The Real Evil

If you're unhappy with healthcare in America, well, first of all just be happy to be healthy.  Second of all, direct your anger at the right places.  I'm not saying I know exactly what goes on everywhere, but holy shit there is stuff going down that is regoddamndiculous.

This will be a meander away from me trying to be funny and just be me being really upset.  But do carry on, I beg you.

Among many other duties at my job, I get medications approved for patients.  That process alone, beyond just being frustrating and near impossible, is mind boggling when you really sit down and think about it.  So, here's how that "works."  You have insurance.  You pay for that in some form or another.  That insurance only covers so much of whatever you get.  That insurance will also probably have some kind of prescription coverage with it.  The insurance company then sets up a formulary--the drugs it deems appropriate for you, because, you know, they know you, your medical history, and are your doctor or at least think they are.  If you need one of those prescriptions, you get it discounted.

But if your doctor, God forbid, prescribes something off formulary you have two choices: pay full price or your doctor has to attempt to get an authorization for that medication.  That is where I come in.  The pharmacy notifies us that the med isn't covered, and I have to call about 17 different numbers until I can get someone to fax me a form where I put down your information and answer their questions like what your diagnosis is and what you have tried and failed.  If you haven't tried enough random medications that were cheap and just might have worked to save them money on this pricier one that your doctor who went to medical school has prescribed for you, the insurance company will refuse to cover the medication.

Isn't that fucking insane?

Despite that your doctor says, "I think you need Whatevercillin," since it costs $20 more than Whachamacallitumab which is sometimes used before stepping up to Whatevercillin, the insurance company INSISTS you try it.  Possible reactions or the pain/sickness you'll deal with until you get to something that works be damned!

One of my favorite ones is when the insurance company asks if patients with like crippling arthritis who need an immune blocker have tried aspirin.  OF FUCKING COURSE THEY'VE TRIED ASPIRIN!  IT IS NOT FUCKING HELPING, OBVIOUSLY!

But it's a normal process, so my outrage at the whole process is kind of dulled.

It does, however, get really terrible when you look at specific cases and you see how some people are suffering.

We had this one lady with rheumatoid arthritis who had it for years.  She'd tried a few things without improvement, so was going onto another med called Enbrel.  In her history she had tried a drug called methotrexate.  (By the way, methotrexate can give you cancer, but don't worry about that.)  When this lady was on it she had an allergic reaction to it which caused her mouth to fill up with sores (like a lot of drugs in rheumatology, methotrexate kind of compromises your immune system).  Uncomfortable to say the least.  So over the course of her therapy after that, methotrexate was never used.  Now, with a lot of the meds this office prescribes, methotrexate is prescribed along with them because it makes them more affective.  Understandable.  So the insurance company, in the prior authorization, wants to know if she'll be taking methotrexate along with Enbrel.  No, we tell them, she is allergic to it, as documented.  Problem is, that documentation is from years ago.  Insurance company says they won't pay for Enbrel (literally THOUSANDS of dollars, but the evil of pharmaceutical companies is another story) unless she's tried and failed methotrexate again.  So the doctor is forced to put her on it again.  Her mouth swells up.  The pain she's in from her disease (which isn't getting taken care of because she can't go on the Enbrel) is only intensified because of these crazy mouth sores.  Thanks a lot, insurance.

The thing I am currently dealing with that sparked this whole rant, though, brought me to tears this week.  We have this man with ankylosing spondylitis, one of the most unfair medical conditions I have ever heard of.  The disease basically causes your spine and pelvis to fuse so you can't move and often causes a curve in the spine.  This patient just came to us a month ago, referred by his primary care doctor, after they found that in one short year the man had LOST SIX INCHES OF HEIGHT.

So the doctor says he needs to be on Remicade, an infusible medication.  We start the prior authorization process (because Remicade is like a bagillion dollars) and they take FOREVER to get back to me, so I call them.  Turns out they "never got it."

This is a clever trick that is all too often played by insurance companies.  If there is any way for them to hold onto their money a little longer, they will.  A patient who used to work for one of the bigger companies in Ohio said they were instructed to literally throw every third claim on the floor.  That sounds like crazy exaggeration, but with the number of things that I get fax confirmations on that were "never received," I believe it one hundred percent.

