well, the good news is that although we only discovered days ago that our primary insurer would no longer cover rsv shots, we were able to quickly coordinate with our pediatrician’s office to have medicaid pick up the tab for the remainder of the season ( in michigan, babies who are in the nicu for more than 30 days automatically get enrolled in medicaid, regardless of income)!

the bad news is that we have to trek to the pediatrician’s office which is pretty much a hotzone of nasty bugs.

the other bad news is that the home health agency told us they can’t bill medicaid for the two prior $2,500 shots that our new pharmacy benefits manager decided to not cover without telling anyone. the nice woman at the home health agency thought it was quite unusual that even they didn’t receive notice that coverage had changed and they were still going to try and recover the money from our insurance company.

as always, the dose of the rsv shot is dependent upon weight so we get to see how much weight he’s put on since his last weighin.

we were surprised to see that he weighs about a pound less than we expected based on his prior weight gains. we thought he’d weigh at least 13 pounds 8 ounces ( 6.12 kilos ), but instead he tipped the scales at 5.78 kilos which is about the 30th percentile in age-adjusted terms for premature boys.

the pediatrician said it was perfectly normal to not keep up with his prior explosive weight gains and felt confident that he wasn’t going to need any caloric fortifiers. whoohoo!

after getting weighed we have to sit around the office for 20 minutes for the medicine to “mix”. this is just enough time for odin to get quite comfortable in his bundleme.

needless to say, he was quite unhappy when he discovered that he was not, in fact, going to get to take a nap.

no sirreee, he didn’t like trading a nap for the poke of the needle. but i choose to remember calm, sleepy odin instead of i’m-mad-as-!@#! odin 🙂