I used the time I had to start researching my options. I sent an e-mail out to the USCF-NE list to see what folks would say there. I got lots of good advice, offers from dentists around the area to check me out, but ultimately, nobody had the silver bullet.
I started talking to the dentists to see what they recommended. I made evaluation appointments at a few places and went in to get checked out. As a low cost alternative, I went to Tufts Dental School to get an evaluation, but ultimately did not feel comfortable there. Penny wise & pound foolish.
A good friend of mine's wife (Kathi) used to work for the "denying" side of the insurance industry. She gave me lots of great advice, plus a good dental contact. I went to see the folks over at the Dentist's Collaborative (http://www.superdental.com) and boy was I impressed. I got an extremely thorough exam, no jumping to conclusions on treatment until a complete evaluation by 3 separate specialists was completed. I knew I had found the place to do my work.
Now it was just going to be a question of how to PAY for all the work. My initial grievance with Blue Cross Blue Shield was denied (sorry, you're not covered). I was pretty angry by this point with BCBS - but Kathi had warned me nothing would come easy. Here I was, with full medical and dental coverage, plus race insurance and I was looking at $14k out of pocket. HOW COULD THIS BE!
I got a phone call from BCBS around this time - a customer satisfaction type of call. I was so pissed. "How's everything going?" SCREW YOU. I let 'em have it, told them they should be ashamed of themselves, blah blah blah. The insurance industry is so bad. They are fine for small stuff, but boy, when you need 'em for something big, poof - they hide behind their contracts and fine print. Complete BS. Start jumping through hoops and be persistent...
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Friday, August 24, 2007
Insurance Companies Are More Dangerous
I was healing quickly and back at the office within a week. All along I had assumed I only had to focus on getting better, not the money for my treatment. I called Blue Cross to confirm my assumption. My conversation went something like:
me: "Will my dental work be covered"
them: "Yes, under your dental plan"
me: "But my dental plan has a $1000 max"
them: "Yes, that's where it's covered"
me: "But it's $10,000 worth of dental work"
them: "It's covered under your dental plan"
me: "No it's not, you're only give me $1k on $10k worth of work"
them: "That's due to your plan"
Turns out, no dental plan in the country offers more than $2000 per year, so, there was no way my dental reconstruction was going to be covered under ANY dental plan. So, I call back.
me: "My accident should be covered under my medical insurance"
them: "No, it's dental"
lots of arguing back and forth.
me: "Do you think I need my teeth medically?"
them: "They are dental"
me: "What if I didn't have dental insurance at all? What if I only had medical?"
them: "But you do have dental"
me: "Do you think my teeth are medically necessary?"
them: "..."
me: "I need them for eating, breathing, talking, quality of life, right?"
them: "Yes"
me: "So they are medically necessary?"
them: "Yes, and they are covered under your dental plan"
Ahhhhhh! So, I wrote up a grievance and talked to my dentist about how to go about getting medical coverage. He said, "good luck." He was totally not interested in helping me fight the insurance company. Damn.
I realized then that I was in for a fight, and that I needed as much information as possible. The good thing was, I had plenty of time to start my research. With a broken jaw, i couldn't even start to get my teeth fixed.
So, my research started...
me: "Will my dental work be covered"
them: "Yes, under your dental plan"
me: "But my dental plan has a $1000 max"
them: "Yes, that's where it's covered"
me: "But it's $10,000 worth of dental work"
them: "It's covered under your dental plan"
me: "No it's not, you're only give me $1k on $10k worth of work"
them: "That's due to your plan"
Turns out, no dental plan in the country offers more than $2000 per year, so, there was no way my dental reconstruction was going to be covered under ANY dental plan. So, I call back.
me: "My accident should be covered under my medical insurance"
them: "No, it's dental"
lots of arguing back and forth.
me: "Do you think I need my teeth medically?"
them: "They are dental"
me: "What if I didn't have dental insurance at all? What if I only had medical?"
them: "But you do have dental"
me: "Do you think my teeth are medically necessary?"
them: "..."
me: "I need them for eating, breathing, talking, quality of life, right?"
them: "Yes"
me: "So they are medically necessary?"
them: "Yes, and they are covered under your dental plan"
Ahhhhhh! So, I wrote up a grievance and talked to my dentist about how to go about getting medical coverage. He said, "good luck." He was totally not interested in helping me fight the insurance company. Damn.