Anyway, I send things again (it is possible, I guess, that it got lost or whatever) and call for confirmation.  A week or so later it comes back denied saying that the patient hasn't tried and failed and disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs).  Another thing the insurance companies LOVE to do is waste paper.  They fax us the denial and then also mail it to us.  So I get the fax which is just like "DENIED, MOTHER FUCKER!  TAKE THAT!!!" but then the mail comes and it says that they are denying our prior authorization for use of Remicade for his RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS.  WHAT THE FUCK, ASSHOLES, THAT IS NOT HIS DIAGNOSIS!!!

Yet another trick those fucks use is screwing stuff up like that on "accident."  And, of course, only putting that information in the mailed letter, so if we were a bigger office it might get skimmed over that the denial was based ON THE WRONG DIAGNOSIS because the info was already received in another form.

(Side note: If you think I'm over reacting based on this single case, consider the prior auth I did two weeks ago for a patient to up his Humira from once every two weeks to once a week.  I sent everything off and then a few days later I got both a denial and another request to do another prior auth, so, confused, I called the medical review at the insurance company who said the second request was sent on accident (so if I had just done it, I would have been wasting more time and would have never gotten a response) and that the denial was because, quote, "Well, all the requirements are here, but whoever at your office filled out the form checked that the patient would not be taking Humira as a weekly dose, so you'll have to do an appeal."  An appeal for a clerical error.  As the woman went on to tell me that the appeal process would take fifteen to thirty days from the time received, I skimmed the form that "whoever at my office" (me) filled out and found the question CLEARLY marked with a yes.  I interrupted her, "Um, I filled this out and I'm looking at it right now, and it's marked yes."  She goes on to tell me that I still have to appeal because they have a no on file.  I say, "Really?  So the patient gets penalized because someone THERE messed up?  I don't understand how the fax of the form that I filled out is somehow different than the one in front of me."  And she says she has a photo copy of it right there and...oh...wait...someone must have read this wrong...yeah, I see it...that does say yes.  So she's all, "I'll fix this and call you back this afternoon."  So, if I hadn't pushed it and forced her to look at that form, it would have been maybe another month.  Tell me that wasn't on purpose.)

But back to my dude with the AS and the denial based on the WRONG DIAGNOSIS.

I call and tell them that he's been denied based on a diagnosis that was not written anywhere on the original form I sent them and has never been in his medical history.  They say I have to appeal anyway.  I'm not all that surprised because infusibles usually require appeals.  So I write up this letter saying that the guy HAS ANKYLOSING SPONDYLITIS in big fucking bold, underlined, non-comic-sans font and go on to explain that Remicade is considered first line therapy for the disease according to the FDA (who, by the way, might be the biggest fuckers of all, but they can be handy to quote in a jam like this) and that DMARDs are not an accepted treatment for this guy's disease as they have not shown to affect the spine.  I also mention that this guy is SIX INCHES SHORTER THAN HE WAS A YEAR AGO and that this kind of disease progression warrants treatment with an infusible.  I mean, the guy is stooped over so much he's rocking back on his heals to look forward and can't move his head 

independent of his body.

And what do they do?

Nothing.

I wait and wait and I hear nothing.

So I call and the woman tells me it's been denied (but apparently no one thought to tell us.  Really, we should have been expecting it, though, right?).  I say, "Even though the medications you are requiring him to be on are not FDA approved for his condition?"  She tells me that the insurance company has its own policies about drug approval.  "And those policies are based on what?" I ask, "Could you require him to have failed birth control for his condition too?"  This might not have been fair; SHE didn't deny him, the company did, but frankly I was mad, not to mention that I was so deeply seeded into this fucked up world that reason didn't really have a place in my brain anymore.  And she took it in stride anyway by ignoring me and repeating about the policy thing.

