Has anyone ever had this happen to them with a claim...

I guess the Departmental Review would have rejected your initial claim. However, they must agree that you have an injury worthy of a claim but they need to re-submit under the correct terminology. This is important in the success path of your claim, if your original claim was degenerative disc disease but they see OA there, it would probably be to your benefit to get an award under OA (as the main claim) and then reassess with the degenerative disc disease later to increase your claim. I don't think its bait and switch as most would agree they would just deny and tell you to pound salt. The fact that they did the paperwork and resubmitted your claim is a positive thing.

The wait time is the wait time unfortunately.

I had a claim originally denied, BPA contacted me and said they could reopen it under a Departmental Review, but I would need new evidence, I.e. a more recent x-ray. I submitted the new x-ray and let the waiting game begin. According to the wait time tool, a departmental review takes 12 weeks for an answer, I was currently at twice that but waiting patiently as these decisions are supposed to he handled sooner than other types. Today however VAC phones me and says their dr. Looked at all the medical information and felt that my injury was under the wrong claim title, so they are now going to look at it under a different name. I didn’t think much of it, after all it still concerns the same body part, same family dr. Diagnosis, same x-ray. But when I opened My Vac Account, I noticed that VAC had closed my original claim and reopened it under a new injury and called it a First Time Application,with a step 3 start date of Jan 29, day 1/week1, with an average wait time of 40 weeks. So the 5 months I already waited disappeared into thin air. It just seems like a slight of hand shell game to me. It’s like if you walked into your family dr. Saying you had a “ slipped disc” and he informs you , there is no such thing as a slipped disc what you have is blah blah blah, the symptoms and treatment would still be the same.