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Friday, May 14, 2004After a lot of red tape, Briana Lane has her skull back in one piece. The 22-year-old woman was injured in an auto accident in January, and doctors temporarily removed nearly half her skull to save her life. But for nearly four months afterward, the piece of bone lay in a hospital freezer across town — and Lane had to wear a plastic street hockey helmet — because of a standoff with Medicaid and the hospital over who would cover the surgery to make her whole again. The surgery finally came through after an excruciating wait, during which she suffered extreme pain just bending down and would wake up in the morning to find that her brain had shifted to one side during the night. "When you think of weird things happening to people you don't think of that," Lane said. "It's like taking out someone's heart — you need that!" Actually, it's probably not as horrendous as it seems on the surface. The patient didn't have insurance. She was waiting for her application for Medicaid to be processed, and that does take some time. The doctors may have felt they were doing her a favor by waiting to see if her Medicaid coverage would come through. Otherwise, she would have been stuck with a very large bill. The surgery wasn't an emergency, as another uninvolved surgeon notes in the story. But four months does seem over long. posted by Sydney on 5/14/2004 05:41:00 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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