Hello, Hello, Anybody there...

So my day of tracking down the med assistant began at about 10 a.m. I called the number for about an hour and a half and continuously got a busy signal -- got to love calling any drs office on a Monday morning. I finally got through around 11:45 only to leave a very stern/desperate message for the med assistant.

 It went something like this, "Hi, this is Al (of course said my full name) following up with you again since I did not hear from you on Friday regarding the approval of my appointment. I do not want to be the one calling you two times a day, but I need to have an update today. I know you are doing what you need to do, but I'm sitting here everyday still in pain and waiting for this appt so that I can hopefully find out some information on how to treat me. I'm confident that you will call me back soon to let me know what's going on. Thank you."

I received a frantic message back from her around 1:15 (I'm seriously always in the bathroom when I get returned calls) "HI Al, I'm so sorry I didn't get back to you. But I'm trying to now work with the supervisor and I just called and they said they would call me back in a half an hour and I'll call you back right after that." She was all out of breath and there was some other weird story about how one request had been overridden, have no idea what that means.

So I waited and when I hadn't heard back, I left another message at 4. A little more force in my tone. And finally she called back at 4:20 to say that she finally got the approval, her supervisor had to talk to the insurance supervisor, that they only got the auth number and should have the hard copy tomorrow and that she will fax it over to Cedars as soon as she gets it. 

So with the auth number in hand I called Cedars to try and book this appt ASAP. Well what do you know they are gone for the day. So I'll be calling in the am, hopefully by then they'll have the hard copy (track record shows there will be at least 3 attempts to fax before it's actually received) but hopefully they will let me book with just the auth number. 

So yeah, long story, long, the follow up appt is at long last approved!! I will, fingers crossed, be making the actual appt tomorrow. I'll let you know what tomorrow's adventures bring. But we'll take the victory after today's battle.