Headed for Cleveland

On Sunday morning I’ll be departing on a long drive headed for The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio to meet with one of the nation’s top specialists in the world of Hypertrophic Obstructive Cardiomyopathy. I haven’t seen it, but I heard the most recent episode of Grey’s Anatomy featured a patient with this condition.

I will go through a full day of testing to determine if I qualify for a septal myectomy (an open-heart surgery). There is a very good chance I will qualify, at which point I will be scheduling the surgery for this coming Spring.

Today was spent trying to work out approvals, etc. to make sure I’ll be covered for all this. Quite a headache. I disagree with any company outsourcing their call centers overseas, but I particularly hate that health insurance companies do it now. Having worked for a health insurance company and trying to deal with people in another country who really have NO idea how things work over here and don’t have a clue what anything you say means, it’s especially awful when I’m an actual patient trying to get answers. They might as well be robots. I feel like hanging up as soon as I know I was routed into an overseas call center. So I just allowed them to give me all the wrong answers and get me upset only to get a totally different set of answers once I spoke to someone here in the states.

So I’ll be spending 2 nights in OH once I arrive, drive back Tuesday morning and I’m back to work on Wednesday with a clearer idea of the future that lies ahead of me.

For those wondering what’s going on with Circuit Theory, here’s the answer: Tom and I have agreed we want to continue working together writing songs, but we’re burnt out a bit at the moment – plus with things like my impending surgery, our lives are kind of preventing us to take anything seriously. So with any luck, we’ll toss ideas back and forth for awhile and once I’m healed, we’ll look at the possibility of seeking out additional band-mates… but the earliest that could happen is probably Summer ’09.