The Higgins Family: The House of Higgins: October 25

Medical Updates

I had my follow up appointment with my cardiologist and thankfully everything went really well. The results from my echocardiogram I had last week came back completely normal =) Also, he's really happy with my blood pressure logs and how the medicine is controlling it. I scheduled an appointment for three months from now to check back in and hopefully wean off of the blood pressure medicine. He's hoping I'll notice it going down on it's own and I'll call and he will advise me on lowering my meds, but if not, we'll try in January.

We ended up seeing the pediatric urologist for our little Toddy boy. Two weeks ago we unexpectedly got a bill for $4,500 from the hospital for Todd and his stay in the hospital. We were prepared for me to meet my $5,000 deductible and had it paid off for the year, but we totally weren't prepared for a second. But turns out we have individual deductibles, which we knew, but just totally weren't expecting his standard hospital stay to cost so much. SO, since we were planning on having his circumcision done early next year between 5-6 months old, we knew we were going to be shelling out a few thousand dollars next year since his surgery will be at Children's Hospital, he'll be put under anesthesia, etc. We met with his pediatric urologist this week to see if there's any way we could do his surgery at the end of 2015 to essentially save us a few thousand dollars since we're close to hitting Todd's deductible.

The doctor is amazing and gives all his patients his personal email. One morning I emailed him to talk about it at 8:49 am and he responded, copied his assistant with instructions to call me, and had an appointment set up all before 9:05 am. I am SO impressed with him and his "bedside manner". Anyway, I made it crystal clear that we obviously first and foremost want to do what's best and safest for Todd, but if doing the surgery at 3.5 months could happen, it would be extremely helpful to us. He reassured me he would never, ever agree to do anything he didn't feel 100% comfortable with and he is willing to do Todd's surgery the last week in December. In fact, he already booked it with the hospital and we're set to go Monday December 28 at 8:00 am. He said that between 3-4 months is completely normal/safe protocol for the surgery, but their office tends to wait until 6 months typically. So overall, we're relieved to be saving the money in the end, and know that Toddy will be totally in safe hands.