Congressional Battering and a Lesson in Fear

Today, I had the talk with our son.  You know, the "honey, because of those cruel, petty asshats in DC playing politics with our lives, your daddy may be out of work next week" talk.  The talk that details the things that will immediately fall by the wayside.  Like cable TV.  Like the paintball Zombie-fest he's been looking forward to since March.  Like the strings for his electric guitar and the new cord to stop that crazy buzzing.

Like his beloved Hapkido classes that represent the only real "in person" interaction he gets with other kids his age. It's three nights a week he gets to hang out and learn and grow with other kids.

And it is OUTTA HERE if those mean, politicking monsters in Congress keep it up.

Explaining to him that, unlike the last time this happened, these bastards almost certainly won't reimburse the families they're devastating.

And make no mistake--they are threatening to devastate us.  It's his first lesson in what happens when bills don't get paid.  How they don't just scoot forward a month, but they become overdue, compounded with fees and fines and penalty interest rates, then lumped into the next month's bill, which is still due.  Things don't get pushed back, they get piled up.  And then the vicious tide of endless calls from creditors starts.  The three, four, five calls a day per creditor.  And each time they pretend they don't know you've already called, already explained.

Already begged.

We are working so hard to drag ourselves up and out of debt.  This will be the end of us, financially.  There will be no recovering from this.

Add that that my looming medical appointments for the large, growing mass in my forearm.  Oh, the copays.  Not just the 35 bucks a pop for doctor's visits, but the fifty+ for the MRI, the 100+ per hospital, etc.  Like having a possible sarcoma growing in my arm wasn't enough, the Republican Party has to trap us under their boot and gleefully threaten to twist that heel.

And it is gleeful.  Don't you DARE tell me otherwise, I read their words, I see their satisfied little smirks.  What happened to public service?  They're not serving anyone but themselves and their corporate masters.

And here's the truly bitter part: any one of them could fix our financial woes in a second. They have that kind of money.  They could just say, "Oh, shoot, 15 grand is all you need to be solvent? Here you go."  But that would be welfare.  That would be wrong.  Bootstraps and all that crap.  Except they're looking to slash those bootstraps and then, once again, castigate us for not being able to save ourselves when they've taken away our only means of salvation.  We are trying, we are paying things down and paying things off, but it's going take about two years to get it all done.  Unless they shut down the government.

Then it won't ever happen.

And all of this over a program the American People have already weighed in on.  They did--they VOTED FOR BARACK OBAMA!  Seriously, what do these bastards think that meant?   They ran their boy Mitt on a platform of killing Affordable Care, and they LOST.  They LOST, and yet they keep terrorizing Americans in attempt after attempt to  . . . unlose?

I know what they're trying to do.  They hope that, if they can make things as painful and miserable and bloody as possible for folks like us, we'll throw our sad, terrified hands in the air and say "Fine! Defund Obamacare, just please, please don't sink my family!"  They know that, given enough fear and hurt, we'll eventually buckle under and throw our fellow Americans under the bus to save our own families.

According to one nutty windbag down in Texas, if the American people get a taste of affordable care, they'll be "hooked."

"Hooked" on affordable health care for everyone.  Oh, the horror!

The stress kills.  They say that it shortens your life and opens you up to all sorts of awful ailments. From obesity to cancer, there's a stress link.  So it's not much of a stretch to say that the Republicans in Congress are attempting to murder me.

This is terrorism.  There's no other word for it.  Every few months, they come at us with threats of shutdowns and furloughs and slashing of services, using us and our lives as game pieces, bargaining chips.  And each time, the constant, thrumming adrenaline, the panic, the insomnia, the tears.  It's terrorism, plain and simple.

Congressional Republicans are terrorists.  They're why Guantanamo Bay needs to stay open for business.

A Buffalo Springfield Kind of Day, For What it's Worth . . .

Tommy and I were talking the other day, and he mentioned a meeting where his then-boss said something about positions opening in D.C., and how he remembered thinking, “This is important. This is where it starts.” I knew exactly what he meant because, back on August 28th of 2011, I experienced the very same sensation. But not in a good way.

You see, I was flat on my back on an examining table, legs up in the stirrups, with someone’s hand inside me when it happened. It went from a happy “let’s get all these routine exams out of the way so we’re going into our insurance-less stretch with a clean bill of health” to “oh, shit, I’m in trouble and I won’t have insurance!” That quick—from all-clear to formerly-comforting voice saying “Hello—hang on. What’s this? Has this always been here?”

“This” is a 7 mm “mass” in the anterior vaginal wall. 7 mm. The size of a pencil eraser, give or take. But that was four months ago, almost to the day. Four months with no follow-up, no further care because we were caught in the limbo of “between insurance” and the new insurance, which took almost three months to kick in, only has one urogynecology office (the other plans had NONE), and that office couldn’t see me until tomorrow. Four months, and I can only hope that it’s still “only” a 7 mm lump. Yes, yes, I did try to see a run-of-the-mill gyno at the mid-way point. You saw how that turned out. Money talks. Broke gets shuffled out of the office sans care in a haze of shame and sadness.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm a step closer to finding out if this is a urethral diverticulum, cancer, or both. Yes, it can be both—a malignancy could be found within a diverticulum, it’s not uncommon. And up there, where the vaginal wall and the urethra are in such close quarters? Even a small cancer can be a disaster. A life-altering, piss-into-a-bag-for-whatever-time-you-have-left kind of disaster. Could it be something totally benign in the truest sense of the word? It could, but I have urinary symptoms. A feeling of pressure, a sensation of something impinging. And that, my friends, takes “oh, it’s nothing” right off the table. It’s absolutely something.

In addition to the terror of what they might find (and it is terror, no matter how cool I might play it), there’s the competing horror of what they’re going to do to me to find out what this is. This is going to be beyond humiliating. Devastating is a more accurate term.

And then there’s the money. Copays, deductibles, the mad scrambling, trying to figure out what labs are covered and what procedures require prior approval in order to protect us from a massive, "we won't cover that" hit from the insurance. Stuff I never had to worry about with the old insurance. And we are so broke, this is not what we need right now. We need for this to be nothing. As stupid as this sounds, I find myself wishing that my old doc’s office had missed this “mass.” Because then I would have written the symptoms off to a touch of cystitis. Then I wouldn’t be worried until my next exam, which wouldn’t have been until next fall. Next fall, when the money starts flowing a little easier and we can better afford for me to be a disaster.

I’m 46 years old. I’ve pretty much lost hope that some Secret Santa-type is going to drop ten grand on our heads and save us. Even the 500 dollar pet deposit isn’t happening, and that breaks my heart. I want Sean to have a puppy. And more, I want to see Sean with a puppy. And I am very afraid of what’s going on with me, afraid that maybe I’m not going to get to see that. I’m fat, diabetic, and on heart meds for an arrhythmia—the almost certain surgery I’m facing is a terrifying prospect with potential to go very wrong for me.

That sensation that something small actually signifies the beginning of something very big, that a certain moment will prove to be the start of something life-altering? Yeah, I know that sensation. Too well.