This is long, but I’d be so grateful if you read and helped me out. I don’t know what to do.
I hope this is the right sub to post on since this is work related. If not, please let me know which sub you think this would be appropriate for. I’m in a really upsetting situation. Back in October I needed a major surgery of which I gave my job 5 months notice. The surgery was very unique and the wait for a specialist clearly was forever the specialist who was highly recommended was out of network (more on that below). My recovery was 6 weeks home and I could start working remote after the first 2 weeks. Well once I was able to start working from home my job decided to move me to part time. I could not afford to work part time and I was truly so upset because I had made a plan with my work prior to surgery. I spoke to some people and they said to go on short term disability. HR was fairly cooperative with this and after a few calls they submitted their portion of the paperwork.
This is where things get upsetting/tricky. I had sent my surgeon her portion of the paperwork and she said she would absolutely do it. Well, I ended up begging her for months to submit the paperwork. It’s now late February and she finally submitted the paperwork last week. In the meantime her office has been hounding me to pay my bill of which I’ve explained many times that I need my disability money to pay said bill. Well since she submitted the paperwork so late, I got an email from unemployment that it’s too late to collect money as I had 41 days or something to get it in. I can appeal this which I plan to do, but here is where I’m really upset. I forwarded that to the surgeon and told them I expect them to waive my surgery fee or discount it significantly as 1) I’m in this extremely stressful financial situation due to my surgeon not doing her job and 2) they have been threatening to send my bill to collections because it has not been paid (I don’t want to get too much into it but pretty much I was given a quote for this surgery as it was out of network but I desperately needed it. I was told that I have really good insurance and majority would be covered. I told them I cannot afford the surgery but they reassured me my insurance will reimburse me most of it. I borrowed money as I needed to pay half upfront. Low and behold my insurance covered barely even 15%)…I literally do not have the money for it and was relying on the disability. Well the surgeon’s office pretty much told me to go pound sand, that’s too bad. I don’t know what to do because this surgery was life changing and improved my quality of life significantly but at the cost of my job (I needed to find a new one because they wouldn’t put me back on full time) and my sanity. I feel really screwed over by this surgeon and she’s getting away with it. How would you handle this?