Argh. This should not be this hard.

So, The Resource exchange emailed me a few weeks ago. They needed a copy of Dominic’s IQ testing, by June 1.

If you responded, “what IQ testing?”, you responded correctly

Apparently they need him to be documented as having an IQ under 70 after age 5, but before age 6, in order to keep him on the CES waiting list. We’re number 295 out of 300 on the wait list, so we’ve got at least 3 years before we could see anything from the CES waiver. We dearly hope we won’t need it, but we don’t want to lose the chance if we do.

So I started trying to find out who would do an IQ test for an essentially non verbal 5 year old.

First stop, the schools. We got his big triennial IEP scheduled for early December, but because they have him documented as having a physical disability, they will not be doing cognitive testing.

Second stop, the list of approved testers that TRE sends out. Called all 7 of them NONE of them take our health insurance. One of them was willing to talk to us about maybe being able to do it. But she’s $200/hr, out of pocket. And believes that there will be 4 appts (1 intake with just parents, 2 with dominic, and then a followup appt to give us the results. If we want a typed report, it will take another 2 hours of her time). Hello $1000 for a piece of paper? Seriously? We do have an appointment with her, but really hope to find a better solution before that appointment (which is the beginning of July)

Third stop, I contacted my friend on staff at the CC Psych department for some ideas. She reached out to one of the clinical psychologists on staff to get some ideas. The local ideas don’t take our insurance. So I ended up calling the Denver Childrens hospital. They COULD do an IQ test, BUT they won’t do it unless they do a full diagnostic workup. We don’t need (or want to pay for, or want to pay copays for) a full diagnostic workup. Their intake nurse very kindly sent me a list of Denver Area folks who could do the testing.

I called the first one on the list. They don’t take our insurance. They said that apparently there’s only one neuro-psychologist in Denver who works with young children who does. I left him a message.

By last count, I’ve called at least 25 people about this.

So I went digging back in the file folder languishing in my laptop bag from early January when I was trying so hard to get Anthem to cover Dominic’s Alpine bill. I had the direct line for a team lead in the Anthem behavioral health dept. I called her, fairly convinced she would have no clue who I was. Nope, she not only remembered us, she was like, oh, Joy, I remember you, how’s Dominic. Blew my mind. Anyway, she’s now made it her mission to find me someone capable of doing this test, in Colorado Springs, who the insurance will pay for. I believe the way Anthem works is if there’s no one within a certain mileage who is in network that can do it, they agree to cover the out of network charges at an in network rate, but I didn’t confirm that with her. This is just nuts.