John's Journal

Adam Pick  John, Please try and take it step-by-step. Yes, the frustration and paperwork can be annoying and bit overwhelming... But please know that this will be just one chapter in your book of life. Keep your head up. If you need anything, please let me know.

John Cook  Thanks, Adam.

I’m getting through it.  I’m just thankful my doctors were able to give me a few months lead time on the surgery and I have time to get everything taken care of before hand.  It would be a nightmare trying to get caught up post-surgery.

Robert Miller  Does the hospital and company not take care of that? In my case, in California(CA), it was pretty straight forward. To my recollection, the first week (or maybe it was 2) I had to take PTO 100%. After that, CA disability and my company health insurance together covered 60%. For the other 40% I HAD to take PTO, i.e. there was no option to get unpaid leave (I would have preferred unpaid leave so I have PTO left for travelling).

Now, CA disability insurance was being a bit difficult and they are almost impossible to reach by phone. I spent hours trying to get through. I think the issue is that there are companies that offer services to handle this for you and they have auto-dialers that makes it very hard for you to get through. I eventually got a senator involved and then all of a sudden things moved quickly. 

As for the bills from the hospital, it took months for the hospital to get paid but I didn't have to do anything at all. I just paid my out-of-pocket cost to the insurance and anything else was handled by the insurance. If you don't have that, many hospitals offer services to help with insurance claims, services after you are released from the hospital, etc. There is probably some information about that in the help center of this website. 

John Cook  Some of the forms I have to do. Some of them, the doctor’s office is doing.

Calculating How much PTO I have to burn a week to not lose income was tedious.

Robert Miller  For me that was 40 hours for the first week and then 40 hours * 40% = 16h/week. I had a lot of PTO accumulated so I never ran out despite 2 surgeries in the same year and taking 12 weeks off for each. I never really calculated it but I guess it was 2*(40h + 12*16h) = 464 hours. Not that I really needed the 12 weeks. I actually got bored a bit because I couldn't do much physical work and I was just walking a few miles every day, sit at the computer and due other mundane stuff. I would have been fine going back to work after 2 weeks as I just work at the computer and if I need to lift equipment once in a while, I could have asked someone to help. I wanted to visit my parents and go to the carnival after my second surgery but they didn't want me to fly for 12 hours. It was a boring time... Having said all that, make sure your surgeon gives you 12 weeks. You can always but it short. All you have to do is getting an approval from the surgeon that it's ok to go back to work earlier. Extending it is probably a lot more difficult. 

John Cook  They have given me the full 12 weeks for disability.  I think I need to burn about 17 hours of PTO to keep everything going & cover the shortfall in disability insurance.  I’ll run out of PTO about Week 9.  My work told me today they will float me my share of the premium for the remaining 3 weeks if I need it.

However, my hope is to be working part time from home around Week 6 or 8. I get bored if I have more than a couple weeks off.  The prospect of 6 to 8 weeks off gives me anxiety,

Robert Miller  Loosing PTO always isn't pleasant. Even more so if you haven't a chance due to long recovery time. But as I said, with my job, I think I could have gone back to at least 50%. Driving is an issue but you said you can work from home. That probably means you could also take a half hour break and lay down every hour or so and repeat that 4 times to get to the 50% (4h/day). And now you would even cover 6 hours of the workday instead of 4h straight. So what I would do is maybe going to 25% work whenever you feel like you can manage. Then increase it to 50%, etc. The reason you don't really want to go to 50% right away is that you need clearance for being able to work for lets say 50%. The insurance(s) are more than happy you go back 50%. And they will be less happy and possibly less likely if now you want to backtrack and go to 25%.