So now the doctor is trying to do a peer to peer evaluation of the thing even though they told us we couldn't because she is a badass and no one tells he what to do!  Peer to peers by insurance companies are equally stupid, by the way, because you call them to set it up and they call back like three times to confirm different call back dates and eventually end with, "We will call on Thursday or Friday between the hours of 8am and 6pm.  If the doctor is not available we will set up another time."  Then the doctor has to talk to someone at the insurance company who is considered a "peer" but is usually someone who is not allowed to practice anymore (for whatever reason like fondling his patients or killing too many of them) and who works for the insurance company so is not inclined to be impartial.

Anyway, that's where that is at.  And I am really upset.

I don't know how involved the government should be in healthcare considering the FDA is run by the government and they are LITERALLY ON THE TAKE (I'll tell you about that later), but someone needs to be monitoring the insurance companies.  I think this case may warrant being brought up to the insurance board.

Property Virgins

Disclaimer: I made a few pictures for this post, but only finished two of them.  They're here and boring.  Don't hate me.


The Boyfriend and I have been watching a lot of HGTV.  That’s Home & Garden Television for all you people with lives.  Basically, it’s a channel devoted to renovating, redesigning, selling, and buying property and the way-too-wealthy North Americans who can do such things.  Seriously, it can get pretty gross, but that doesn't make me love it any less because good TV is good TV.

There is this one show on HGTV, though, that focuses on people that we can sometimes relate to called Property Virgins.  The premise is to take what is usually a couple and follow them on the search for their first home.  The first thing the producers do is cast a couple.  A terrible couple.  The casting call is something like this:

Looking for a male, mid to late twenties, completely unaware of anything around him, devoid of personality, and dumb as shit.  He is to be cast alongside a female, early to mid twenties, extremely picky, and uses the word “hate” with reckless abandon as in, “I know I said I wanted hardwood floors, but I hate this color.”  Also, be mixed race but act stereotypically white (which isn’t a problem because most of the episodes are shot in Canada where everyone is white on the inside anyway.)

Then the show’s host, Sandra Rinomato, Canadian Realty Queen, takes the couple to a neighborhood that they would consider ideal.  She then proceeds to tell them they cannot now nor ever afford to live there, setting up the theme of every episode: “Look, you’re dumb and have no concept of realty or money in general, and you’re going to have to stop being prissy bitches and learn to compromise.”

Sandra then asks the couple of Twinkies what their list of demands is and shows them three places that are within their price range that meet some of those demands (which really allows them to focus on the one thing that the place doesn't have), but doesn’t tell them the actual cost—she makes them guess!  It’s AWFUL.  The couple is always confused and embarrassed about this part and usually guesses too high, which ends up working in their favor so they’re like, “$600,000?  That’s not so bad!”  Oh, Sandra, you sneaky, sneaky Canadian.

Needless to say, The Boyfriend and I are dying to be on the show.  We’ve even considered moving to Toronto just to be publically humiliated by Sandy herself.  The problem is…we’re poor.  And snow is the worst thing in the world.  So, we will have to make do with our imaginations.

Sandra would narrate over wide shots of the city we're looking to buy in, "In Anytown, The Boyfriend and Lordess of the Blog are discovering homebuying isn’t a walk in the park.  Both are college graduates, but they may as well be using their Bachelors of Arts in English as toilet paper.  They are both currently working outside of their fields in dead-end, part-time positions and living in a one bedroom garden apartment—that’s the quaint way of saying 'underground.'"

I'd go, "I’m a receptionist at a doctor’s office."

He'd go, "I’m a service representative at the local university."

And the producers would be annoyed that we don't have children or dogs and would make us improvise, "We have two little ones at home, Bart and Di."

"They’re assholes," The Boyfriend would say and that would get edited out because Canadians don't swear.

Then we would go over our wishlist:

• to not be living directly below anyone else so we don’t have to breathe in their smoke or hear them rearrange their furniture every night
• no risk being held up at gunpoint in our own building
• no flooding
• have a pilot light that the landlord has to illegally light because the gas company refused to do it for not being up to code

Sandra would say, "I’m taking them to their ideal neighborhood of Westershearbrambleberryhiggins Park to begin the humiliation process.  So, The Boyfriend, Lordess of the Blog, what do you think houses go for around here?"

