We have a case officer! A week ago thursday (Jan. 14th) we got word that we’ve been assigned a case officer, but surprise! there’ve been some hiccups too. The first hiccup hicced a week before the CO was assigned. We got word that our medicals were being referred. This happens automatically whenever there’s any abnormality noted during the examination and each of us had one abnormality noted on our records. All of them were minor and shouldn’t be any sort of problem, but it means that our medicals are automatically referred to a physician for evaluation. The main thing it means is that our application will probably be delayed for a least a few weeks while a INZ physician gives the ok. Conceivably they could even ask for more info or an additional examination by a doctor here which would really delay things, but hopefully it won’t.
But who cares, we have a case officer! Naturally, at the same time the case officer was assigned the second hiccup hicced. She sent word that our x-rays that were uploaded by the medical office were in the wrong format and needed to be re-uploaded in the correct file format. That was on Thursday the 14th, and she gave us 5 days to get the correct images uploaded. However, two days of that was a weekend, and the following monday was a holiday so the doctors office would be closed, meaning we had half a day on Thursday and all day on Friday to get the images uploaded to our file for her by the 19th. It took a little doing to get in touch with the right people, but by mid-day friday I had the people at the x-ray office working on it and by the end of the day I was assured that their IT people were uploading it.
We waited over the long weekend for confirmation that the case officer got the files she needed. Unfortunately she’s based in London and our immigration consultant is based in NZ, so it takes longer than usual for messages to get back and forth to us. On Wednesday, the 20th we got word that the CO contacted our agent and the images had not shown up in our account yet. More frantic back and forths with the x-ray office (at least this time I knew who to contact right away) and I was assured their IT people had re-uploaded our files. We also had them email them directly to the CO as a backup. Hopefully between the upload and the email our x-ray images will get to our CO. But again, because of the time differences we’ll have to wait until after the weekend to find out if they made it (a few days late at that). I guess it’s good practice for waiting to hear about things, something we’ll have more of in the future, but it’s still nerve wracking, especially when it’s the CO asking for something and we’re depending on other people to get it to her. Stay tuned to see if the images make it…
Kiwi Bound 