Back from my hiatus

Wow… its been a long time since I posted anything. Have been very busy both at work and at home. The festival season is upon us and hence lots of religious activities to take care of. The parties that I dreaded about in my last couple of posts were not as bad as I expected. There indeed was a lot of talk of pg due dates and u/s scans and various tips to through a successful PG. URGHHH! But, I did fine. My digital SLR gave me enough reason to escape the adults. The minute I started to feel myself get sad, I went to the kids room to play with them on the excuse of wanting to shoot some pics of them playing w/ each other. It worked out pretty well. I got to avoid the conversations I couldn’t stand… and the parents got pics of their kids! I am yet to download the pics from the flash card… but that’s besides the point.  I also picked up a couple of books over the last weekend. So that kept me company too.

A bunch of things have happened on the IF front. I have a nice billing story to share. Since I am extremely anal about details (especially when it involves BIG $$$), I asked the billing coordinator from the IVF lab to give me a detailed statement of all the charges from my IVF#1. I get it in the mail a couple of days later, go through it line by line, and towards the end, I see 3 charges for cryopreservation (that is the embryo freezing charges) for $575, $575, and $475. As a recap, I had 5 embies frozen at Day3 and 1 frozen at blast. And I remember by IVF coordinator telling me that they had frozen the 5 embies in 2 separate batches. So I just ASSUMED that thats why they charged me 2 sets of $575 and the blast freeze at $475. BAD ASSUMPTION! VERY BAD ASSUMPTION! A week goes by and I call back the billing lady to talk about something else and as a “side note”, I ask about the 3 cryo charges. She looks at it and the phone goes silent for a while. She comes back with a “Oh, that shouldn’t be there. There should be only 1 charge of $575 (for the embies) and 1 charge of $475 (for the blast). That was a double billing error. I’ll take care of it right away.” My. jaw. just. dropped!!! BILLING ERROR of $575?!?!  Thank GOD I asked!

Freaked out, I decided to go through the billing statements of the IVF clinic as well. And guess what another freaking double billing ERROR!!! This time for SIS#1. They billed $300 for the catheter for the SIS and then a $230 for the actual SIS! AHH! $300 for a catheter? I don’t think so! So later I was told that the $300 includes the procedure as well and the $230 will be removed!

That’s a total of $805 I saved last week!! So to all you ladies out there, take the time to look through your billing statements!! Make sure you don’t get ripped off… that is any more than “necessary”! *sigh*

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