I realized then that I was in for a fight, and that I needed as much information as possible. The good thing was, I had plenty of time to start my research. With a broken jaw, i couldn't even start to get my teeth fixed.
So, my research started...
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Before and After
Just a couple of pics to show the wires on my broken jaw. The "old" me was taken in Dec. 2006... the new me was taken 2 weeks after the accident - still a bit swolen, but most of cuts had healed. FYI - those wires on my teeth were a real PITA!
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Staying at Home is not Dangerous
I was released from the hospital the following day - feeling much better, but looking back on it now, far worse than I thought I felt. I was sent home with some pretty good painkillers, but I tried my best not to take them (I think I took a total of 2).
Fortunately, I had recently started a new job which afforded me some sick time (I was previously consulting for Syrinx Consulting which would have meant no $ for me while I was laying in bed). After 3 days of lying around watching TV, I was dying to get back to work.
I still looked pretty horrific (although, according to some friends, it was an improvement), so when I told my boss I would be coming in to pick up some stuff so I could work from home, he graciously offered to swing by and drop it off for me.
I spent the week at home, healing as fast as possible. By Monday of the following week, I was healthy enough to go into the office, at least part time. It was also around that time that I started thinking about the cost of the accident and how the insurance company would handle the bills. I had (and still have) Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts coverage for both medical and dental. In addition, I had race coverage provided by the USA Cycling. I was well covered, so surely I would only have to worry about getting better, not the cash for treatment.
Boy, was I wrong...
Fortunately, I had recently started a new job which afforded me some sick time (I was previously consulting for Syrinx Consulting which would have meant no $ for me while I was laying in bed). After 3 days of lying around watching TV, I was dying to get back to work.
I still looked pretty horrific (although, according to some friends, it was an improvement), so when I told my boss I would be coming in to pick up some stuff so I could work from home, he graciously offered to swing by and drop it off for me.
I spent the week at home, healing as fast as possible. By Monday of the following week, I was healthy enough to go into the office, at least part time. It was also around that time that I started thinking about the cost of the accident and how the insurance company would handle the bills. I had (and still have) Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts coverage for both medical and dental. In addition, I had race coverage provided by the USA Cycling. I was well covered, so surely I would only have to worry about getting better, not the cash for treatment.
Boy, was I wrong...
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Bike Racing is Dangerous
One of the things I love doing is riding my bike. I ride a lot and up until Father's Day of this year, race a lot.
I was in a local race in Newton, MA on June 17, 2007 when some sketchy rider in front of me fell and I managed to endo over him and hit the pavement with my face. Hitting the pavement with your face while traveling 32 MPH leads to problems.
I was knocked out, broke my upper jaw, lost 2 teeth completely, cracked another 2, split my face open vertically and basically cut my lips off - oh, and wound up with tons of road rash.
Yuck.
All this to get a little speed work in a week before the Fitchburg Longsjo Stage Race, which I was training very hard for.
Yuck.
I wound up at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston where they performed just about every test on me to make sure nothing was seriously wrong. Fortunately, I did not have a head or neck injury. My wife showed up in the ER before any of the injuries were treated. I could tell I looked pretty bad based on a couple of things: 1. The lack of any reflective surfaces in my vicinity and 2. My wife turning completely pale when she realized the bloody lump on the stretcher was me (she only knew it was me by looking at my wedding ring).
Three hours of plastic surgery and countless stitches (and shots of Lidocaine) later, my face was back together. I had to keep asking for an Oral Surgeon to come in to look at my teeth. If I didn't insist, they wouldn't have done anything - oh my.