Me: Way too much.

The Boyfriend: Yeah, why are we here?

Me: I cleaned houses once and those places could have fit in these garages.

The Boyfriend: We would never expect to even walk these streets without getting arrested for looking suspicious.

Sandra: Try 1 to 2 million.

Me: Is she listening to us?

The Boyfriend: Maybe our budget got lost in translation.

Sandra: Hockey.

Me: Right…

Sandra: So these places are a little above your budget of…um…$28.58?

The The Boyfriend would pick a penny up from the street, "$28.59, sucker!"  And then he would get arrested in Westershearbrambleberryhiggins Park and we would have to charm the mounties to get him released from custody.


So, obviously, we will never be on Property Virgins, but a girl can dream.

The Worst Thing About Going To The Gynecologist

I totally deprived you guys of this wonderfulness.  I started it and never finished.  Here's what I had.


The worst thing about going to the gynecologist is that, after the whole thing, you technically end up buying her dinner.

Also The Boyfriend calling her the vaginologist isn’t that great either.  A nice thing about this trip, though, was that she surprised me by telling me they only do pap smears every other year now so this year I drove an hour to Newark to wait thirty minutes in the waiting room and another thirty minutes naked save for a paper gown and socks on a table in a cold-ass exam room, fanning my vagina which had conversely broken out into nervous sweats just to have a midwife come in and stick a finger inside me for about half a minute.  I feel so used.

The best thing about the whole experience was that she told me, “You’re funny” about seventeen times.  AND I didn’t even have to use any of my utterly hilarious gynecological humor on her that I’d spent the earlier week coming up with.  I felt only a little cheated not getting to ask her any of the questions I’d been mulling over while she cranked open my nanner so as to distract myself like, “How do my labia compare to other labia?  You know, aesthetically speaking?”

Warning: I'm Naked In This One!

Well, I'm finally selling out to try and get internet famous; I'm posting nude photos.

Well, drawings.

I've been working on this post for a while, but you're going to look at the following pictures and think I not only lost my ability to walk, but to draw too.  Well, listen here, Internets, it takes an awful lot of effort to get to the scanner.  I had to scoot all the way across this queen size bed and suffer a super wedgie (front and back) to do it, so deal.  Then I was so tired after I uploaded these, that I only turned up the midtones, so they look rather awful, but it's the gist I needed to get across to you.

So, you should know by now that I can't deal with being gross.  These means I will risk certain death to get clean.  Or at least risk genuinely breaking my pelvis to do so.  The other day The Boyfriend was sleeping as is usual because he works at night and I was feeling particularly grimy.  Me experience showering has been, since I've been broken, lackluster.  The Boyfriend helps me in, I sit in a plastic lawn chair and scrub, shave the parts of my legs I can reach (if I'm not exhausted at that point) and then he helps me back out much to my hip's dismay at being moved in such a weird way.  After two weeks of waiting for him to get up before getting my uber-Italian oil off, I thought "Hey, I should be handicapable enough to do this on my own now!"  The short story is: I am.  The long story is, well, this:

I got in without a hitch pretty much.  My heart raced at the thought of slipping and impaling myself on the faucet, but that didn't happen, just like I knew it wouldn't.  I was very happy to get clean:

After washing up and drying off a little I celebrated: "Fuck yeah."

So then it was time to get out, so I grabbed onto the faucet thingy and tried to stand:

Much to my dismay, The Boyfriend was not right there to grab on to:

A new route would have to be found.  Maybe I could lunge forward?

Nope.  So I figured I could swing my leg over the edge, straddle the tub, then swing the other leg over and stand up on the floor in reach of my crutches.

The caption for the previous picture is "OH MY FUCK!"  When I realized that my muscles were still too full of blood (an "internal scab" which is the grossest thing I've ever heard) to work properly, I knew I wasn't going to be lifting my leg out.  But there was another option:

I could sit on the edge of the tub (slipperier and narrower than one would expect) and then shift myself over to the toilet and stand up from there.  I reached:

But did not have the length or upper body strength necessary to do so.  There was only a single other option, and that was not to call The Boyfriend.  I was an independent woman.  I would do this on my own:

And I fucking did:

Hell to the yeah:

With the utmost expertize, I lowered myself flat onto the bathroom floor, legs in the air and propped up on the tub.  I was a fucking miracle worker.  The only thing left was to shimmy backward into the wall and slide my leg down.

