network, but the hospital in which the procedure was going to take place was NOT in network. So insurance wouldn’t cover the procedure if it was done at the out of network hospital. Now, I’m sure to people who work for insurance companies, this makes perfect sense, but us real people in the real world dealing with real issues, this is by far the most frustrating and asinine rule EVER! Something that seems like a simple fix is actually the most complicated fix. We had a couple options. The best option for us was to have another in network Urologist at the same office that we have never met do the procedure at a hospital that is in network. Confused yet? You’re probably asking “why couldn’t his original doctor just do the procedure at this other in network hospital”. Exactly what we asked! But apparently, it doesn’t work that way. What do we know anyway? We are just real people in the real world dealing with real issues and know nothing about insurance. Yet we pay lots of money for it. UGH!!!!

So, his procedure was scheduled for Monday December 19th. I took the day off to drive him to and from and take care of him. He came out of surgery and the doc came to speak with me. He said that all went well and that he was able to successfully tie off a couple rather large veins. I was surprised that he said couple. I was under the impression there was only one. He said typically they see results within 6-9 months. Seems so far away. He was in quite a bit of pain. He stayed home Tuesday and went to work Wednesday but ended up coming home half way through the day because he was really uncomfortable. Thursday he did ok, and he only worked a half day Friday. Then we both had the following week off for the holidays. It actually worked out quite well.

As of today he has had a follow up visit and is healing quite nicely. They had to make an incision really low on the left side. Similar to a C-section but a much smaller incision. Doctor said that it may be up to a year before he feels normal in that area again because they cut through muscle. He goes back in 3 months for a repeat SA to see how it’s effected his numbers so far. And repeat every 3 months after that to, hopefully, continue to watch them get better. I won’t be returning to the RE until we are ready again. Right now, we aren’t trying but not preventing. We just want to see how he heals and go from there. Who knows what the future holds but right now, it’s nice not have to worry about a bunch of appointments and tracking my cycle. Don’t get me wrong, it still kinda sucks to continue seeing pregnancy announcements and all that jazz, but I try to take it day by day for now. I have my good days and bad days.