I'm approved!!!!!!!!!!

After a looooong seven month wait, I finally received the news I had been waiting for today. My surgery has been approved by my insurance!!!

I vividly remember last year on Mother's Day weekend, I was talking to my mother about my struggles with my weight and mentioned that I wondered if I could have 'weight loss surgery'. If you're from Kansas City, I'm sure you've heard the "Less of You, More of Life...Weight Loss Surgical Center" jingle. Well, after hearing that commercial for a million times, I finally allowed myself to wonder if it was a possibility.

I have been on the heavier side all of my life, but once I quit playing golf in college my weight ballooned. I have fluctuated quite a bit over the past ten years, and even lost quite a bit of weight for a while, but I was not doing it in a healthy way and that caught up to me. Despite being diagnosed with hypothyroidism a few years ago and being treated for that as well as some vitamin deficiencies, and despite spending a lot of time in the gym over the past million years I have been unable to shed significant weight. As you can imagine, this has caused a lot of stress for me over the past few years. However, when I first entertained the thought of surgery, I also felt like I was failing myself or 'giving up' on myself. I have the mentality that to lose weight properly you need to spend hours a week in the gym and 'eat right'. Well, that just wasn't working, so after talking to my mom and looking into my insurance requirements to cover the surgery, I began the quest.

Over the past seven months I have met with an exercise physiologist and dietitian each week, met with the surgeon, and even a psychiatrist to meet the requirements. Supposedly the paperwork was submitted last Monday (the 20th), but I asked them again yesterday to fax it instead of mail it, and was told they did. This morning , I called the insurance company to verify they had received the fax yesterday and she initially told me she didn't have a record of my authorization, but then she put me on hold......after she came back on the line, she told me my file was sent directly to the medical clinician who had approved my claim 10 minutes before I called. I literally started crying on the phone and told the woman that the news she just gave me made my life....not my day, but my life.

I can't begin to express how excited I am and what an answer to prayer this is. I had just expressed my frustration to my mom yesterday afternoon and she even replied that now she knew how to specifically pray for me....well, those specific prayers worked. God is good all the time! I have learned so much about myself through this journey, and now I am excited to start a new, different journey.

The process now is that I have to wait for the doctor to send me the 'official' letter, then I schedule the pre-op class in which I get more detailed information about the two-week liquid diet before surgery and that is when I will get to schedule the actual surgery. The things I am not looking forward to so much, but will gladly suffer through to reach the end result, are the two-week liquid diet that is mandatory before the surgery to prep my body, and the wait until I am able to schedule the surgery.

I also got some really exciting news today regarding my job and the program I run, but I'll talk about that in another post soon.

By the way, I noticed today that my blog is seriously lacking in pictures....I'll work on that!

Have a blessed day!!