About once every three years, I catch some nasty upper or upper and lower respiratory disease, this despite the most powerful flu shots and the most potent pneumonia shots available as preventatives. Usually, these nasties come compliments of my truck-driving husband, diseases which he catches driving Canada. …Or they might come from some friend who has children and neglects to wash his hands and face after hugging and smooching them off to school. And the nasty is always devastating, coming near to killing me.
I absolutely do not do ‘sick’ well. I’m never gracious about it. Neither do I run to the doctor’s office — no point. By the time they can get me an appointment, I’ll have either died or survived. And, yes, I despise doctors, too, simply because they do not listen. Instead, it’s “daddy knows best” with verbal pats on the head as they proceed to use the appointment as an opportunity to treat me like their personal lab guinea pig with blood tests, urine tests, scans, and x-rays that have nothing at all to do with my illness, results delivered to me a week later telling me that my tests came out fine, but that makes no sense to them because, by rights, I should have all these things wrong with me based on statistics, so they’d like to do some follow-up tests, now.
Would you just give me some bloody antibiotics for the secondary infection, please?
Well, they think I’ll recover without them.
Right. As I hack up more greenish, putrid-smelling phlegm.
That will be $160 for the visit, two grand for the scans, another $300 for the x-ray, and, $75 for the urine test.
You betcha. Oh, and none of it is covered by that ugly close-to-a-grand-a-month-just-for-me Obamacare policy I have to pay to Blue Cross.