Your True Tales
July 2008 - Page 20
Struck by a Coincidence
by Carol
I work in the reimbursement department of a medical office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One day about two years ago, there was an overhead paged call asking for someone in reimbursement to pick up. I was free at the time, so I took the call. It was a representative from an insurance company calling to follow up on a patient's claim. We commonly get these calls, even though we don't handle the claims at my office, but at an office in another part of the city. I always try to help if I can, so I asked for the patient's name and wrote it down, as I often do when taking calls from insurance companies (this is important to my story).
It was not a common name nor was it an odd name, but for the sake of privacy I'll call him "Sylvester Pennypacker". I tried to look up the name in our computer system, but I couldn't find him. I tried reversing the name and different spellings, but I still couldn't pull it up. Our records go back 12 years or more, so I didn't think the patient had been on service so long ago that he was simply "kicked out" of the system. Anyway, it is highly unlikely that an insurance company would still be following up on a claim that would have been older than a few years. I was not able to find the patient, so I forwarded the call to our billing office and went about my day as usual.
The next morning, my car was rear-ended on my way to work. Not too much damage to my car, but the other gentlemen's car was a bit banged up. We did the usual routine, exchanged insurance info and contact info. I went to work and then to the hospital ER just as a precaution. They sent me home to rest the rest of the day. This was a Friday.
On Monday, I was back at work. I had some papers in my bin on my desk and I happened to look on the back of one of them. It was the name I had written down the previously Thursday when I had taken that call about "Sylvester Pennypacker". I had forgotten about that call, and was confused for a few minutes because the man who hit me was also named "Sylvester Pennypacker" -- and I know I didn't write his name down on a piece of paper and put it back in my bin.
So what a strange coincidence that I would get a call about this person with the same name who wasn't even a patient of ours to begin with. I wonder if this was a kind of "warning"?
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