A lot has changed!

Wow, it has been a long time since I have updated this blog. It has just been a crazy few months around here. Some good news, Abigail seems to be progressing with her speech just as a typical child should, saying dank du, ball, shhh (for shoe), no no, mommy, dada, woo (for Luke), where mommy go?, bye bye, hi (and saying it to anyone and everyone, miss social bug she is), beah (for her bear), go, dog, tee (for teeth), oh I could go on and on. It is very reassuring!

She is walking and following Luke everywhere. Every time we ask Luke if he needs to go potty, she walks right in the bathroom, even before Luke sometimes. So cute. She even tries to push the stool up to the potty and stand like brother. How do we even begin to explain to a 17 month old that girls just don’t do it that way!

Last night we went to the park down the street after dinner. Traditionally, daddy takes Luke on a walk there while I finish cleaning Abigail’s mess up from dinner, then the two of us drive over. Abigail did not want any of that. She saw them leave and ran to the table, grabbed her shoes off of it, sat down and tried to put her shoes on, fussing the entire time. She wanted to go now! I will tell you what, Abigail is one little spit fire and we love it!

On to Luke, he is plugging along with all his therapy. He gets about 14 hours of ABA a week, 45 minutes of speech a week and occupational therapy 1 hr per week. But, it is all play to him, he has fun, he loves the one-on-one time he gets. One of his ABA therapists works for a private school system and is on hiatus during the school year and will be back in the summer-Miss Johanne. Thankfully we were able to pick up Miss Kelsey, another therapist, who starts this week.

We did move Luke’s OT services to Children’s Therapy Center. He was at Kosair Children’s Hospital, but this new place has a lot more services and space. We took Luke there last week for the first time and he loved it! They kept him active, which is very important when working with him! He is an active kid to say the least!

He is making great progress, communicating in 4-6 word sentences, says hi to people and friends, has almost mastered undressing himself, he draws circles, squares and crosses (the later two we had no idea he knew how to do until is OT evaluation last week!). He knows his age, his last name, and his birthday now! He surprises us every day with the things he can do!

Insurance company battles continue on. Lost our battle for reimbursement for speech therapy, all appeals exhausted there. UPS said that it wasn’t medically necessary. So, what is speech therapy for then? Luke is speech delayed, he needs speech therapy, bottom line. This stuff just irritates me.

There is still a sliver of hope for ABA and OT (although if they said no to speech, things do not look good for OT). We have 30 days before we hear of decisions on that from UPS. Luke started ABA therapy in June and we are still in the final appeals stage with UPS/Aetna to cover that. We probably have another month to wait on that. So in total 5 months between the submission of claims and actually getting a decision.

This is really taking a toll on finances. Family has helped, but there is only so much they can do. We are spending around 2 grand a month out of pocket. So some back pay from UPS/Aetna would really be nice.

In the end there is hope, it is called living in Indiana and getting a private insurance policy. Indiana is one of the very few states in the entire country that have mandates that insurance companies must pay for treatments related to autism. UPS/Aetna falls under the one exception which gives self-insured companies an option whether or not they want to cover it. Hence the battles we are facing now. But a private policy must pay for it, if you live in Indiana. So, mom and dad, no, we will not be moving to Kentucky anytime soon. Although the law in KY has similar mandates, they have a $500 cap per month. Indiana has no cap!

I think that is all for now, thanks for reading!