I Had a Baby!!!

Back in July of 2008, Thomas Beatie, was supposedly the first man to give birth. Of course, you have to decide for yourself whether or not a woman by birth who gets herself changed into a man is really a man or not. I mean, come on. All she did was have her boobs removed. She left all the female plumbing in place. To me, that makes her a woman with no boobs. I on the other hand am a man with big boobs. And, according to Humana, I gave birth in May of 2008. That obviously makes me the first man to do it. Sorry, Thomas.

Earlier that year, sometime in February, I was doing my crossing duty when a parent's car stalled out. We got him out of the parent pick up line, and, when my duty was over, I rounded up a custodian, and we pushed the man's car until it started. In the process, I hurt my right heel. It wasn't anything major. Just a little twinge.

Later that evening, I opened up the school studio for the Tiger cubs. I do that every year. I noticed, as I showed the kids how a broadcast works that my heel seemed to be getting worse. No stranger to plantar fasciitis, I just assumed it was a little overworked and would be better the next day.

Boy was I wrong. When I got out of bed the next morning, I nearly fell down from hopping to get off that foot. It hurt so bad I could barely hobble around on it. From that time on, I suffered with that heel for three months. It would get a little better. Then it would be bad again.

One time, I was walking to the kitchen. As I did, a piece of that metal they use to hold the carpet edges down that had evidently gotten messed up, snagged my good foot. I was harpooned on a solid inch of sharp metal. I shifted my weight quickly to my right foot with the injured heal and sent a pain shooting through myself like I had never felt before. I panicked and ended up falling sideways onto the kitchen floor. I landed on my left hip, shoulder, elbow, and wrist.

I laid on the floor for awhile unable to breath. For a few seconds I even entertained the idea that I was dead. Then I started hearing a strange thumping sound down by my feet. It kept going tharrrrump, tharrrump, tharrrump. I gasped in a painful breath and bent my head to see what was making the noise. It was blood spurting out of my foot and hitting the plastic trash can. I stayed there watching it without really understanding what I was seeing.

Suddenly, number two son comes running into the room shouting, “Dad, are you okay?” I told him to get his mother. He stood there asking if I was okay until I screamed at him to leave me alone and get his mother. She came down and slowly helped me get up. We got the bleeding stopped, cleaned up the wound, bandaged it, and I went up to bed. Fortunately, even with all that blood, the wound to my good foot was really pretty minor and didn't ever hurt to walk on.

A few weeks passed during which the pain came and went until one day everything changed. I was sitting on the couch late that night watching television. Rachel and the boys were all upstairs in bed. I stood up to go up myself and felt something happen in my heel that sent a jolt through me. I lifted it up off the floor only to discover that that hurt even worse. I tried to walk, but couldn't. Anytime I lifted up my foot, the pain was more than I could take. At one point, I even felt like I was going to pass out. I ended up dragging my foot all the way to the stairs. I went up one stair at a time on my butt. I would kind of roll my heel up the step keeping pressure on it.

Once I was in my room, I put on the brace that I usually wore at night and happily discovered that it stopped the pain. I was equally lucky in the morning to learn that wearing a shoe put enough pressure on it, too. Just the same, I had had enough. You are probably thinking, “Why didn't the idiot go to a doctor?” I honestly thought it was just flare ups of my plantar fasciitis. When it got this bad, I wasn't so sure anymore. I called Sports Medicine and made an appointment. The doctor told me that I had pretty much trashed my heel beyond repair. Instead of fixing it, he proposed putting cuts in my Achilles tendon to lengthen it and take the pressure off.

I had the surgery at the end of May, right before school got out. I knew I would need the whole summer to heal. After that, my heel was as good as new. I haven't felt a twinge of pain since.

A few months after the surgery, I got a call from the doctor's office telling me that Humana had turned down my claim, but not to worry. They would resubmit it. We couldn't understand why they would turn it down, as everything had been pre-approved.

A while later, the claim got rejected again. The doctor's office asked me to contact Humana and find out what was up. I spent almost two hours on the phone trying to do exactly that. Finally I got transferred to a very nice woman with a Wisconsin accent. She was able to determine that the reason for rejection was that the treatment did not match the diagnosis. She put me on hold while she tried to find out what the code was. When she came back, she told me that I had been pre-approved for the surgery to lengthen my Achilles tendon. However, according to the coding on my claim, the doctor had not done the surgery. Instead, he had delivered my baby. She and I had a long laugh about that. We weren't ever able to determine who got the code wrong, Humana or the doctor's people, but she was able to fix it, and, the claim went through with no problems.

I still find it amazing that the Humana computers are so thorough that they can find a diagnosis/treatment mismatch, but they can't catch a treatment that doesn't match the sex of the patient. Anyway, I never did get my face on the cover of a magazine for being the first documented case of a man giving birth. I actually think that is a good thing. I bet Thomas Beatie wishes she hadn't gotten all that attention either.