The Oral Surgeon came in and shot my mouth up with some more Lidocaine (including a VERY unpleasant shot into the roof of my mouth) and proceeded to wire my upper jaw with an Arch Bar. She managed to save a tooth that had come most of the way out, but unfortunately, one tooth was completely missing and nowhere to be found.
Once the work had been completed, I was wheeled to a room, so I could spend the night. I wasn't able to sleep much that night, but by the morning I was feeling much better. I even took a picture of myself using my cell phone:
Isn't that pretty? Take it from me... it wasn't fun.
I was in a local race in Newton, MA on June 17, 2007 when some sketchy rider in front of me fell and I managed to endo over him and hit the pavement with my face. Hitting the pavement with your face while traveling 32 MPH leads to problems.
I was knocked out, broke my upper jaw, lost 2 teeth completely, cracked another 2, split my face open vertically and basically cut my lips off - oh, and wound up with tons of road rash.
Yuck.
All this to get a little speed work in a week before the Fitchburg Longsjo Stage Race, which I was training very hard for.
Yuck.
I wound up at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston where they performed just about every test on me to make sure nothing was seriously wrong. Fortunately, I did not have a head or neck injury. My wife showed up in the ER before any of the injuries were treated. I could tell I looked pretty bad based on a couple of things: 1. The lack of any reflective surfaces in my vicinity and 2. My wife turning completely pale when she realized the bloody lump on the stretcher was me (she only knew it was me by looking at my wedding ring).
Three hours of plastic surgery and countless stitches (and shots of Lidocaine) later, my face was back together. I had to keep asking for an Oral Surgeon to come in to look at my teeth. If I didn't insist, they wouldn't have done anything - oh my.
The Oral Surgeon came in and shot my mouth up with some more Lidocaine (including a VERY unpleasant shot into the roof of my mouth) and proceeded to wire my upper jaw with an Arch Bar. She managed to save a tooth that had come most of the way out, but unfortunately, one tooth was completely missing and nowhere to be found.
Once the work had been completed, I was wheeled to a room, so I could spend the night. I wasn't able to sleep much that night, but by the morning I was feeling much better. I even took a picture of myself using my cell phone:
Isn't that pretty? Take it from me... it wasn't fun.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Upgraded to XP Pro
I spent this weekend upgrading my new Thinkpad T60p laptop to Windows XP SP2. At least that's how it felt.
When I started my new job at CoreStreet, I insisted on building a machine that could fully handle the full weight of Vista. We're talking about a laptop equipped with a Dual Core 2.33 Ghz 3GB RAM 100 GB hard drive and 512 MB ATI Fire GL graphics adapter. If there's a laptop out there that's Vista ready, this is it.
Let me start by saying, that I am a Microsoft developer to the core. I've been developing solutions using Microsoft tools since 1990. I am currently a MCT and a MCSD .NET. I drank the Kool-Aid a long long time ago. So, when a good friend of mine at Microsoft told me he got nearly the identical laptop, and that HE was running Vista and it was "awesome," I just had to have it. I had read a lot about Vista and seen plenty of demos. I primarily use my Operating System as a launching point for my Virtual Machines. I don't put the full stress of development on the base OS - that happens on my development images - typically Windows 2003 Server. I use VMWare Workstation 6.0 for my virtual tasks - due to Microsoft's lack of USB support in Virtual PC. I figured the people having problems with Vista, were the same people that try to run every new piece of software on the market and fill their system tray with tons and tons of utilities - that's a recipe for disaster and one that I don't follow.
When I arrived at CoreStreet, our IT manager handed me the laptop, kind of chuckled and said - well, it's already bluescreened 2 times on me. Heh... umm... not good, but who knows what he was doing. I was anxious to get started with Vista, booted it up and waited. And waited. And waited. Wow. Brand new laptop and the boot time was much longer than my 3 year old desktop running XP. Now, I can't blame all of the boot time on Vista. IBM certainly is to blame as well. They put every piece of management software known to man on the machine. How annoying.
