JS was our 1st child, so we really didn’t know what to expect when he was born. JS had exceptional needs from infancy. He had trouble sleep and cried irreconcilably. It was my mom, an experienced grandmother with several grand kids, noticed he JS had exceptional needs.
We always tried to help him in different ways. We went to a cooperative school, they tried to help us by giving us books to read, but nothing they tried was successful. We got parent coaching for one year to look for alternative ways of parenting, but that did not address any of the challenges we were facing.
After some time, after the parent coaching, we decide to evaluate JS. A couple of days before the evaluation I was wondering if there could be a chance of Autism. He was able to talk and look directly into your eyes and JS is a really smart boy.
We were not prepared for the diagnosis that followed and we have gone through a lot of emotions since. It felt like when you are out side in the wind by yourself with no protection. When we got the diagnosis, we also had a 2-month old baby on top of that surprising news.
Going through the process is overwhelming and the questions of "what do I do now?" And "how can I help my child?" Come to your mind.
Our bigger challenge was that no one understood what was happening and people were thinking we were not able to parent our own child.
We all suffer the judgment of people. People were saying to us –“Your kid has so many tantrums and cries for an hour straight”. We were surrounded by judgments and that was a big challenge being a parent. We had so many opinions of how we should handle this that were being thrown at us and that was very frustrating.
We started ABA with no insurance coverage and we needed to pay everything by ourselves. Our provider, Mosaic, in which we found a lot of support tried processing our insurance, but we were denied. They helped us look for a different path and mentioned to us The Washington Autism Alliance & Advocacy. I reached out to them and I immediately heard from Trish, she was SO helpful and kind, it was truly a blessing come true.
Trish asked us for our denial letter and she said “I will help you get your response letter.” We did not know how that worked but Trish did and we even got WAAA's Staff Attorney, Mira Posner, involved. WAAA's Insurance Navigation team of Trish Thrush, Health Law Advocate, and Mira Posner, Staff Attorney, worked with the family to appeal the insurance denial, “Trish helped us submit a rebuttal for our denied letter. It took some time, as our Insurance company did not want to cooperate, but after all WAAA's effort, the pieces were finally coming together."
Finally, we received a letter from our insurance that said they will cover all of 2015 payments we had made, and it did not end there. Trish set us up with the attorney Ele Hamburger that had a class action lawsuit. They got us into a pool to attempt reimbursement for the previous claims. I was crying when I got the check from the mail, they paid us back all what we had paid for our son's treatments.
I am so appreciative of WAAA’s work!
AS