After a few choice words I was free at last, free at last!

And that's how I got out of the bathtub on my own that one time without shattering my pelvis or impaling myself on the faucet.

Helen Keller, eat your heart out.

And from there, Robot Unicorn came and flew me off to heaven:

THE END.

There is an unexplained beeping coming from somewhere

and I can't even find the fucking thing because, of yeah, I can't fucking walk. I can't go Christmas shopping. I can't go see my best friend graduate. One of these cats is driving me fucking insane because he can now get on the kitchen counter because our kitchen table was moved too close to the counter and I can't move it away because, of yeah, I CAN'T FUCKING WALK! Also, I can't stop the cat because I can't go knock him off. I have a squirt bottle, but that does little good when he hides behind the fridge. He also gets up on the dresser and scratches at the plastic on our fucking shitty windows and lets the cold in while I'm trying to sleep and I have to spray him to stop again and wake up very three fucking seconds and then I have to get out of bed and shut the door which takes like twenty minutes and I have to get Bart out of the room too who hasn't done a single thing wrong because he's just fat and stupid, but not bad, but he doesn't move when I tell him to so I have to yell at him and smack him with a shirt and I feel horrible but I'm just so goddamned tired and I hurt so fucking much that I can't sleep anyway and I'm alone at night all the time because The Boyfriend has to work so much and I'm awake all by myself during the day and I CAN'T FUCKING WALK so I can barely cook anything to eat and I've been constipated for the last two weeks and finally took a laxative and shit my guts out all day today, over five times today, and I got my period because I had to stop taking my birth control and of course it's like two weeks early so it's going to last now for two weeks and now I'm going to have menstrual cramps on top of everything else which is great timing because I have like 3 painkillers left and I'm off the birth control because of this stupid blood thinner that I have to inject in my stomach every fucking day and it hurts so much it's almost worse than my hip and I can't even laugh because it feels like my insides are trying to explode out of me when I do, so nothing can be funny and sometimes I sneeze on accident and sneezing is the worst thing ever, except it's not worse than just feeling like a useless piece of shit who can't even shower herself which I couldn't do today because The Boyfriend got called into work early and of course it's the day that I shit 5 times and got my period and my vagina is all mucus-y and I am just angry all the time and feel like poop and want to pass out after washing three dishes and don't think I'm ever going to get better.

And ya know what? I'm sick of people telling me I'm lucky. I FUCKING KNOW. I SAW THE GODDAMNED SUV SLAM INTO ME!!!

Also, THIS WASN'T MY FAULT. FUCK THE POLICE!!! SERIOUS-FUCKING-LY! They fucking charged me because I was the easy one to pin it on, because they knew very fucking well I would be too hurt and too inexperienced to go to court.

Sigh...

And if any of you don't agree you can go fuck yourselves because if I can't rant on my blog then where the hell else am I supposed to do it?

u

g

h

I cried today for the first time since this happened.

Today was just a bad day.

Thanks for sticking around til the end. This won't happen again.

Promise.

Part II: Trauma!

You think it’s going to be horrifying to have your vagina flopped out in front of a room full of strangers. Truth is, you’re not even going to realize it until you’re having a conversation about your improperly inserted catheter with a nurse an hour later.

I had on a neck brace and was on a backboard so I had little sense of setting when I was wheeled into the hospital, but I did know that the people designing the hospital knew that the ceilings had to be interesting because this was the view a lot of people were going to have. There were like blown up children’s paintings up there. It got my mind off things for a few seconds.

I was wheeled into this large room with a million people in it. The EMT had prepped me for this—he said they were taking me straight to trauma and there’d be an onslaught of people to attack me. I like that he built it up so much because, like with a lot of movies, it didn’t live up to the expectations he’d set so I can look back and say, “eh, not so bad.”

