Miracles of Modern Medicine

My least favorite thing about Nashville, second only to the outlandish price of houses, are all the Christians.

Sometimes, though, they are also my favorite thing.

This is the story my nurse told me today, as I sat on a table waiting for the doctor, how her brother had been in a horrible accident and how the doctor told him he would never walk again.

See what a good story it is already?

In telling you the set-up, you can already see the end.

The only thing missing is what she said, what makes the story different from every other story one might hear that starts “and how the doctor told him he would never walk again.”  What the ‘what happened’ meant to her.

She said that she hadn’t even been aware of the heaviness on her, but when her god spoke to her and told her that her brother would walk again, she felt the heaviness lift and she knew it was true.

And it was.

Sadly, I Have Been Diagnosed with Brown-Eyed-Handsome-Man-itis

The doctor says I’m going to have to give them up, for my health.

No, actually, there’s nothing that stands out as being wrong.  My heart is good.  My blood pressure is good.  My temperature is good.  Except that I can’t breathe, I appear to be pretty healthy.

I like my doctor.  I also wrote her a letter and I found that very helpful as well–both in terms of it making it easier for me to talk to her and for me feeling like I said everything I needed to say.  I told her my financial woes and gave her my priorities for things to work on and so that’s what we’re doing.

She wants to get me in a sleep clinic as soon as possible, but we’ll have to see how expensive it is.

Still, I feel good about things and I like her.

I Keep Waiting for these Women Who Have Left Feminism to Put the Butcher on their Checking Accounts, but They Never Do

Y’all, I’ve been giggling about this all morning.

Two things really strike me.  Let’s start with the lesser funny and move on to the greater funny.

1.  “Newsflash. The Internets can be mean. Actually, feminists are some of the meanest ones out there, but whatever. (I broke with the sisterhood, so I should be virtually beat up.) ”

Y’all, thank god that Adrienne thinks I’m one of the meanest feminists out there because I’m about to say something very mean and I would hate to think she felt caught off-guard by it.  But who is even remotely surprised that a conservative woman who was in a sorority but has only mostly male friends doesn’t find feminism has much to offer her (you’re still welcome for your college education, though, of course)?

Well, pluck my feathers and call me a chicken, of course she doesn’t.

Yet.

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Also, let’s give a little “ha” to the idea that saying, “this is a woman who thinks that Cosmo is a main vehicle for the transmittal of feminist values, so, really, there’s no hope,” constitutes “virtually” beating her up and another little “ha” to her trying to pass “Mean Girls” off as a documentary.

2.  “Perhaps many of leading lefty blogs are men, but on the right, there are powerful women. We don’t make a big deal out of it because the right operates by merit while the left focuses on quotas. ”

Do we have instant replay in blogging?  Let’s institute it.  Can we get an instant replay?

“the right operates by merit”

Oh really?

Oh really, really?

I have but one question (and yes, I believe you could ask the same thing of the Democratic candidates, but no one’s claiming the Democratic party is a meritocracy): When you look at the Republican presidental candidates, do you really believe that those are the Republicans most capable of leading this country?  That they, out of all of the Republicans in this fair land, are the few that are the best for the job?

I’m going to be laughing about that  for a long, long time.

Health Insurance

Y’all, I take personal responsibility for not paying closer attention to my health insurance policy, which amounts to “We’ll cover $500 and after that, you can’t have healthcare,” at least in my case, because I have no way to come up with the $2500 it would take to get me back into the shit they would cover.

But I was thinking, on my walk this morning, that I have a master’s degree in English.  If I can’t read and make sense of my insurance choices, doesn’t that mean a shit-ton of people can’t make sense of their insurance choices?

I had to sit down with two other grown-ass people, one of whom also works at my place of employment and is familiar with how insurance works, and go through it just to make sure I was getting dicked over as hard as I thought I was (I am) and to help me pick a better policy for next year that will mean I can see the doctor more than once.

I was also thinking of the Butcher’s curly blond friend, whose sister got in a terrible car wreck two weeks ago and was airlifted to the hospital with internal bleeding and how the hospital refused to operate on her because they wanted to see if the bleeding would resolve itself, since she didn’t have health insurance, but wouldn’t transfer her to a hospital that would operate on her, since she would probably die in transit.

My dad was telling me that there’s some kind of investigation going on in Illinois into taking away the non-profit status of a bunch of hospitals (including the one he relies on) because they’re turning away so many uninsured folks.

Also, I’m trying to understand Clinton’s healthcare plan, but I’m floundering on that, as well.  Doesn’t it seem like she’s making it easier for people to stick with insurance they like, opening up the insurance program that the federal employees get to everyone, and then making it illegal to not purchase insurance?  I don’t know.

I do know that people can’t afford healthcare, not even with insurance, so mandating that everyone have insurance seems to me to not solve the problem.

I mean, my employer offers insurance coverage, which I stupidly signed up for, which I can literally not afford to use.  And the insurance plan that I can afford to use (with low co-pays and lots of stuff just covered by the policy) is the most expensive.

Now, I know that from one perspective, that makes perfect sense–the program that gives you the most for the cheapest should cost the most.  But from the perspective of me, it means it’s very difficult for me to afford the coverage I need.

And I’m working someplace with good benefits and a hospital under its control.  They could say tomorrow that sick employees and families are so expensive that it’s worth it to them to offer completely free healthcare in our own facilities to our own people.

I just feel like this is one of those things that is so important and yet I don’t understand enough about it to feel confident talking about it.  It just feels like a mess to me and I’m not sure what we can do to fix it.

It’s one of those things where it appears to be screwed up all across the board.  It’s like some of us are in a slowly sinking lifeboat and some of us are in the cold water.  Does it make sense to put everyone in the lifeboat if the lifeboat is also going down?

No, not unless real help is coming and we just need to buy time.  The lifeboat itself is not a solution.

And I suspect that letting hospitals, doctors, politicians, and insurors get together and decide how to get everyone into their leaking boat is not a real solution either.