I have to start eating whole wheat bread and broccoli and salmon and blueberries and whatever else is this month's designated healthy stuff.
I have to drink at least 128 ounces of water every day. I have to walk two miles every day, rain or shine. I have to work out for at least an hour every evening. I have to get at least eight hours of sleep every night, wake up refreshed, and think happy thoughts all day long.
In other words, I have to do whatever it takes to become more healthy.
Why? Because I don't think I can go through much more of trying to figure out my medical bills. The stress is killing me.
I'm telling you now, get all your surgeries done when you're young and still have an abundance of brain cells.
In fact, if you have extras, do whatever it takes to hang onto them, because you're going to need them. The irony is that you need more surgeries as your body gets older. But meanwhile, up in your head, (according to science) your brain cells are dying off at an alarming rate just when you need them to figure out your medical bills.
I suspect my demise will happen one day while I'm sitting at an old kitchen table with a large stack of medical bills in front of me and my mind will suddenly implode. If that just injures me and doesn't take me out, then ironically, one of my kids will have to figure out how my insurance is going to cover that, thus passing the curse onto the next generation.
I had some surgery back in May. And right away, the bills started trickling in. Well, they weren't actually bills, because printed right across the top of them in large letters were the words, "THIS IS NOT A BILL." So I guess those not-bills were kind of a preliminary warning that a lot of money was being billed by the surgeon plus a whole cast of supporting players, plus every corner of the hospital where I was, plus a few other places I sincerely don't remember. And whatever the insurance company won't pay, I have to. Hence these warnings to start saving up.
So I'm sorting through mountains of not-bills and I find some from names I don't even recognize. I call the insurance company to ask who these people are and they want to know why I don't know. I point out that the second name on the bills, right after the surgeon, is the anesthesiologist who put me under, and therefore I wasn't awake when all these other people came in. My best guess is that once a patient goes under, the doors to the surgery room are flung open wide and everyone with any medical credits to their names are invited to come in and add their billing information to the list.
As I'm on the phone with an insurance person -- it's "LuAnne" today -- I ask her about this list of itemized stuff with words on it like prothrombin, venipnct, bacitracin, and paculevel.
LuAnne patiently goes through the list with me and I learn that aspirin costs $30 a piece, the brown stinky stuff on a gauze pad used to clean the incision site is $40, and the operating room itself is billed by the minute. Holy cow.
Then, I ask LuAnne why there doesn't seem to be any logic to what the insurance company does and does not pay.
She starts to explain, "Well, the disposition format when it was priced, it came back as invalid so that caused the check to not have been released. We have to send it to the local to be posted as a valid disposition format and then they review it as a non-duplication of a claim because that EOB code usually means the primary paid the maximum and we're not going to pay because you've received the maximum for that claim, so that may have been the reason but then there's also the secondary part of it which is ...
I interrupt, "LuAnn, thank you so much. I'm sure you'll do the right thing, and I'll just figure out how to pay the rest (maybe sell a kidney or something). You have a great day, OK?"
She hangs up. I have a headache. I need to lie down. Right after I take a not-$30 aspirin.
You may contact D. Louise Brown at maven¬_55@yahoo.com or leave a message with her editor at 801-625-4223.
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