Speaking of annoying - the user account control feature of Vista has got to be one of the most annoying "features" ever. I quickly googled how to shut it off, and within a few minutes, it was gone.
As annoying as all the IBM pre-installed junkware was, it wasn't a showstopper. I could live with it. I then proceeded to install the few bits of software that I needed - VMWare Workstation and the Cisco VPN client. Uh oh... strike one. The company only owned version 5.5 of VMWare Workstation. Not Vista compatible. A trip to VMWare's website informed me that version 6 had just been released and it was compatible with Vista. Time to pull out the old credit card. No big deal, installed the new version of VMWare Workstation, upgraded my virtual machines and I was up and running.
Next step, the Cisco VPN. Again, same deal. New version of the VPN client was available, compatible with Vista. Installed. No luck. Ugh. Since I was new at the company, I really didn't need the VPN immediately, so I left it to our IT guy to look into the problem.
I also had problems with two other pieces of software that really need to reside on the host OS - Easy Media Creator and TheaterTek DVD.
I managed to get up and running fairly quickly. I could read docs and e-mail, which is all that mattered on my first day. That night, I brought the laptop home and connected to my home wireless network. Cool, seemed to work OK. After about 10 minutes, the wireless network disconnected. Within 10 seconds it reconnected. Hmm... no big deal, probably just some interference. Ten minutes later, same thing. Ugh. All night I dealt with it going offline/online.
I began my hunt for updated drivers and found that the laptop was completely out of date with its drivers. Funny, here was a brand new laptop and there were new versions of pretty much every driver. I began the process of downloading every new driver and methodically updating all my drivers and testing after each update.
Once I had the drivers updated, things seemed to get better. I believe the new power management driver along with the new wireless driver fixed my problem. I was then able to connect to the wireless network without interruption, well, almost. Occasionally, my wireless connection would drop out and the only way to reconnect would be to disable and re-enable the wireless adapter.
My big shock with Vista came the next day when I went to copy a fairly large file from a server on the company network. It was a 4 GB file. Should have taken a few minutes. Vista took forever to get going with the file and then calculated that it would take over 2 hours! WHAT??? Surely, this must be a bug? I did some googling around and found some fixes to make the copies start faster, but the actual network copies NEVER got better. I tried the same file on a Windows XP virtual machine running under VMWare - under 10 minutes.
I could go on with my Vista experience, but it doesn't get any better. Blue screens when docking/undocking; extremely slow standby/wakeup; flashing video when docked; incompatible devices; constant hunting for new drivers (often beta). You get the picture. All this for an OS with a really cool looking interface. umm. ok, great. But, could I run anything new? Could I run anything that I couldn't run under XP? Since I'm not a PC gamer, DirectX 10 didn't matter at all, so the answer was, no.
All these hassles were for more glitz and Windows Sidebar. Wow. So, after 3 months of living (suffering) with Vista, I gave up. I tried. I really tried to like Vista. In the end it feels like Windows ME all over again. I formatted my drive, installed XP and now my machine is fast, stable and runs everything I need.
Take it from me, if you are a business user and need to be productive with your computer, stick with XP.
When I started my new job at CoreStreet, I insisted on building a machine that could fully handle the full weight of Vista. We're talking about a laptop equipped with a Dual Core 2.33 Ghz 3GB RAM 100 GB hard drive and 512 MB ATI Fire GL graphics adapter. If there's a laptop out there that's Vista ready, this is it.
Let me start by saying, that I am a Microsoft developer to the core. I've been developing solutions using Microsoft tools since 1990. I am currently a MCT and a MCSD .NET. I drank the Kool-Aid a long long time ago. So, when a good friend of mine at Microsoft told me he got nearly the identical laptop, and that HE was running Vista and it was "awesome," I just had to have it. I had read a lot about Vista and seen plenty of demos. I primarily use my Operating System as a launching point for my Virtual Machines. I don't put the full stress of development on the base OS - that happens on my development images - typically Windows 2003 Server. I use VMWare Workstation 6.0 for my virtual tasks - due to Microsoft's lack of USB support in Virtual PC. I figured the people having problems with Vista, were the same people that try to run every new piece of software on the market and fill their system tray with tons and tons of utilities - that's a recipe for disaster and one that I don't follow.