But the questions certainly did come from everywhere. They asked my name and date of birth and then this glorious thing happened: people started getting my name right! And they used it a lot. I believe in what Dale Carnegie says—everyone’s favorite word is their own name. I got asked for a contact number for someone. I spat out Mom’s name and her home phone number—literally the only number that I actually know. I got really upset because I didn’t know if she had The Boyfriend’s number. I started conjuring up ways to contact him at work and the different avenues we’d have to go through at the University to get to him. I immediately decided no one was good enough at Google except for me to contact him. All was lost.

Then I realized they were cutting off my clothes. I only knew that was what was going on because the EMT told me that would happen. They were either so marvelous at it that I didn’t notice (creepy) or I was in so much pain that I didn’t notice. Oh, did I tell you I was in pain?

This was probably where it hurt the most because they kept rolling me and moving me. They warned me before hand that they’d have to roll me and it was going to hurt and when they did I distinctly remember going, “Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit” and then promptly apologized. Someone told me, sincerely, “Well, you handled that significantly better than most people.”

They cut off my shirt—again, very impressively—and asked if I wanted to keep it because, guess what, it was my Lil Abner shirt with the signatures of the cast and crew on it. The musical that I had the female lead in! Cut up! Arg! The question of keeping it was weird to me, like it didn’t matter because I just didn’t want to be dying, so I was like “Whatever…it’s okay, you can throw it out,” but mostly I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone. NAKED GIRL ON TABLE WITH FRACTURED PELVIS DIDN’T WANT TO INCONVENIENCE ANYONE. Story of my goddamned life.

After they got my pants off a woman with a glove leaned over me from my feet and said, “I’m really sorry honey, but I have to make sure you’re not bleeding internally, so I’m going to have to insert my finger in your bottom.” What a nice way to say you’re going to STICK YOUR HAND UP MY BUTT!!! But honestly, it wasn’t the worst thing ever. In fact, I barely felt it.

What I did feel was the four sets of hands prodding at and peeling back my vagina to get the catheter in. When the woman told me they were going to have to do that I must have looked utterly distraught because she apologized profusely. In my mind, tube in urethra = most intense pain ever. I said, “I promise I’ll just get up and walk to the bathroom! I promise!” She told me I wouldn’t be walking for a long while. Ugh. I gave in. Then they shoved it in. Again, not terrible, just uncomfortable. I imagine I didn’t feel the full pain of a lot of this because my hip was excruciating. Someone said it was wrong so they took it out and redid it. Someone else said it was wrong so they took it out and redid it again. I was thinking someone better Google “pee-hole” before they do that a fourth time because I love my vagina the way it is and never intended on piercing it. Meanwhile a separate group of people were at each of my arms sticking me and taking vitals and asking me questions, but none of it mattered when so many people were prodding my lady place.

Finally, they were like, “That’s gotta be it, right guys? I mean, we can’t miss that many times! Harhar!” And someone was like, “There’s no urine in the bag!” And someone else was all, “Flush it!” So they ran some fluid into what was supposed to be my bladder and after the thing that was supposed to happen didn’t happen, they were like, “Guess you just don’t have to pee!”

Great.

So I went and got a cat scan. I think. It could have been an MRI. All I really know is that the machine looked expensive and instead of the tech giving me directions on when to breathe, the machine did, so I’m positive it was expensive. Again, I contemplated asking to forgo it, but knew that would get me nowhere.

I ended up in another room, a quiet room, a room where only two other people at the most would be with me. It was nice. There was a curtain separating me from commotion. I really enjoyed this—for like two minutes. Then I could feel all the pain and discomfort. Blah. Some nurses came in.

Sidebar: The nurses I encountered at Grant Medical Center were some of the nicest people I have ever had the pleasure of coming in contact with. I feel so blessed to have been in a place with RNs, LPNs, and like all the other nurse-type titles that were that incredibly sweet. They wanted nothing more than to make me comfortable and smile at me. It was amazing.

Sidebar II: It was really nice to see some near-equality in the male to female ration of nurses, at least in my limited experience there. I saw probably 30-40% male nurses to the women that took care of me and that was cool.

