I'm Still Here

It's been simultaneously busy and boring since I got out of the hospital.

Bills are starting to roll in just from the initial scans and biopsies from April and the first half of May. Despite having insurance, we're talking several thousand dollars worth of items with deductibles or stuff the asshole insurance company is flat-out refusing to pay for.

For example, United Health Care is trying to say any ultrasound or MRI is an "experimental" procedure. Mind you, lobular carcinoma is notorious for not showing up on x-rays.

So it's a matter for writing letters to challenge the UHC's bullshit. And calling various providers to set up payment plans.

Before anyone makes a comment about why we don't have savings, let me point something out--we did. We'd been saving for a down payment on a house. That's gone now, swallowed in the miasma of cancer treatment costs.

In the meantime, my typing was down to nil, thanks to my Jackson-Pratt drain. When the surgeon takes such a large swath of tissue, like in a mastectomy, fluid collects under the sown-up incision, especially blood and lymph fluids. My drain was a couple of inches beneath my left armpit. Unfortunately, there's no rhyme or reason for how long a person might need to keep the drain in. As my surgeon said, there's no correlation between age, gender, size, or type of surgery.

No worries, right? I could sit in my recliner with my laptop, right?

However, when I tried typing on my wip the second week after my surgery, my left arm would rub against the drain. Think of the type of rubbing of a new shoe that causes a blister on your foot. Within three days, the pain was unbearable. I had to stop. I even tried typing with just my right hand, but I'd get so immersed in the story, I'd start typing with both hands until the pain made me halt.

So I left my laptop on the desk, propped up my left arm, and watched too much TV.

The drainage petered down to where the surgeon felt comfortable pulling the drain on Monday. Yay! Freedom! I could write again without pain. And I did peck out a couple of pages Monday night.

However, my appointment with a oncologist here in town is next Monday, roughly four weeks from my surgery. I'm also looking to get a second opinion from an oncologist in Detroit. I don't know what's going to happen next. Radiation? Chemo? A combo of both? Neither?

Basically, I need to write (type) as much as I can over the next few days before the next step. But to be perfectly blunt, I'm reconsidering reconstruction after all the bullshit with the drains.