Visit to the Lab

After 3 weeks of a run-around from my doctor's visit to the Hershey lab, to my insurance company (via phone), to the local lab, back to the insurance company, & to the doctor's office (also via phone) ... (phew! Are you out of breath yet?) ... I finally spent a couple hours at our local hospital lab this morning. What took a couple hours?! Well, since you asked, the bulk of that was going back & forth between the lab, registration, & billing to get straight what the lab codes are & whether these very expensive tests would be covered by insurance. Then, the lab took quite a while to figure out just how many vials of blood they needed.

The upshot is that I have good news & ... well, no bad news, just a couple inconveniences to report.

The wonderfully good news is that the people at the hospital's billing office were able to verify that my insurance should cover the extremely expensive Complete Ataxia Evaluation. The very helpful folks in the billing office told me that even if my insurance were not to cover the costs of the lab tests, the hospital would pay the send-out lab that's evaluating the Ataxia panel, & then the hospital would just absorb the costs.

One of the slightly irritating inconveniences is that I fasted for this blood test needlessly. The gal at the lab a couple weeks ago had seen one of the highlighted tests that calls for fasting, but the highlighting was not a test my doctor was ordering. It was highlighted by the company that prints the lab order forms.

The other inconvenience was that I was only able to get about a dozen vials of blood drawn for all the miscellaneous tests apart from the Complete Ataxia Evaluation (ONLY --HA!!) because the send-out lab doing the CAE is only open Monday-Thursday, so I need to return to the hospital next week lab to get another 5 tubes drawn for the CAE.