ElbowRoom's Implant Experience Journal

[ElbowRoom]

ElbowRoom, sorry to hear that -- I can relate. After surgery when getting into the car for the ride home, I miscalculated clearing the seat cushion bolster, dragged my scrotum across it with all my weight on it, and that moved the edge of the bandages/gauze right on top of the scrotum stiches. Hurt like hell until I got home and removed the bandages. Also caused massive bleeding that turned into a scrotum bull of blood, edema down my thighs, and a large ring of hematoma around the base of my shaft that prevented me from moving the shaft any direction except straight forward -- for several weeks. Even after the swelling had mostly gone down, it took longer for my body to re-absorb all the hematoma.

Hopefully the small amount of hematoma you have will be absorbed quickly and you'll be back on track soon ! Best wishes.

Holy shit that sounds awful. I'm glad it resolved well for you. It seems the human body (and implants!) are actually pretty tough and can recover quite well from trauma.

[ElbowRoom]

BTW, I got the bill from the hospital yesterday. For reference, the out-of-pocket cost with Dr. Hakky if I paid myself would have been $24-30k depending on a number of factors.

The bill said I owe $0.00 and the entire amount was billed to insurance, but I expect that to change and to be on the hook for $1500-2000 in order to hit my out of pocket maximum on my policy.

So...how much did the hospital bill the insurance company? How about $142k?

Now, the insurance company will no doubt come back and and only agree to pay "reasonable and customary" rates for all the line items, and the hospital will drop/eat the rest. But that is still likely to be over $60k, or about double what I would pay out of pocket.

The entire insurance/hospital symbiotic relationship is very broken and inefficient. It's the only sector of the American economy where none of the parties negotiating price are the ones actually receiving the service.

[dgraham]

The Northside system is expensive. In 2021, Anthem dropped them because "Anthem notified Northside that it wanted to terminate its contract, alleging that Northside's costs were an "extreme outlier" compared to other metro Atlanta hospitals." It finally got resolved after a couple of years but it was a mess to go through as an Anthem user.

The Northside Dr. Hakky uses was purchased from Gwinnett (County) Medical in 2019 and they have poured tons of money into improving that system.