The male nurse who started taking care of me made me feel really calm. Asked me about who was coming for me. He went to make sure someone was. Then a doctor came in.

OK, so I work for a doctor. I know they are not all sucky, but my experience with them totally was at the hospital. This guy was actually an orthopedic surgeon who had looked at the x-rays. He explained that it looked like I had fractured my pelvis and what went along with that. He was pretty cold, but how can you not be when throwing around medical terms? It’s a good thing I’m a fucking genius because otherwise I would have been confused.

I listened to him intently, I didn’t really ask for clarification, I was good the whole damn time he talked. Then he asks, “Is there anything at all I can do for you to make you more comfortable, Ashley?”

And my mind lights up, “I have this really intense urge to pee, but I can’t really go. I think this catheter may be wrong.”

His response, “Catheters make you feel like you have to pee,” and totally dismisses me and goes.

I was really angry because I knew something was not right but now I was totally alone. Every time someone passed by I hoped they’d come in, but it seemed to go on forever that I was alone. I had to pee so badly and I was still shivering so much that I thought all that was actually causing my hip pain. Finally the male nurse comes back and asks if he can get me something—I practically cut him off, “I have to pee something fierce!”

And a female nurse is walking by or had come in with him or he got her, I’m not sure as the urine was reaching my eyeballs at this point, and she checks it out. “Honey,” she asks, “Did a man put this in?”

“Uh, there were like twenty people, so I don’t really know. They did it three time”

Only a slight bit of hyperbole there.

She takes it, slips it in again, INSTANT FUCKING RELIEF!!! It was peeing without peeing. It was an empty bladder without movement. It was the best I ever felt. I almost cried thanking her.

Now the only question is this: What the hell did they actually flush out???

Coming up next: Part III: Visitors!

Guess Where I Was! or Part I: The Accident

OK, if you’re reading this, you probably already know, but I was in the hospital! I could probably write several blogs with very different feelings to them: the sentimental, thank God I’m alive blog, the funny, everyone at the hospital is so invasive blog, the I can’t believe healthcare is so expensive blog, but instead I’m just going to shove it all into one. And try for the invasive one the most because I’ll get to say vagina a whole lot in that one.

Friday I was headed to Pataskala from Columbus to meet Minigan, a good writer, better friend and the best at being extremely hyperactive, to have a writing meeting. We hadn’t met in weeks, and were supposed to the Monday before, but The Boyfriend got really sick and I had to take care of him instead. So, if you think about it, this whole thing is totally their fault.

Anyway, I was on 71 and had already passed an accident, but once I got to 70 (a major highway just after rush hour) I felt free and clear. To not be an asshole, I switched over to the left, “fast” lane so that the people coming on from and getting off on the really closely spaced onramps would have the least amount of people driving in front of them. I am too nice for my own good. Then the cars in front of me, way in front of me, put on their brake lights. So I tapped mine too. Then I realized they were still stopping. Like, a lot. And hard. So I had to match it. It looked like I was going to ram the car in front of me, but that didn’t happen.

Instead, my car with its week-old, new brake job (oh yeah, I just put over $500 into my car, mainly for brakes so this exact thing wouldn’t happen), pulled to the left and spun me sideways. I remember actually thinking, “Oh, this is bad,” as it happened. That, I think, is one of the weirdest things. How, you know something bad is happening, at least in my experience, and you know you have little to no control, but instead of freaking out, you are completely calm and just take it. Because that’s what I did. I was just sitting there, seeing the road before me disappear and be replaced with the meridian, and thinking, “Oh, dear, this is a bit of a pickle.” I hoped that I would end up driving off into the meridian and stop in the grass. That didn’t happen.

Instead, whoever was behind me slammed into the driver’s side door. That was a shitty turn of events.

I had barely been going 60 and had been stopping, so I was going slower. Now, I admit, my car was old and little and poopy, but it didn’t hit the car in front of it. So what the fuck was the guy behind me doing that made him hit me? Texting, I bet.

