Bills and Bills

Simple, right?

Congress passed, and the President signed, the CARES Act just before the weekend, so I've spent some time looking through not only the complete text of the bill, but also various summaries of key provisions in order to write up some summaries and things that we will need to communicate what is relevant to the university and medical center. The bill itself is 335 pages long, so it's been difficult to decide exactly what to include for one audience or the other.

A little while ago we heard a huge crash outside on South Claiborne Avenue and everyone ran out to see what had happened. Apparently someone was driving toward town in the right lane while texting and suddenly realized he was about to hit a parked car in the curve near Lowerline. He over-reacted, went across three lanes, across the neutral ground, through a concrete light post, across the three oncoming lanes, and hit the house on the corner of Pine and S. Claiborne. Apparently he was OK. The car, not so much. Anyway, that was our excitement for the morning.

Just making stuff up out of thin air

Meanwhile, I've been dealing with the other kind of bills, namely medical ones. I've already spent quite a bit of time confirming to numerous entities that the accident did not involve a car or anyone else they can get money out of in order to avoid covering the costs for my medical care, which I suppose will probably come in at around $30k. The disturbing thing is that some, such as University Medical Center, are making up stuff and incorrectly checking off boxes on claim forms. At no time did I tell anyone that any automobile was involved in the accident, yet I received a form in the mail yesterday on which they had checked "Yes" for "Auto Accident?" and put in "Auto Insurance" for "Insurance Plan Name." I don't know what to call that except attempted insurance fraud. Hopefully I got it all straightened out over the phone, but I'll bet I will be dealing with the same thing for months. I had already had to submit a report over the phone for BlueCross/BlueShield because they denied the insurance claim on the assumption that it might be an auto accident. My medical record from both hospitals clearly explains what happened and does not mention a car.

On the recovery front, I can walk unaided right now, but it is not without some pelvic pain, so I will be continuing to minimize my left leg load-bearing. All I can do right now is to use pain as my guide especially since no Physical Therapy was prescribed and no follow-up x-rays or CT scans were done. The broken ribs are coming along slowly. It still hurts a bit to take deep breaths, both on the left side where there are the confirmed broken ribs, and up high near my sternum on the right where they never noticed anything but where I assume there was also some kind of fracture or separation since it still hurts over three weeks out. On the plus side, I can no longer feel the broken pieces moving when I take deep breaths. Right now I keep going back and forth about trying to put the bike on the trainer to see if I can tolerate that. I'm pretty sure the pelvic fracture, which is near the root of the inferior pelvic ramus, is probably what I sit on when I'm on the bike. Changing my position radically so that I'm sitting much more upright and therefore more on the back part of the pelvis may have to be the solution, but I think I'll give it a few more days.

TMC Team for Roche Testing

Here in New Orleans there are starting to be some hints that the Social Distancing efforts may be having some effect in "flattening the curve." It really remains to be seen if it's real or just a function of reporting issues, though. We can hope, anyway. Meanwhile, Tulane and LSUHSC cooperated to set up the Roche rapid testing which is up and running as of today at Tulane Medical School. Results in about four hours, so much better than sending samples off to Baton Rouge and waiting days for the results.