$$$

Some of you have asked about our medical bills and how many generations of kids we'll have before it's all paid off.

Little background about me: I am a massive personal finance nerd. I track every expense we make and I know exactly what our net worth is and how much money we save every month. I'm also a massive Excel spreadsheets nerd. Just ask my wife. I have about five or six different sheets detailing our financial lives. Put those facts two together and you wouldn't be surprised to find out one of those spreadsheets has actually been tracking every single insurance claim made on our son and by taking one glance, I know exactly how much he's worth. Want to see?

 

These are the totals of all the claims just from April 15-September 1, 2015 (the date my wife's insurance expired)

See column C: $471,396.83? That's what we'd owe if we didn't have insurance.

See column J: $4,000? That's all we ended up owing thanks to my wife's spectacular health insurance and out of pocket maximum!

If my math is correct, that my friends, is a savings of 99.15%. Talk about Black Friday deals. 

Some fun facts:

-See the row number, 173? If you take away that row because it isn't a claim, and take away row #1 because it's the titles of the columns, that means our son had ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY ONE claims in his two months of existence. That is ridiculous. How many do most babies have? Like zero because the delivery is charged to the mother's name, right? 

-The ambulance from Provo to SLC, a mere 50.4 miles according to Google Maps, billed us for $10,265. Outrageous.

-Our son had a total of 32 X-Rays costing $1,238.60 in two months. We're just waiting for him to become a radioactive mutant any day now.

-He had 7 echocardiograms and received anesthesia 5 times.

-Each night in the NICU cost $1,099.48 in case anyone was wondering and wanted to book a romantic getaway there. But that was just to STAY THERE. That doesn't include any of the medicine or care or anything else. So multiply $1099.48 by 61 nights and you get a boatload of money. 

-Even more of a boatload of money was a silly charge we got called "Comprehensive Costs" which is the medicine and the care and the everything else. $366,761.84. I kid you not, that bill was actually sent to us in a UPS package because it was so thick. I think it was around 60-70 pages long. That bill itemized every single mL of medicine he got and most of them cost under $1 per mL.

-The most expensive charge was his second surgery, which cost $27,261. Strangely, his first, third, and last surgeries were $2,484 each. Not sure what was so special about the second one.

-My favorite number: Column K which is how much we have remaining! We'll have all the NICU bills paid off in a couple months. 

But the bad news is my wife's insurance expired in September, so we renewed it and began a new billing year. Two weeks later, our son found himself back in the hospital for two weeks with a virus. So we have another deductible and out of pocket maximum to cover. But on the bright side, we maxed out two weeks into the policy so any medical bill for us for the rest of the policy year is free!

Ogden Nightmare

A few weeks before we brought our son home from the hospital, my wife registered to attend a professional development conference in Ogden, about an hour and a half away from our home. At that time, we thought our son would still be in the hospital, so it'd be no problem for her to go to the conference. She even got a free night at a hotel, so we thought it'd be perfect for her to go and get the credits she needed for her certification, and I wouldn't be tasked with the responsibility of taking care of anyone except myself (which is already hard enough...)

As the conference date approached, our son started improving by leaps and bounds and was suddenly getting ready to go home. One week before the conference, his nurse approached us about taking him home. The conference didn't even come up in our minds; we were terrified about having to learn all the complicated tasks and duties we'd have to take over once we all went home. Three days before the conference started and one day before we went home, it came to me.

I turned to my wife and said, "Hey. Don't you have a two day conference coming up soon?" 

She looked at me and thought for a few seconds. "Yup."

"Does that mean I'm gonna be home alone with the baby for a whole 48 hours with no prior experience of taking care of kids...ever, let alone a two-month old baby fresh out of the NICU?"

"Hmm..yup."

"Sounds great."

Then I excused myself and went to the bathroom and grew up really fast. I was no longer a mere mortal who hated kids. I was now "Super-omphalocele-dad" who could do anything. 

We were released from the hospital the next day, and made our way home with about a million boxes full of supplies and heads crammed full of information.

Our son went home with an oxygen tube, a feeding tube, and a horrible device called an oximeter (which I will discuss in a later post) hooked up to him. 

We got through the first night and first day with no incident, while I was trying to absorb as much information as I could to prepare for a whole 48 hours by myself with no outside help. 

The next day, my wife packed up and left me.

It was just me and my son. Against the world.

Or so I thought.

THOSE 48 HOURS WERE THE MOST STRESSFUL 48 HOURS OF MY LIFE. 

My son decided to turn against me. He took note of every possible worst case scenario that I prayed would never happen and made sure they happened.

He ripped out his feeding tube WHILE THE FEEDING MACHINE WAS RUNNING.

