This depends on what school it is. Some schools don’t offer online classes. At others it may be possible.
Depends on if the school has a good amount of online / distance courses that regular students may take.
But also, check on the possibility of a one semester deferral instead of a one year deferral (i.e. gap semester instead of year).
This. First, I would call the student health office. Tell them your child’s condition and ask for a referral to a cardiologist that would be in-network for the student health insurance. Then double-check that information with the cardiology office and the insurance website. Make an appt with cardiology now for August (this can take a few months) and find out cost after insurance. Find out what hospital the cardiologist uses, whether that hospital is in-network and what the terms are if a stay should be needed.
A cardiology appt with tests can be very expensive even as an outpatient (more expensive if the cardiologist is part of a hospital system, less expensive if in private practice, though it also depends on whether the private practice runs their own tests). There are many variables for cost. Even with insurance, I would budget a few thousand dollars at the low end, multiple thousands on the high end, if there is likelihood that multiple appts will be needed while the child is at college. The tests can really add up. Better to be prepared for the cost, and not need to spend it, than the other way around.
As for whether to send him, if his condition is stable and you see that he can manage himself well, I vote for sending. If avoiding various types of exertion is important, you can look at how far of a walk the dorm is from classes, are there lots of stairs, make sure he budgets enough time to walk slowly. If the distance from dorms varies, consider requesting a closer dorm for medical reasons.
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I can share my experience with long term Covid kid in college but privately. Not heart related but similar experience. Send me PM.
This all the way.
Delayed enrollment may work to help with recovery. We did exactly that but still had a crash first semester on campus…You need a combination of strategies. Being a foreign student not familiar with the system will not help. In case of an emergency, your child will need an adult advocate to help to navigate bureaucracy in school and medical insurance…
Agree, I think of people who wear medical alert bracelets or carry their health history on their person, list of allergies, list of medications, etc., just in case they may faint and require emergency care and no one is around who can explain their health conditions.
Our cardiologist suggested carrying a copy of the latest EKG (photocopy in wallet and pic on phone), as in that kid’s case, medical personnel might freak out unnecessarily without understanding that specific piece of history.
I think establishing care, right away, with a cardiologist local to the college would be key.
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Yes and no. Maintaining balance and realizing your limits when everyone around are healthy and bouncing off the walls is very difficult and require a lot of maturity! Be prepared that the first semester on campus will be a disaster no matter what even if it would be delayed…Expect zero support from school and a health center during crises. ZERO. They talk a lot and do little. All support will depend on an adult who will be able to coordinate health care outside of campus and will be able to go through administrative barriers in school. A sick student is not able to handle it. Being overseas and not knowing the American system will not help you…I would vote to keep the child nearby…
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Please do not assume that the American medical system is great and your child will automatically get all the help he will need… Anyone with experience with very sick people in the USA can tell you that you need to fight to find the right care and the right treatment, and not all health insurances and all doctors are equal. Furthermore, it is possible that school health insurance (I know nothing about that insurance) can be very basic with limited doctors that will need referrals and approval from insurance, etc. You have no idea what you are setting yourself and your child for.
I am not trying to scare you… It is a reality… It took me months to find the right doctor next to campus that would help my child, will not make our family budget broken, and will work with our actually pretty good private (not college) insurance…Good luck doing it from overseas without understanding how an American system works…And good luck to find an opening in the doctor’s schedule in case of needed urgent care. In that case, your child will have to get to the nearest hospital and you have no control at all over what would happen there in terms of who will treat him (in-network or out-of-network doctor), what would be amount of bills, will he even get the right treatment etc.
I would like to comment on navigating the medical system from afar. We had only one criteria when our kids applied to college. They had to be within a 3 hour drive of our house, or within an hour of a close friend or relative…just in case there was an emergency of some sort.
Neither of our kids went to college with a medical condition.
BUT one of our kids had to have emergency gall bladder removal surgery…I’m talking the student was admitted and surgery was the next morning at 7 a.m. We live on the opposite coast of this country and it was impossible for me to get there by the time surgery began. My kid had signed all the release forms…so at least the doctors…and yes there were multiple specialists because of a complication…were able to speak with me. Most important, we had a very close friend right there IN the college town, and a very close relative who went and spent a week at this kid’s bedside in the hospital.
And our kid had scoped out hospitals when they arrived on campus as a freshman, and knew exactly where our insurance would cover, and where the care was reported to be excellent (and the kid was right).
I’m not sure how you would deal with any health situations from afar. I am not telling you what to do in terms of sending the kid…but please have a plan (we had the friend and a relative nearby). Better to plan ahead…do you have friends or relatives who can help your son here IF he has a medical issue?
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Agree with @momsearcheng that the American Health system is NOT standardized and you can’t bank on everything being aligned. Some of those basic college insurance plans cover the minimums of care.
My 18 year old ended up with pneumonia in an East Coast Hospital. We’re in California on the West Coast. I couldn’t get a flight out to her because the planes were not flying into her town (snowstorm). I was desperate and she was scared.
I had to have the nurses call me for updates and I spoke via a conference call with the doctors and nurses. We had NO family, friends, acquaintances, no one in the area. We had to rely on our medical insurance to have sufficient resources to get her care completed. I had to ask the nurses to contact her professors and the Health care system at her university. This was pneumonia and not a cardiac condition. Everything ended well and the billing department said that we were fortunate that our expensive medical insurance covered her costs including transport.
She was a healthy (athlete) girl and had never experienced pneumonia.
It’s your child, in an unfamiliar environment, with unknown health coverage and a significant health condition. He seems to be making the decision for you and is not thinking with his head. If he gets sick and needs to be out for a week, he will miss out on classes and possibly fail those, if he has no one to ask for a medical leave on his behalf of his medical “condition”.
I personally feel that some of these posts are very negative. As I wrote, my kid has at least three serious health conditions and did have two medical leaves during college. But we sent her fall of freshman year. Things that helped were a single room and reduced courseload (3 instead of 4 classes still kept financial aid). Extensions for papers caused some accumulation of work at times but also helped during crisis.
In our experience with three kids, college health insurance covered what was needed, It has to meet ACA criteria.
This is, hopefully, an acute and not chronic situation. If you can set up a PCP and cardiologist in advance, I think fall school could be considered. As I wrote before, you don’t know what the summer will bring. There is the option to defer for medical reasons but that can wait until late August.
The medical insurance and medical system at my kid’s college worked well. I am sorry others had a different experience. It is true that our kids with health challenges need a lot of support. I handled insurance and prescription that first year but did not speak with doctors. That was the beginning of some autonomy for my kid and did require some maturity.
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I feel in post covid era, it is noteworthy that some regions have had some churn and disruption to their hospital staffing, retirements of physicians, mergers among physician group practices, and rise of telehealth.
(Some providers may still require a mask. Some providers still ask one to wait ten days to schedule an appointment if one has travelled overseas.)
Large univerisities have and may continue to have shortages of staff and delays in appointments for advising or special accommodations.
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