Updates from Kaiser
Bad News
Yesterday, I had a video visit with my doctor to ask about a neurological exam. Several people have told me that Kaiser is generally pretty good about providing services when asked, so I thought that they might be willing to do a neuro exam if I came up with some plausible medical reason, e.g. “it’s been 10 years since I came off meds, so I wanted to do a check in and see if everything is still okay.” Unfortunately, my doctor couldn’t find a way to justify this, since followup exams for childhood epilepsy patients is not at all standard practice. So, it looks like I’ll be paying for all of this out of pocket. Which totally sucks.
The Plan
I’m going to call around and try to find a good neurologist in the SLO area who is willing to do all of the action items the FAA has given me. I’m very fortunate that the FAA is only requiring an evaluation from a board-certified neurologist, not an FAA HIMS neuropsychologist. The latter tend to be few and far between, so it’s impossible to get on their schedules and they are also orders of magnitude more expensive than a regular specialist, because they can be. We’ll see what happens from there.