When I arrived at CoreStreet, our IT manager handed me the laptop, kind of chuckled and said - well, it's already bluescreened 2 times on me. Heh... umm... not good, but who knows what he was doing. I was anxious to get started with Vista, booted it up and waited. And waited. And waited. Wow. Brand new laptop and the boot time was much longer than my 3 year old desktop running XP. Now, I can't blame all of the boot time on Vista. IBM certainly is to blame as well. They put every piece of management software known to man on the machine. How annoying.
Speaking of annoying - the user account control feature of Vista has got to be one of the most annoying "features" ever. I quickly googled how to shut it off, and within a few minutes, it was gone.
As annoying as all the IBM pre-installed junkware was, it wasn't a showstopper. I could live with it. I then proceeded to install the few bits of software that I needed - VMWare Workstation and the Cisco VPN client. Uh oh... strike one. The company only owned version 5.5 of VMWare Workstation. Not Vista compatible. A trip to VMWare's website informed me that version 6 had just been released and it was compatible with Vista. Time to pull out the old credit card. No big deal, installed the new version of VMWare Workstation, upgraded my virtual machines and I was up and running.
Next step, the Cisco VPN. Again, same deal. New version of the VPN client was available, compatible with Vista. Installed. No luck. Ugh. Since I was new at the company, I really didn't need the VPN immediately, so I left it to our IT guy to look into the problem.
I also had problems with two other pieces of software that really need to reside on the host OS - Easy Media Creator and TheaterTek DVD.
I managed to get up and running fairly quickly. I could read docs and e-mail, which is all that mattered on my first day. That night, I brought the laptop home and connected to my home wireless network. Cool, seemed to work OK. After about 10 minutes, the wireless network disconnected. Within 10 seconds it reconnected. Hmm... no big deal, probably just some interference. Ten minutes later, same thing. Ugh. All night I dealt with it going offline/online.
I began my hunt for updated drivers and found that the laptop was completely out of date with its drivers. Funny, here was a brand new laptop and there were new versions of pretty much every driver. I began the process of downloading every new driver and methodically updating all my drivers and testing after each update.
Once I had the drivers updated, things seemed to get better. I believe the new power management driver along with the new wireless driver fixed my problem. I was then able to connect to the wireless network without interruption, well, almost. Occasionally, my wireless connection would drop out and the only way to reconnect would be to disable and re-enable the wireless adapter.
My big shock with Vista came the next day when I went to copy a fairly large file from a server on the company network. It was a 4 GB file. Should have taken a few minutes. Vista took forever to get going with the file and then calculated that it would take over 2 hours! WHAT??? Surely, this must be a bug? I did some googling around and found some fixes to make the copies start faster, but the actual network copies NEVER got better. I tried the same file on a Windows XP virtual machine running under VMWare - under 10 minutes.
I could go on with my Vista experience, but it doesn't get any better. Blue screens when docking/undocking; extremely slow standby/wakeup; flashing video when docked; incompatible devices; constant hunting for new drivers (often beta). You get the picture. All this for an OS with a really cool looking interface. umm. ok, great. But, could I run anything new? Could I run anything that I couldn't run under XP? Since I'm not a PC gamer, DirectX 10 didn't matter at all, so the answer was, no.
All these hassles were for more glitz and Windows Sidebar. Wow. So, after 3 months of living (suffering) with Vista, I gave up. I tried. I really tried to like Vista. In the end it feels like Windows ME all over again. I formatted my drive, installed XP and now my machine is fast, stable and runs everything I need.
Take it from me, if you are a business user and need to be productive with your computer, stick with XP.
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