Thank You

I would like to send out a love-filled "thank you" to everyone for all of your sweet comments, emails, and phone calls in response to my "worried" post. After many stressful conversations, tears of frustration, and unfortunate encounters with a person who clearly does not like her job, herself, or people in general (which I am not even going to get into that), I finally spoke with a kind woman at SSI this morning. Her name is Tia and she actually took time to listen to me. She answered all of my questions and was very willing to help.

Unfortunately, I was told that Christian no longer qualifies for his SSI benefits, although still considered disabled (temporarily), and he will lose his secondary medical coverage through the Oregon Health Plan on 11/30/08. We always knew, since the beginning, that Jason's income alone was too high to be considered for benefits. What we did not know was that the reason Jason's income did not matter before was that Oregon Health Plan is given automatically to a preemie baby during his/her first year of life (you still have to go through the application process and it is VERY difficult AND your baby has to be born at a low birth weight of 1 kilo or less I believe). Now that Christian is 1 he is no longer eligible for benefits.

I called our insurance and found out that Christian has more coverage left than we had expected. He still has about $175,000 left until he reaches his $1 million cap. The good news is that we are going through his insurance a lot slower now that he is out of the hospital. I feel a lot better after finding out that he still will have coverage for a while. I thought we were closer to the edge of being capped off.

Thank you all for being there for me when I was feeling so overwhelmed. And thank you Tia for realizing that I am a real person with a real family and a unique situation.

Christian finally fits into his Converse shoes that his Uncle Casey and Aunt Tita bought him. Can you say CA-UTE??!!!