Discharged and the Curbside Oxygen Machine Purchase

We are headed home.  Shawn was discharged today and we are on the road back to Heath.   Going home today means we have spent 21 of the last 22 days at MD Anderson.  

We have all Shawn’s medications and purchased an oxygen concentrator that will provide Shawn oxygen at home, as needed.  He has been using some oxygen when he sleeps.  We had to separately purchase that concentrator because insurance would not cover it (based on an oxygen saturation test Shawn took a couple days ago).  He had an oxygen saturation of 92% and it needed to be 89% for insurance to cover home oxygen.  Therefore, I had to separately purchase the oxygen machine.  It was not cheap and it made we wonder what people do that don’t have the means to purchase these things with their own money.  I guess they just suffer until they are sick enough to meet the relatively arbitrary oxygen saturation requirement.  Odd.  Obtaining oxygen seems like the kind of thing that a doctor should simply be able to write a prescription for and have covered by insurance as a medical necessity.  Particularly if that person has a critical disease that is directly impacting their lungs.  

I will say the purchase of the oxygen concentrator was a bit of an amusing experience.  The MD Anderson case worker handed me a yellow Post-it note with the name of a medical supply company called “Excellant Medical Supplies.”   She told me to call a guy named Bernard and he would be expecting my call.  I called the main number and Bernard answered the phone.  It seems this was his mobile phone.  We discussed some various options and I settled on a used, stationary oxygen concentrator.  He gave me the price and I agreed.  He said he would need to get it from the wearhouse and asked what time we were being discharged.  I told him 2:00 from MD Anderson.  He said he would do his best to get it to us by that time.  At just before 2:00, Bernard called and asked that we meet him downstairs with a prescription and payment for the machine.  He said he would be in a brown Toyota Sienna minivan.  I went downstairs, stood outside watching all the people and cars go by until I spotted an older, casually dressed man in sunglasses driving a brown minivan.  I flagged him down and he pulled over.  He got out, opened up the back of the van and lugged out a large, heavy and clearly used, oxygen concentrator.  It looks like something from the early 90s.  He said it was recently serviced and said it should work fine.  He then handed me a one page invoice, with very little information that looked like it was made with Microsoft Word and printed on an ink jet printer.  I asked him if he took a credit card.  He said cash, check or credit card.  Anything works.  I handed him my card assuming he would run it on his mobile phone (through Square or any of the other mobile payment systems that are now available).  Instead, he got out a crinkled piece of yellow paper and proceeded to write down all my credit card information.  After he wrote down everything he looked at me, smiled and said - “I guess that’s it.”   I was a bit stunned and didn’t know what to say other than, “Thank you.”   I then lifted the beast of an oxygen machine up onto the sidewalk and started wheeling it inside.  It was the oddest thing.  I felt like I just did a black market deal to purchase an oxygen machine.  What the heck just happened?!?