Wiilly Niit

Old habits die hard…like not updating my blog very frequently.

I probably should write about the uneventful well baby doctor’s visit that the twins had today (huge sigh of relief), but my wife, the blog subject thief, already has it covered. Instead, I will talk about much more worldly matters.

It’s not quite news anymore but one of my Father’s Day gifts from Kristina came as quite a surprise. After years of Kristina taking a hard line stance against game consoles, she surprised me with a Nintendo Wii. I know my wife trusts me, but she has made rightful claims that her stance was due to her “not wanting to lose her husband.” I guess I should maybe take pause at that notion and wonder if she actually does want to lose her husband, but instead I blindly assumed that she thought I could actually be responsible and not play all day and all night. To prove my responsibility I even waited a couple days until I could clear out an evening to setup the Wii. I did this despite my instinct to set it up right away and let the family fend for themselves for a few days. However, on the evening I did get it installed I “tested” the unit until the, uh, wii hours of the night.

While I’ve certainly played computer games in years past (not sure why I don’t very often these days) the one and only game console I’ve ever owned is an Atari 2600. I sunk plenty of hours into that game console (I used to have the Activision patches to prove it). With that point of reference the Wii is an amazing creation to me. It is a far cry from the days of blowing in the cartridge to get a game to work. When I first opened the box I couldn’t believe how small the console is. Then as I looked at the connections I foolishly thought “how can you fit multiple joysticks into this (I hadn’t yet learned the proper term: Wii Remote - and didn’t think to use the proper generic term: game controller)?” Silly me, there are no wires for the controllers, because they are wireless. Duh. Speaking of wirelessness, it’s also very cool that the Wii comes with the ability to connect wirelessly to the internet. This has allowed me to download Super Mario Bros. for Kristina, which has the nice side effect of enabling my sinister plan for her to become attached to the Wii too.

Anyway, I’m quite happy with the Wii versus the other game consoles. Not only are most game titles a little more kid friendly (I’ll need to start Alex as soon as possible of course), but I really do like the idea of having to get up and move around to play a game. Plus, quite frankly the game controllers found on the Play Station and XBox just confuse and disorient and old man like me. The Wii controllers are quite natural, which is very welcome.

Anyway, I would write more, but clearly I have some important things to do.

183 Days Later

The girls turned 6 months today. In some ways it seems like a long time ago since my mind works hard to forget the stressful days while Kristina was in the hospital and then the girls were in the NICU. Thankfully, the NICU days seem long gone. In other ways time has flown by. Going to work and helping parent 3 kiddos when I'm home does not create much boredom. In that sense, time has zipped by and so it seems the twins cannot possibly have already traveled half way around the sun.

In many respects the girls have come quite far. Never mind the feat of just getting out of the NICU without crazy major complications. Clara has reduced her oxygen needs faster than anticipated. With the help of the physical therapist's weekly visits and Kristina's uber-mom diligence with therapy, the therapist is already seeing good progress as the girls attempt to catch up to their peers. It is also nice to have a therapist around to look for some of the subtle signs of neurological damage (she hasn't noted any) and to observe that the girls are hitting milestones roughly together (they have). At this point the girls are relatively healthy, are gaining weight well, and are mostly happy babies. They are even starting to crack a little bit of a laugh now.

Still, there have been enough scares to stay a bit cynical. Perhaps my memory is poor, but it seems like when Alex hit a milestone, he grasped it fairly quickly. For the girls, milestones seem harder to judge as they develop gradually. And Clara has hit a bit of a wall with her oxygen. We were hoping she would be off oxygen by now, but some experiments removing oxygen from Clara as she tries to sleep have failed (though she is so very close). A little coughing fit doesn't strike fear anymore, but receives a lingering raised eyebrow of worry. I'm grateful for the progress already made and ecstatic to see the girls' little faces light up when they see me in the morning an again when I come home from work (they are happy babies). However, there is still a constant undercurrent of concern.

I'm curious to see what the next 183 days will bring.

The Numbers Are In

So I think after a couple phone calls this week. All of the medical bills associated with the twins have been settled. Sure Evelyn had a somewhat recent trip to the hospital for her MRI, but I actually paid a couple bills this week from the girls stay at the NICU. It has been four months since the girls came home (has it been that long already?) and only now do I think I'm all paid up.

I have to say that while Aetna, our insurance provider, has been very good to so far it pays (literally and figuratively) to procrastinate paying medical bills. I did not really procrastinate on purpose mind you. In fact I was quite organized. The biggest reason for my hesitation to pay bills was due to the girls' NICU stay spanning a calendar year. Since I knew the bills would be astronomical, I also knew that we would have no troubles reaching our yearly out of pocket maximum for 2007 and 2008. Side note: Try to plan your emergent medical care fall within one insurance enrollment cycle.

So when the bills came rolling in, I paid some of the smaller ones, but waited until I had all of the bigger bills in hand before I started to pay them. I figured if the bills were totaling too high I had some chance of rectifying the situation by threatening a provider with non-payment and working with Aetna in the meantime. If I just paid all bills as they came in I imagined it would be a difficult process to try to get a medical provider or Aetna to cut a check back to me for overpayment. Luckily, I never had to threaten anyone. Aetna has been pretty good, though I have had to clear up a some mistakes along the way. For example, my heart went in my throat a bit when a visit to Aetna's website showed that Aetna was denying all claims for Clara's NICU stay and the hospital was allowed to charge me the small sum of about $263,000.00 (not a typo).

The real payoff for my procrastination was for the bill from the Pediatric group that works in the NICU. Granted the NICU doctors have a terribly tough job, but they charge separately from the hospital. In fact they attempted to charge over $800 per day per child (just a bit steep). On most days, for our girls, that amounted to a doctor spending about 10 minutes per child during rounds and taking a quick call from Kristina or me to give a status report. Anyway, after sitting on this bill for about a month I received a recording from their billing department that they would deduct 20% off the bill if I paid within the next 15 days...so I did. Though I wonder how much they would have discounted if I waited longer. Anyway, since the doctors had already been paid tens of thousands of dollars by Aetna, I assume a discount was offered because that would be a lot easier than eventually trying to go into some sort of collections agency to handle this (I wasn't going to let it go that far).

To close, I will give stats on what the medical industry thought all of this ordeal was worth. Granted, these numbers are what the medical providers would charge someone off the street without insurance. Since insurance companies have negotiated rates, I think Aetna allowed the medical providers to charge roughly half of these numbers. I've rounded the numbers to the nearest hundred.
Kristina: $76,100
Clara: $427,200
Evelyn: $472,000 - Not sure how or why her bill is higher than Clara's. Maybe Aetna's website is not quite right.
Total: $975,300 (almost a million!!!)

Thanks to pretty good coverage and out of pocket maximums we've paid only a wee amount of that million (though this hasn't exactly been free).

That's all. Sorry this post was a bit scattered, but I wanted to convey another side of all the medical fun we've had.