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Initially, he couldn't tell you anything. He couldn't tell you if he was hurt, he couldn't tell you if he was hungry, and when he got frustrated it was extremely challenging, and of course the older he gets, the stronger he is.
When the financial advisor had come into our hospital room, I thought, you know, am I, or is my baby going to continue to get treatment, or, you know, are they going to kick us out of here because we don't have health insurance?
You know, it's very difficult. You're getting older, and you try to build yourself up. I eat properly. I never drank in my life, never smoked a cigarette. Doesn't matter. I mean, it's genetics.
I was first diagnosed 10 years ago with hypogamma globulin anemia. I was totally exhausted every day. They started me on IV polygam, and I started getting some of my energy back.
I've been having these IVs for the past 10 years, and when I was told from the very beginning, I'll need them for the rest of my life, all of a sudden I got a letter from the insurance company stating I was no longer qualified to have the IVs.
I've sent over 35 faxes, and no one was listening to me. I made some phone calls. This woman told me about HLA and connected me. It was like a miracle when I talked to attorney Alyssa because she said, I know what you're going through. That should never have been stopped.
You take it easy now. We'll take it from here. And I just felt a big burden up. Sorry. And within a matter of a few weeks, I got the decision they reinitiated the infusion, and I couldn't believe it would never have happened without HLA.
They saved my life. I know they did.
I was only working part-time, and my husband works full-time, but he's just an auto-body technician. He doesn't make a lot of money.
We thought, how are we possibly going to pay 10,000 plus dollars for the doctor's appointments in the C-section? And I thought for sure we'd be in debt for the rest of our lives.
When the financial advisor had come into our hospital room, he had heard about the health law advocates, and he said that our case sounded like something that they might take on.
Health law advocates really helped. They were able to get us coverage. It's a huge relief to know that it's all behind us.
When Joshua was eight, he got off the bus one day. He went in the house, he went into my daughter's room, and ripped her by her hair onto the ground.
He ripped his whole roma pot, and that was when we finally had to call an ambulance.
When he got upset, it was dangerous for the other children. He'd lash out, hit them, bite them, punch them, and it also hurt himself.
There's a lot of times that I took the brunt of his aggressions because I wouldn't allow him to hurt himself. It's extremely challenging because all of your attention and your resource goes towards him.
You have to constantly know where he's at at all times. My other children don't lose out a lot because of that.
School was great. They had plenty of staff, but when he came home, you can't follow what they do at school. It's impossible.
And we felt the only way for him to stay in the school he was at was to go residential, so he cared for 24 hours a day.
We've been our own advocate for my son over the past seven years. Everything is a fight. Everything is between the insurance company, the school district, even at the hospital sometimes.
I'm a firefighter in Watertown. It was expensive to have your child in residential school. We knew we had to call somebody, and we couldn't afford an attorney.
So we called health law advocates, and they've made the process so much easier on us. He's in the right place then.
They did everything for my son. They got him exactly where we wanted him to be, but without him, he wouldn't be there.
