So things are on the mend. She keeps disappearing somewhere, and clearly the other
animals worry her, but things seem to be improving. In the evening she stayed on my lap for
some time, though clearly Bruno's presence worried her.
Last time I was in Geelong for my eye checkup, Estelle asked me about paying my bill: $500 outstanding. But that
should only have been $250, and finally I got round to checking. Yes, deducted far too
early on 15 March. It looks for all the world like an organizational slipup.
So what's going on? I received an estimate ahead of time for the sum they're asking, but
clearly that was before they contacted Bupa, my medical insurers. OK, print out all the documents I have, not helped by the
fact that Google Chrome produces PDFs that my printer
doesn't want to know.
Call up Bupa, supply obligatory date of birth (8 digits please) to the voice menu. OK,
19480817. Wrong! I want DDMMYYYY. Why do people do this? There should be a prohibition
of using date of birth for authentication. Also, more logically, the membership number.
“We have an estimated wait time of between 13 and 19 minutes. Want a call back?”. OK.
70 minutes later I gave up and tried again, this time being routed differently by their
voice non-recognition system. First to Daclin ([spelling?]), who transferred me to
the correct queue, where the waiting time was down to 7 to 10 minutes. Held on, spoke to
Lachie ([spelling?]), who was not very easy to understand (maybe VoIP quality issues somewhere?), but who
ultimately told me that there can be up to 4 bills for a procedure: the hospital (paid, that
was the $250), the surgeon, assistant doctors and the anaesthetist. In my case no assistant
doctors were involved, but Medicare and Bupa only pay up to a fixed amount for the the surgeon and anaesthetist
(Medicare 75%, Bupa only 25%), so their bills are outstanding, in more sense than one: my
$250 has suddenly increased to nearly $1000, and there's the possibility of another $730 or
so for this month's operation. A far cry from what Nick told me four months ago. They're going to look into that.
On the positive side, the whole thing only took 20 minutes, including waiting time. And I
note that in December I had the same issues with their voice non-recognition system and the
sound quality.
In the first photo, she looks like a brown Burmese, but in the second she looks
almost chocolate. That's exactly what we saw with the photos that Helen sent her on Friday,
and which I still haven't been able to save. But this seems to be an artefact of the
camera: she looks brown to then naked eye.
But then I looked at the pedigree. According to that, the sire is lilac, dam is chocolate.
There's no way that that combination can lead to a brown offspring. What had the GCCF been thinking to accept that pedigree? But
then it occurred to us that we had seen the mother, and she's brown, not chocolate. Still,
it's puzzling.
Mona is still not showing her face much,
and today wasn't a good day for keeping an eye on her: Yvonne had horsey visitors in the morning, and in the afternoon we were off to Geelong. She has found a hiding place
behind this cabinet:
Off to Geelong again today for
what proves to be the final followup on my eye surgery. Once again Bridget, the orthoptist, saw me first, and confirmed
that her main purpose was to measure my eyes. Three weeks ago I had asked her to do so before I knew what I was there for.
And the results were interesting. Left eye -0.5 dioptre spherical, +1.0 dioptre
cylindrical, at 100°. Exactly what my right eye had three weeks ago. But the right
eye has changed (and improved). No spherical correction any more, just +0.5 dioptres
cylindrical at 130°. That's very much in line with what I had been observing.
And then an eye scan with this Zeiss device that I haven't been
able to identify. It proves to be a scan of the macula, and all came out well. That's good,
because I'm overdue for a macular scan.
In to see David, who was also happy.
In principle I should come in for a final checkup at the end of May, but given the current
status it's likely that he will take an even shorter look and say “yes, everything's OK” and
send me on my way again. Not much for a 2 hour drive. So we agreed that we would only make
an appointment if something were to change. And he suggested that I have my eyes checked
with an optometrist (Specsavers) at the end of
May, very much in line with my current appointment for 10 June.
So it's done! All in all, an excellent outcome, and one of the best treatments I've had
anywhere. To be recommended.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
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