Day 147: $800,000 in Medical Bills and Becoming an Uncle

It seems that spending a few minutes reading before bed has been helping me to sleep better and longer. So, before falling asleep last night I read for 30-45 minutes. I managed to sleep for 8+ hours with getting around 4 hours of deep sleep. 

My legs were still sore from my previous two workouts and my shoulders were feeling sore from the mobilizations I have been putting them through so I took today off to recover. Instead I spent a couple hours reading before Laura woke up. 

While I plan on working out tomorrow I won’t be pushing my shoulders too hard because we have another appointment on Monday with the orthopedic surgeon.  

I’m still experiencing some pain deeper into the muscle of my left shoulder but our orthopedic surgeon said that could be like that for 8-12 months post-surgery. 

While waiting for Laura to wake up her mom texted me to let us know that my sister-in-law had gone into labor and that they were rushing down to Manhattan to be with her and my brother-in-law. 

Later in the day we officially welcomed my niece into the world, making me an uncle and Laura an aunt both for the first time. We were able to hear our niece cry a couple hours after being born when we said hi to my sister-in-law. 

We’ll get to see them in 3 weeks when we fly home from vacation. We’re going to sail St. Lucia with our family for a week and on our way back we’re going to stay in New York for the night so that we’re able to see Laura’s sister, our brother-in-law and new niece. 

For some odd reason my head scar was unusually itchy today. It seems to go through periods where it gets really itchy. It must be part of the healing process. 

While we were checking into a few things with our medical insurance I peeked at how much had been billed to-date. The grand total so far is $800,000.  

Of course this isn’t what the insurance paid since they negotiate that down (~$400,000) and that is far from what we’ve paid out of pocket but it is still an incredible amount.  

With MRIs costing around $8,000-10,000 each and chemotherapy costing between $4,000-7,000 per month, that $800,000 will only continue to increase this year. That doesn’t even start to take into account the ongoing blood tests or fertility costs. 

It was yet another time where we took a minute to be appreciative for having good insurance, an HSA and having the funds that everyone donated in those initial weeks. 

With today being our final cheat day of the holidays we picked up pizza, poured a beer into a frosted glass and settled in for the night to watch “Flight”. Netflix kept recommending it so we finally watched it. It was a good flick and, as usual, the pizza was delicious.