Change is a comin'

It would figure that literally the day after I nail down my five year plan, something happens that makes said plan seem much less nailed down.

I very erroneously assumed that getting Rejeanne diagnosed would somehow lead to her receiving proper care for a well-established medical condition. Oh, how wrong I was!

It turns out that South Dakota is not so much on the ball with this whole autism thing and they haven't bothered to do anything about funding treatment or laying out best practices for the school districts or anything useful at all!

This leaves me with a few options:

1. Apply for SSI/Medicare and wait til hell freezes over and hope for the best.

2. Put Lee on a diet, change his entire personality, then force him to join the military so we can get Tricare.

3. Find a job with the Feds and hope their insurance is similar to Tricare.

4. Move to a state that has sane coverage and/or better procedures in place, such as our fine socialist neighbor to the northeast, Minnesota.

5. Move to Sioux City, cross fingers and try to piggy-back off of Alisha's blazed trail of services for her son. This would let us still have USD as a schooling option & I'll have no excuse to not go see my old friends and cuddle all the new babies. Services for Rejeanne wouldn't be like MN, but it wouldn't be a junky waiver/lotto system and other kids in that district are getting ABA, so at least they acknowledge it is the only thing to do with empirical evidence supporting its use.

6. Give up on college for eternity and move to NH, the intentional libertarian stronghold in America (Porcupine!), which for some reason still cares enough about human decency to ensure autistic children get medical care. (Dear East Coast, why do you feel $20k+ is an appropriate tuition for a state school? You do realize that most folks think UNH is just as podunk as USD, right?)

7. Become a pimp.

8. Spend a great many months/years trying to convince the Vermillion School District to pony up the funding for 20-30 hours a week of ABA therapy just because it is the right thing to do (oh, and will save them $2 for every dollar they spend in the long run). While we wouldn't have to move (rockin'!!), I'm pretty sure they'd fight me tooth and nail on this one for at least a year. I'm not willing to wait that long, which means I'd have to raise an ungodly stink and call an advocacy attorney and probably sue them in the end. FYI, lawsuits take forever. Rejeanne would be 15 before it was done. (ok, probably 8-9 would be more realistic, but still)

If anyone knows a trick to scare the bejeezuz out of a school district to make them throw money at your every whim, please let me know. I'll also accept tips on getting them to just provide what is proven to work. Obeying my whims is not nearly as necessary as I pretend that it is.

Unfortunately, despite very diligent efforts on my part, it took 1.5 years just to get a diagnosis. At this point, every day she goes without the ABA, the longer she will need it later and the less effective it will be.

Please feel free to weigh in on which of the above options seems the most reasonable to you. While I acknowledge my pimp hand is strong, pimping and pandering is unfortunately against my morals these days so if you vote for #7, it's like voting for Nader.

Also, rich people reading my blog, you don't need that third Maserati. If you have that kind of money laying around, I'd like to suggest that my adorable daughter's ABA is a much better use of your cash. It's only $50 per hour. What a deal, right??!! Probably even cheaper than a Maserati.

Maserati = approx. $120,000
$120,000 in ABA hours = 2400

That would be a year and 8 weeks of therapy. From what I hear, that's about how much she'd need (provided she responds to it at all).

Hello? Rich people? *echoes*

Oh well. You'd think there would be at least ONE rich person who finds this on accident while surfin' the 'net on their jet while googling the price of the new Maserati GranTurismo. What the heck is the point of even tagging these posts with such things if I can't lure in just ONE generous benefactor?? It's because we don't live in Africa, isn't it?