We had Devin’s follow up foot-ortho Dr appt on Monday and with new Xrays, they determined that his ankle had shifted and should have surgery.

To be fair, they did give Devin options: 1. It would heal in the current condition, but would be arthritic before long because of how it was situated. 2. he could wait until his work insurance kicks in (likely not until Jan due to some miscommunication on when he had to have signed up originally). This option would include allowing it to heal now and going in and re-breaking it later to correct everything. 3. Just go ahead and get the surgery now while everything was workable and didn’t require extra measures. My thoughts on the options were: 1. he’s too young to want to start dealing with joints that will always bother him. 2. being inactive for healing once is driving him nuts, he doesn’t want to go through it twice. 3. This will drain all of his savings and then some (I am sure he is groaning that he just got his car paid off and thought he had a decent slush fund), but he can recoup money and it is better to do it now.

Not wanting to be out of commission and go through this twice, he decided to just have it done now. The surgeon’s office was awesome enough to call around to the facilities they use and get the best facility rate that they could. This shopping saved thousands of dollars – so if you are ever in that position, make sure to ask that they shop around.

On the subject of discounts to be had that only need to be asked for: Last night, I went to the local pharmacy to pick up his ‘after surgery’ prescriptions and when I asked if we could have generic if available as this wasn’t going through insurance, she said that the scripts were already generic, but there were some discount programs out there and in two minutes, she re-bagged the drugs at a 75% discount over what they were going to originally be charged. – Don’t get me started on the basic overcharging of many drugs to begin with. I will leave that for another time and just be thankful for the help with this current situation.

So, payers said, food and liquid intake ceased at midnight last night, off we go to surgery today. It just so happens to be the same facility that I had my surgery a few years ago at. I hope he enjoys his day as much as I did. (and this is not sarcasm. I did have a really good and enjoyable day – its in the blog somewhere if you need to read it -search surgery)

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Sally