I saw the shoulder doctor again recently. As expected, she now wants me to get an MRI. There has been a delay in scheduling it, though, because my health insurance needed to approve it first, an extra step that really pissed me off. My old insurance didn’t require preapproval. I’d just get whatever procedures I needed and they paid for it (or didn’t, as was usually the case, because of my giant deductible). How outrageous it is that my health insurance is now making these decisions, not me and my doctor. But hey, that’s the way of things lately. Bit by bit our control over our lives, our spending, our health, even our very own bodies, is taken from us.
A few days after my appointment, I received an e-mail from my insurance. My request for an MRI had been approved. And also denied. It was confusing until I read through all the nonsense. What they’d approved was the place where I wanted to get the MRI done, which was not, incidentally, where my doctor wanted me to get it done (she wanted to send me to the hospital where I’d been charged more than $3,000 for a cortisone shot. No thanks!).
But the insurance had denied my request for the MRI itself. They’d based their denial on the crazy notion that I hadn’t already done physical therapy. I was like, “Oh, you mean the physical therapy that I did have but that you denied my claims for?” I could feel my blood begin to boil, but I let it go. I knew the doctor’s people would straighten it out. And they did. The insurance has since approved the MRI, and I’m just waiting for the MRI people to call me to set up the appointment.
I feel like I need to keep my expectations low, though. Reading between the lines of what the doctor told me: surgery is unlikely to bring my shoulder back to its previous state. What they can probably do for me is to get rid of the pain. It’s less likely that I’ll get back a full range of motion. She says most patients in my situation are happy with just the pain relief, and yeah, I think that would be enough for me, too. But even that can only happen if the MRI reveals something that can be fixed surgically. Otherwise, my only options will be more physical therapy, more cortisone shots, and a lot of positive thinking.