There was a split second, though, when I spun around and was still moving forward on the highway, but very slowly. I would have come to a stop. It would have been okay. But in that nugget of a moment that I was still in mid-turn I caught a glimpse of the driver’s side mirror and what was behind me. Then, sideways, I happened to see basically a grate and some headlights pretty much next to me. And in that second I knew it was going to hit me. And again, totally calm, I just thought, “Darn.” Why doesn’t my mind swear and go crazy when actual horrific shit is about to happen?

So then it hit me. Literally. I was conscious through this whole thing, but this was the split second that it got fuzzy. I couldn’t accept what was going on, and I just had to go, get out of the car. I’ve had a lot of nightmares about car accidents, so I thought maybe I was in one of those. Maybe this wasn’t happening and I’d just wake up next to The Boyfriend in a cold sweat and everything would be fine.

After I fumbled with the seatbelt and whimpered because I couldn’t see (I’d find out later that my glasses came flying off and ended up in the middle of the highway which, by the way, I HAVE ON RIGHT NOW! That’s pretty cool, ya gotta admit) I went to open the already open (because it was crushed) door and step out. My brain, always cool and collected, said, “Okay, so that just happened. Now, you’ve seen a lot of crime dramas—you know what happens next. This is when the car explodes, so you need to get away from it.” So I tried. I took a step out to go. But how the hell was I supposed to know my legs didn’t work?

I ended up on the ground, wedged in the crook of the door, facing the back of the car. Without the open door, I would have been flat on the ground. Then there was this woman. Actually, no I think she was like an angel. Really. Because she was the first person there and she kept calling me “sweetie” and she was so nice and every time I think about her I cry. I told her we had to move because cars were going to come and hit us. She told me the cars all stopped. She got me a blanket. She held my hand.

And that’s when I knew I was going to die.

Never in my life have I thought I was going to die. I consider it my intense egotism, but I just don’t think God will let me die this young and with so much left to do. I don’t do crazy things because I have that nonsense knowledge, but it’s really just never seemed that realistic to me. I know people die and that someday I will, but not me NOW. Except then, on the pavement, with strangers around me and my car in a mass of metal, I knew I was going to die. There was no other option. Not because it even hurt, I just thought, “This is it.”

Then a random man who happened to be an EMT came and assessed me. He got my info, he made me feel a little safer. On the other hand, though, about three other people, old white men btw, were walking around, shaking their heads, going “Oh my God, I can’t believe this” and freaking me right the fuck out. They asked me if I could move. No, 60 year old man, I cannot, and please don’t try to move me because you’ll probably kill me. DON’T YOU WATCH TV? DON’T MOVE THE VICITM!

But that woman was there and talking to me and that was okay.

Then the actual paramedics came. And guess what. No one got my name right. Ever. Not once. It is a good damn thing I was conscious and could repeat “ASH-LEEEEEEEY!” to them over and over when they kept questioning, “Melanie? Veronica? Pete?”

They took off the blanket the nice woman gave me, they took off my coat. They took off my sweater. They made me lay flat and my hip was so mad that I am pretty sure I swore because my actual voice is nowhere near as calm as my inner voice. I started shaking so badly from the cold and pain I thought I was going to snap everything I owned and passed out. I repeated “Ashley” a couple more times in case they forgot again and hypothermia had taken me.

I had on a neck brace, I was on a backboard, and they were getting ready to put me in the ambulance. This is the part where I thought, “Maybe I’m not going to die” and then the other rational part of me kicked in and my brain exploded into, “God, no DON’T PUT ME IN THE FUCKING AMBULANCE!!! IT’S TOO FUCKING EXPENSIVE!!!!!!!!!!!! Can’t that nice lady drive me? Or how bout I take myself? Seriously, guys, I don’t have $1,000 for a cab ride!” Then, on top of that, they decided to take me to Grant which was a billion miles further away than Licking Memorial, so then I was like “FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!” because they charge you mileage in those things.

And then my mind calmed down and the guy in the back of the ambulance with me was like, “What was your name again? Angie?”

Close enough.

P.S. Oxygen is effing terrible. Breathing on my own is something I prefer much more.

Coming up next: Part II: Trauma!