New Milestone

I've gone back and forth about whether I really want to post something so personal on a blog a lot of my friends and family read.  But in the end I decided I wanted to share because I think it's important. We reached a milestone this last week with Julia.  The six figure milestone...as in her medical bills have now exceed $100,000.  Over 80% of that was from the five days she was in the hospital last month.  I'm not even sure we've received them all yet as another came in last week which pushed us over the six figure threshold.  And this is for honestly a fairly standard procedure with no lifelong residual therapies needed.  Not that we thought of it as routine but as I said, Children's Hospital reminds you that what is something your friends and family have never heard of is something they battle every day or week.  Which is comforting that it's so familiar to the surgeons and nurses but terrifying in that so many family's are going through it as well as things much scarier.

I want to stress that not only are both kids happy and healthy (which is most important) but that we have wonderful medical insurance as well as an emergency savings to handle this and are in no way in any financial trouble.  But it makes me shudder at what would happen if we didn't.  If we like most Americans lived with too high debt and were one emergency away from bankruptcy.  Or if we didn't have medical coverage with a reasonable out of pocket maximum through work.  I talked with a coworker a few weeks back who told me that our story with both Jonah and Julia as well as a friend of hers who had a high medical needs child made her realize how differently she had to think about planning for getting pregnant.  And that's sad because planning to start a family should be blissfully happy not stress inducing.  But better a little pre-planning than catastrophic stress later.  So I decided to share.  Julia is at $106K and counting, Jonah I never really calculated but a decent estimate would be about a quarter million with 95% of that occurring during his first two months of life and luckily very little over the last 3.5 years.  I can honestly say that in both cases I considered the costs so I could adequately budget for them, but that I didn't have to base my decision on what was the best course of treatment for them on what we could afford.  And we shouldn't have to, having your child have surgery is quite stressful enough I assure you.

I don't want to get into all the political arguments surrounding cost of care and insurance, that's not really my style and many people wiser than me have expressed all sides of that debate.  Rather I want to encourage everyone to plan for the unexpected in their own lives, be it medical or otherwise by getting your finances as healthy as possible to weather whatever storm it is that will hit throughout your lifetime.


Julia says hello and she wants to end on a happy note, mom is so serious...

Julia Update

Thought I'd provide an update on Julia, she's now 6 weeks post-op which is a milestone in that the first six weeks are the most crucial in terms of her skull pieces knitting together and becoming sturdy.  Julia started at daycare the beginning of last week and has readjusted pretty well, too much to look at instead of napping, but that's to be expected.

A few posts back I showed her first week in photos, I thought I'd dig up a few more to show the changes over the last month.  Here is Julia 2 weeks pre-surgery and two-weeks post surgery, you can see how the overall shape of her head has changed quite a bit and the ridge on her forehead has been smoothed out.

     

Julia four weeks post-op at the fourth of July parade and cookout.

 

Five weeks post op this last weekend, just because I can't believe how you can't even really notice her incision in this lighting. Her hair has started to come in; though with how light and fine it is it'll probably be a while before it truly hides anything.