Medical bills could give me night terrors

Little Bit woke screaming last night. We rushed into the room to find him sitting upright in the middle of the bed. He wasn't fully awake and continued to scream, cry, or say, "No!" every now and then. I got him to lie down, snuggled up to him, and tried to comfort him. About 15-20 minutes later, he was finally breathing deeper and obviously in a deeper sleep. My first thought was night terrors. Screaming, sweating, thrashing around, impossible to wake up - yep. Supposedly night terrors aren't remembered the next day. He was his usual bright and happy self this morning.

Medical bills and statements from my insurance for the two ER visits this year have been trickling in. Now we're really seeing the disadvantage of working for a small company versus a big company. My insurance coverage is nowhere as good as it was at my previous job. Based on what my current insurance paid and the bills from the doctors, hospital, technicians, etc, we owe $2000+ for two ER visits! Compare this to the coverage at my previous job: Little Bit spent two and a half weeks in the NICU. We paid $0, even though the total bill for all the NICU costs (room, nurses, doctors, labs, xrays, specialists, etc) and my labor/delivery was about a quarter of a million dollars. Again, we paid zero dollars. My insurance at the time, with the large company I worked for, covered it all.

Daycare has a program that will pay up to $5000 towards the medical bills not covered by personal insurance when a child is hurt in their care. So at least we won't have to try to squeeze $2000+ out of thin air.

The whole "in-network" "out-of-network" thing is a crock, too. The first hospital ER we went to was "out-of-network", so not very much insurance coverage. OK. Lesson learned. We went to a different hospital ER for the second incident. My insurance statements say that the hospital was "in-network", so the only thing to worry about was my deductible. However, the doctor who treated Little Bit's arm at the in-network hospital ER is considered "out-of-network". WTF!? That means we owe the ER doc close to $800. That's bulls---!!!

Pissed off

I am so, so pissed right now at daycare. At one of the teachers there. Little Bit was favoring his left arm, holding it close to his body in his right hand. When we tried to examine it, he cried and said it hurt. After asking him about it, we found out that apparently he had been climbing (something, not sure what) yesterday, when Miss So-and-So grabbed his arm and hurt him. Several bruises have appeared on that arm. "I in trouble....I in baby's room." The sad thing is, since they consolidated the Twos and Threes by the end of the day as kids left, Little Bit felt he was being punished by going back to the "baby's room." He said, "I no big kid. I baby." Oh, man, if that woman said something like that to him...It. is. on. As it is, she fu@#$ing grabbed my baby roughly enough to at least sprain his wrist and leave bruises.

DH is at the ER with Little Bit now to get Little Bit's wrist/arm looked at and x-rayed. I have to be here at work instead of with my baby. Little Bit is really being a trooper about his arm. You can tell it really hurts if it is moved. He didn't want to move his left hand or arm at all. He said this morning, "I go doctor for my boo-boo. No go school."

I'll update later when I hear what the doctor says.

Update: The doctor at the ER confirmed that it was "nursemaid's elbow, a dislocation of the elbow caused by a jerking motion on the child's arm. He said it's the most common pediatric complaint because the ligaments are still loose in toddlers. The doctor took some scans just in case, but saw nothing unusual. He popped the elbow back into place and gave Little Bit a sling. I met DH and Little Bit at the local bagel shop so I could see my baby and see he was ok. Between arriving at the bagel shop and staying long enough to eat, Little Bit's arm was obviously feeling much better. He had straightened the arm out so that the sling has slipped partially off, and he was using it.

The cranky saga continues

I told my manager yesterday that I had a medical diagnosis for what's been going on - PMDD. At first when I said "PMDD", he got the hint of a smile, like maybe he thought I was kidding. I continued on seriously, that the difficulty concentrating, the migraines, the debilitating symptoms every month were all symptoms. Looking back, it really pisses me off that maybe he at first thought I was joking. Like, ha-hah, I've got really bad PMS. No, it's not a fucking joke. Has your wife gone through menopause? Then you should effing know what hormone imbalances can do to someone.

The other thing that pisses me off is that yesterday he suggested we look into finding me another position to rotate into, since I'm on our lead's "list". What the hell?! We just finally got an intermediary on our side of things to help "translate" what the lead wants. This intermediary has been a huge, huge help the last few weeks. The intermediary told me that he thought any reassignment for me was on hold, pending how things work with him interfacing for us and translating. I'm pissed that it sounds like my manager is no longer in my corner. At least, the intermediary is in my corner. Maybe he can convince the lead to wait and see how things go. I don't know what will happen. I just need to continue to produce.

