Health Care For Me

So, bad news first: I have what might be a torn rotator cuff and, in entirely unrelated news, Lyme's disease.  Yay me!  Lyme's disease, if you catch it early and hit it hard enough with enough antibiotic (doxycilian, I think?), should cause no lasting problems, though the bull's-eye rash on my knee is so impressive everyone at the clinic had to be called in to view it, and my doctor wanted to take a picture.

The rotator cuff, well: that is causing me serious...no, serious is not the word.  Agonizing?  Vicious?  Amazing?  Astounding pain.  Who knew pain could reach this level?  Me with my migraines and childbirth stories and remember I had gall-bladder issues.  This is a whole new place of pain!  Oh boy!

I've got a fat new bottle of Vicodin and I can see already it won't last long.  Ten of them got me through last night.  mr. delagar kept thumping (I was wailing in my sleep) telling me, "Go take another one."  (I was drugged enough to sleep but not enough to let him sleep.)

The good news?  Our University just, like two months ago, got us a semi-socialized clinic.  Yay!  So I do actually have medical care.

This is opposed to all summer long, when I did not, because the doctors we had been seeing cut us off because we were unable to pay off what we owed them at the rate they thought we ought to be paying them.  (We owed twenty-five hundred dollars, that's over and above what the insurance had already paid, which I was paying off at the rate of fifty a month, that's all I could manage, considering mr. delagar's a diabetic and I'm on five different meds, so our monthly medical expenses are already fairly steep -- fifty a month was not enough: one day when I called for an appointment, they wanted me to give them five hundred dollars: that day, right then, or they were giving us no further medical treatment.  I offered them two hundred, all I had left in the bank just then.  Nope.  Five hundred or fuck off.  I pointed out I needed my prescriptions refilled, that I was a cancer survivor, and that these prescriptions were necessary, that I would die, literally, without them.  Fine, they said, cough up five hundred dollars then.)

I love American Health Care, don't you?

Anyway, I went to a doc in the box, and got the scripts refilled, but we had been doing without health care since.  (The docs above turned us over to a collection agency, even though I continued to pay fifty dollars every month.)

Now we have our university-sponsored semi-socialized health-care clinic, where the doctors don't do anything but practice medicine, where I never have to wait three hours to see the doctor (as I usually did at the previous place), where I don't get told, every third or fourth call, as I always did at the last place, that the doctor is "too busy" to see me, so I'll have to try a doc in the box if I'm "really sick," where I have to do research beforehand myself and tell the doctor what the problem is, if I don't want to end up paying for five or six hugely expensive tests I won't need, because the doctor is too busy to actually figure out what is wrong with me, and is taking the shotgun approach to medicine.

Also? because it's semi-socialized medicine, which means the university sort-of owns it?  Our health insurance totally covers it.  I get bills, but every single one of them says Patient Owes $OO.OO.

Boy, do I like reading that.