Another bump in the road..

My four year old Abigail called me on the phone yesterday around 11am and with a scared voice told me to come home that mommy needed me because Faith was really not feeling good. I could hear Faith yelling in the background and Renae trying to console her. I was at the hospital at the Referral office trying to get some assistance getting her admitted into a hospital as soon as possible. The only thing I learned there was that Faith should have been assigned a behavior case manager to guide and assist us through this bureaucracy call health care so that we could focus on her and the rest of our family instead of struggling to get her into a hospital. This should have happened after her first stay in a psychiatric hospital. Now they tell us????!!!!!!! So my next stop was to the TriCare office where Renae met me with Faith. The lady there was awesome. She stopped what she was doing and spent 30 minutes calling around to everyone she knew to try and get us a case manager as fast as possible so we could try and get Faith admitted this weekend maybe. However unsuccessful this was, we were able to leave a message on the manager of the behavior case workers in California. She actually called us back within an hour and then the bombshell was placed upon us. She informed us that TriCare would not pay for Renae to stay with Faith during her partial hospitalization. Even though this is what her doctor wants and the previous stay at the hospital showed is the only thing that would work. My unit in the Army has to pay for Renae's part of the hospitalization because TriCare considers this type of hospitalization as "outpatient treatment". What makes it even more amusing is that in the Behavior Health Pamphlet handed out at their office has a few pages on outpatient hospitalizations and how they are a recommended form of treatment. They just do not cover what happens if one of those facilities is not in your region. Faith has a combination of disorders that require a very specific type of treatment. The outpatient treatment is the only one that will work for her because of her severe anxiety that is fueled by her BiPolar. So her mom right now is her safety blanket that we hope to be replaced by the service dog. She has had a couple of traumatic experiences that she is afraid to relive which also fuels her anxiety. One of which is her getting ripped out of our arms one day because we were naive enough to believe a principal and a teacher at a school that this was what was needed to get her into school. Unaware of her mood disorders we allowed it to happen. Now she relives that experience with weekly nightmares that wake her in cold sweats. We have both promised Faith that we will never let that happen again. So when someone tells me to do an inpatient treatment, and that they " have workers standing by ready to take her back" I really just want to punch them in the face and walk out, but Faith needs the help so I just give them a serious stare and say " no thank you, next option". These people get to go home at night, we get to live with this hidden disability the rest of our lives. This is where I am determined to help remove this stigma of mood disorders and how people just don't understand how serious they can be. So once we were told this wonderful news from the lady in California, I went to the one person who came through for us last time Faith was in the Hospital and we were told TriCare was not going to pay for it. In the Army they have what is called an Ombudsman. They are there to help service members and their families with ANY issue that we cannot figure out. Our ombudsman was not too happy when Faith and I went into his office and told him we were sent to yet another hospital without being told that Renae's expenses would not be covered. TriCare told us last time it was because we were under 100 miles from the treatment facility and yesterday they said it was considered an outpatient treatment. Maybe I should have just put Faith on a plane by herself so she could get the treatment she needed??? Well to make a long story short he took Faith and I to the hospital to see a very high ranking gentlemen who stopped what he was doing and spent about an hour getting us the answers we needed. It turns out this was a loophole in the system that pretty much every person he spoke to was unaware of. People were making calls from home on a Friday evening and talking to him on speaker phone trying to get help for Faith. From the beginning he said "we will get her and your wife where they need to be, we just have to figure out exactly how to do it". Not only did he work it out, his top priority is to have a plan in place for us and other children in the future so this will never happen again. The Army is a wonderful organization that truely does care about its service members and most importantly their families. It is just hard sometimes to get through the maze of organizations and offices that are in place to assist us with anything and everything that we need. Thankfully there are wonderful employees out there that really do care and will do what is necessary to accomplish a task. Thank you Fort Campbell for helping our family and most importantly Faith on this very stressful and scary day. KrisandRenae