How we handled insurance issues as a then-unmarried couple

Adam: One interesting situation that happened to us after Vika was diagnosed was…

Vika: Yeah, it was right at the end of my pharmacy practice residency year and my insurance was about to run out, I had one more month. After I was diagnosed, I had one more month before my insurance ran out, so we were quickly coming up with options of what to do and something we considered was to get married, you know, in the courthouse real quick, so I could be on Adam’s insurance and luckily Adam had already gotten a job for the summer so he knew he’d have insurance, so that’s where we were at, at that point.

So, what happened was my employer was fantastic and approached me and said “We can keep you on for your entire chemotherapy treatment. We can have you even work from home. We can have you do a minimum of 8 hours every two weeks.” It was a dream come true, really. And I could have full insurance benefits. If it weren’t for my employer being so thoughtful and generous and just doing the right thing for me, I think we would have had to get married real quick so that I could have some insurance coverage.

Adam: At the same time we were thinking about, should we get married anyway, just in case that falls through? We thought about having double insurance, you know, maybe it was a couple more hundred dollars a month, but it's definitely worth it if there’s a possibility she could lose insurance at some time during treatment and what an incredible struggle that would be.

Vika: Yeah, we also didn’t know, with insurance these days, whether they can just drop you because of a cancer diagnosis, I mean, I wasn’t very clear on that. We didn’t know whether to have single coverage, double coverage…we knew we had to have some sort of coverage, but…

Adam: But then we kind of run into the idea of your families have some expectation for what your wedding is going to be like and what you getting married should be like. So, for us, it was, we’re doing this to serve a purpose. We know we want to get married and have a wedding the way that we had imagined it but we had to think about, “OK, should we still have that in the future but for now should we just go the courthouse, make this thing legal, so you know, we can get some insurance coverage.” But, ultimately we decided it looked like she wasn’t going to lose her insurance. We called the insurance company, we said, “Hey, is there any chance we could get dropped from this, you know, tell us exactly, guarantee us that we’ll stay covered.” And they were able to do that, so we decided that we would probably just…

Vika: …put off our wedding.

Adam: To get married when we had our wedding.

Vika: We got married exactly a year after…

Adam: …a year and 10 days…

Vika: …after I was diagnosed. Yea, a year and 10 days after I was initially diagnosed so…initially we were going to get married…I got diagnosed in the Spring, we were going to get married in the Fall, but since I got diagnosed in the Spring, we waited until the following Spring to get married.

Adam: Which I think was a good idea to push it back a little bit. You know, I think you’ve got to be realistic in that chemotherapy is going to take its toll and you’re going to be tired afterwards, probably, and even if you think you’re going to make it through without too much of a struggle, it's probably a good idea to hold off.

Vika: And I don’t think I looked like myself during that time, even a period after, you know, just with the steroids and the fact that I was in menopause, it really changed my body, so I didn’t feel like I looked like myself. It was enough time for me to get back to the way I used to look and feel.