Yesterday afternoon, I was overwhelmed with a flood of despair. It all seemed to be too much, too big. I wanted to go home and curl up on my bed, in a dark room, and hug a stuffed animal, and try to sleep. To disappear. But I don't have the "luxury" of doing that right now. So, I concentrated on one thing at a time -- open the file I needed to work on, start copying and pasting info from another file. One thing at a time. It worked. I was able to get a decent amount of work done. And I felt a bit better this morning, having gotten some work done.

I hope it helps (I'm sure DH does, too)

This last week I've been working like crazy to get a big deliverable done by yesterday afternoon. I was working on the weekend, 10+ hour days Monday and Tuesday, barely taking time for lunch, but I did it! I did it without flipping off my boss or yelling - that's a pretty good accomplishment right there - or anything. Which I really wanted to do once or twice when he kept going on and on about something I'd already said wasn't finished. Arrrrrghghghg!!

(Any guys reading this might want to wander away now because I'm going to talk about 'female stuff' now.)

Yep, I got my project done even while I was wanting to tell most everyone to eff off and leave me the eff alone for a minute, because the Prehistoric Monster Syndrome was rearing it's flaming, roaring head. You know when the sound of someone's breathing annoys you? Yeah, that's what I was dealing with. Just for kicks, the hormones would also randomly make the bottom drop out from under me. Literally, walking from the bedroom to our kitchen and suddenly I would just feel too depressed to breathe. Not that I do that anyway. [Score extra geek points if you know what I'm referring to! Or just follow the link...]

Sure, those feelings could just be from the stress of being under a microscope and wondering if I was going to get written up or fired for poor job performance, but, three things make me think this has been PMS a week "early" this month.
1.) Last month, it was a week early, so it could actually be time for it.
2.) I had the feeling this week of being in a brain fog and having to struggle with focus.
3.) Today, like a switch, I'm much clearer.

Anyway, I saw my Doc today. He said that he wouldn't think perimenopause, but he diagnosed PMDD. That's right. No pansy-ass regular Prehistoric Monster Syndrome for me. My hormones have decided to regularly firebomb the hell out of my inner balance. Making just about every encounter that particular week of the month a running internal dialogue of irritation about the stupidity of everything.

P.M.D.D. -- Psychotic Mood from Dealing with iDiots. Whadya think?

No matter what the label is -- The treatment goal is the same. Get those damned hormones under control!

The Doc gave me a sample of one of the brands of continuous birth control pills, the kind where you only get 4 periods a year. Yee-hah!

More potty talk

Poor Little Bit is still suffering from that awful diaper rash. His rash seemed to be getting better over the weekend. Then, he went to daycare on Monday. I left the cream, asked them to apply it after every diaper change. On Monday night, his rash was worse again. We were back to his begging us not to change his diaper.

On Tuesday, I told his daycare teacher that the rash had gotten worse and to please be sure to apply the cream after every diaper change. When we picked him up Tuesday night and picked up the prescription cream to take home, we saw that they had gone through almost the entire tube. Let me spell it out -- according to my health insurance, this 50g tube of cream was supposed to last for 30 days. Daycare used most of the tube in one day. I don't even know how they could go through that much cream unless they were using it on every kid in class, too!

We tried to get a refill of the cream last night, but the pharmacist told us the insurance company would not pay for it. So, how much is the tube without insurance? $250! Two-hundred-fifty dollars!! That daycare blew through. $@#@#$@!!!

So, DH and I went home, trying to figure out how to handle this. Little Bit is in crying pain, begging us not to change his diaper with this diaper rash/infection, and we're almost out of cream. We looked at the ingredients on the prescription cream -- (0.25% miconazole nitrate, 15% zinc oxide and 81.35% white petrolatum). So, it's Monistat and diaper rash cream (the zinc oxide). For $20 we can mix up our own cream using OTC vaginal yeast infection cream and diaper rash cream.

Several people are going to hear about this -- first my HR person who can say something to our health insurance folks (maybe they need to see a video of our boy screaming and begging us to not touch his bright red bottom). Sure, daycare used way more than they should have, but the health insurance is crazy if they think that tube is enough to last 30 days. Then, our daycare folks will be in for it for wasting a 250-fuckin'-dollar tube of cream in one day. And then, our doctor for prescribing $250 cream without mentioning to us that we could just make our own over the counter for $15-20! Arrghhhhh!!!