At birth, Chesni LaRoe faced a life-altering condition that had an easy solution.
Born with a deformed skull, the toddler needed a specialized helmet called a DOC Band to reshape her head. However, the $3,000 price tag was too expensive for Chesni's parents, and her insurer refused to cover the expense.
Her father, 23-year-old Matt LaRoe, is a specialist in the Army and is currently fighting in Afghanistan. He’s not expected to return home until February.
“Life's hard enough; why add more to it?” said Kelsi LaRoe, Chesni's mother.
Life got a little easier for the 22-year-old mother earlier this year. After News 8 featured their fight with LaRoe's insurance company, donations and help began to come.
Fights like what the LaRoes faced are a harsh reality for many families. Holly Stock said she was shocked to learn in 1999 her insurer would not fix a deformity on her then three-year-old daughter’s nose.
“We were very surprised," she said. "They considered it cosmetic. Clearly, it was. It wasn't affecting anything physically with her at that point. However, she would be a completely different child today if she had a huge vascular malformation on the end of her nose.”
The family paid for the surgeries themselves. Now 13-years-old, her daughter - Channing - shows no scars and doesn’t have to worry about teasing from other children. The experience motivated the Plano mother to start a foundation in 2002 called "Share a Smile," which has helped nearly 100 children with serious deformities from low-income families.
With the help of surgeons donating their time, the foundation has helped correct deformities from birthmarks to hemangiomas, tumor-like bubbles of blood on the skin.
“A lot of insurances just do not cover this type of thing,” Stock said. “There's a clear line between what is cosmetic and what is not. Having a mole removed on your face that doesn’t show very much is one thing; having a malformation or a disfigurement on a small child's face that's only going to get worse as the child grows older and impact them socially and physically is very important to correct.”
Many insurance companies do not cover things like cranial molding helmets or removing skin discolorations, partly because some doctors believe they will fade over time.
The LaRoes' provider, Tricare, is a government insurance plan for military families. The company has considered and dismissed paying for the helmets in the past.
“The underlying condition for the deformity is not caused by craniosynostosis, which is a congenital defect,” said Bonnie Powell, director of Tricare Deputy Communications, in a statement to News 8 in August. “The misshaping of the head alone does not qualify the beneficiary for a medical device."
The LaRoes feared their daughter's misshaped head would eventually cause vision and hearing problems.
After the story ran on News 8, Stock's charity bought Chesni a helmet, which her mother said is working by slowly squeezing her skull into shape.
“I was so grateful for her,” LaRoe said. “It’s very expensive. It’s just a great, great help she did that.”
E-mail jbetz@wfaa.com