He made sure the oximeter beeped every 5 minutes, setting me into a frenzy because I THOUGHT HE WASN'T BREATHING.

He removed his breathing tube without me knowing WHICH IS WHY THE OXIMETER BEEPED EVERY 5 MINUTES.

He would wait until I'd run and take a 2 second bathroom break and VOMIT ALL OVER HIS CLOTHES, BLANKET, AND MY BED.

He made sure to set off a pee fountain ALL OVER ME WHILE I WAS CHANGING HIS DIAPER.

He screamed his lungs out THE ENTIRE TIME I GAVE HIM A BATH.

DOES HE EVER NAP?!

I probably did not sleep the entire time because I was constantly waking up in a panic because I had these horrible recurring dreams that I accidentally dropped him and killed him.

Looking back, I can't help but chuckle. I was such a noob dad. 

Now, 5 months later...feeding tube ripped out while the machine is running? No problem. Let me calmly click pause and slide that thing right back in.

The oximeter is beeping? Please. That means nothing to me now. The silence button is now my friend.

Breathing tube removed? That's ok. I'll pop it back in for you.

You vomited? Let me whip out my handy dandy wipe box and get you all cleaned up.

Pee fountain? Not today with my lightning quick diaper changing skills.

Bath of a million screams? I finally got him to take a bath last week with zero screaming. Possibly my proudest accomplishment as a father thus far. 

Just give me a job in the NICU already. I know how to do everything now...

My wife and I fondly refer to those 48 hours as the "Ogden Nightmare".

When my wife got home from her blissful "vacation", I took one look at her and said, "Your turn." And I went to bed and took a well-deserved nap. 

3 days later (I wish), I woke up and I was a completely new person. I had been cleansed by fire and I was reborn as a stay-at-home dad.

I'm writing this post while my son is napping. He'll be 8 months old tomorrow. Feeding tube is snugly in place while the feeding machine is running. He has no breathing tube now. He has no oximeter now.  His diaper is clean (I think...), pee fountain free for 12 days now. He's down from 8-10 vomits a day to just 1 or 2. I gave him a bath this morning and I'm pretty sure I saw a teeny tiny smile that lasted a nanosecond. He probably won't admit it, but I saw what I saw.

Ever since those 48 hours, I feel like I can conquer the world.

Going Home!

Hi again everyone,

Sorry again about the weird blog shutdown. Something happened with my URL and I wasn't able to "own" it anymore. So the blogger people wouldn't let me open up this blog again until I changed my URL. So the brainstorming for a new name began and continued for about....2 months. This is the best I could come up with...omphaloceledad.blogspot.com. Sorry for forcing you all to learn how to spell a word you'll probably never use again in your life...hopefully.

For those of you who are newcomers to this blog, my wife and I had a baby boy in April. He was perfect, except he was born with a condition called Omphalocele. Read the rest of my posts to get all caught up.

Anyways, the general story of the NICU is just about wrapped up. After he finished all his surgeries (4 in 10 days), he stayed in the same area for another 6 weeks while learning how to breathe on his own. He was on a massive ventilator, but eventually weaned down to a little oxygen machine. Once he was doing well, he was transferred to a a non-intensive unit where he had less nurses watching him and my wife and I were able to finally transition into becoming his primary care takers. He stayed in that room for about two more weeks, then after a grand total of 61 days, he was free to go home! It took long time for reality to set in for us that we were actually going home WITH OUR SON.

We knew we'd go home with him eventually but it didn't feel like we ever would. We were becoming very numb and stale to feelings/emotions. We just went through the motions for a long time while not seeing any signs of improvement. He was making slow, steady improvements, but not overnight. It was not immediately noticeable.

So when the nurse approached us about going home in a couple days, we were taken aback. "What? He's ready now? But he still has a feeding tube and a breathing tube, does that mean he'll be off those soon? Because there's no way we're going to take care of his tubes, right?"

Wrong.

We spent the next couple days learning how to take care of his tubes. Fortunately for us, he only had three wires left, down from the high of 18. We learned how to insert his feeding tube through his nose, how to insert his oxygen tube, and how to attach him to an oximeter to measure his oxygen levels.

Overwhelming.

The first time we tried to insert his feeding tube, we felt like we would be sent to hell for abusing a sweet little boy like that.

Then we got used to it. And guess what? He pulls it out on an average of 2-3 times a week. And we put it back in. Every time. He hates it. So do we.

#lifewithanomphalocelebaby.

So anyways, over the last several months, we have had some weird/funny experiences that we'll be posting that can only happen with a baby like ours and updates and other stuff so all your questions and hunger for updates will be satisfied.

Hopefully this blog can also be used to restore faith for other Omphalocele parents that someone else went through it and so can they. If you ever find someone who has a baby with this, show them this blog! We'd love to connect with them.