We Make the Most of Our Health Insurance

In the past 8 days, The Boy and I have been to doctors' offices 9 times. The Boy has had his temperature taken at least 14 times. I have been stuck with needles 8 times, and The Boy twice. Between the two of us, we have ingested 10 different medicinal substances.

And I'm not ready to call things normal.

It all began 11 days ago, when I found out that I would have to undergo out-patient surgery.

It's not that I'm squeamish. I've chatted away with phlebotomists filling vial after vial of my blood, discussed my work while doctors do what they do with speculums. I'm the one who never says it hurts when a physician pushing her hands into some tender part of my anatomy asks if it hurts.

It's just that the past several times I've casually trusted someone to perform a medical procedure on my body, I've come out of it feeling . . . invaded. And the surgery I was told I had to have feels particularly invasive. As if anything that involves strangers putting metal implements into your body isn't particularly invasive.

I had been avoiding the surgery for six weeks and felt more than a little bit defeated that I had run out of options. Acupuncture sure made me feel less gloomy, but it wasn't resolving the problem. I'm grateful I found my way back to regular yoga classes, but they didn't regularize my body. And, frankly, I was sure I had only a limited amount of time remaining before Hubby threw up his hands and told me to move back to California to feel sorry for myself.

So we scheduled the surgery for the following Tuesday, and I continued my week a marked woman.

Two days later, a Wednesday, I received the welcome distraction of a call from The Boy's school. "His temperature is fine, but he's kind of weepy and wants his Mommy," they told me.

What could be better than a child who just wants to be held by his Mommy, who, conveniently enough, really wanted to hold her boy?

I took him home and we played cheerfully and I pretended I didn't feel like I was walking around under a big, black, scheduled-surgery cloud. We had a little dinner, which, these days, consists of The Boy sticking his fingers into whatever dish I'm holding and eating his refried beans/yogurt/other viscous substance by hand. We both enjoy it greatly.

After his dinner, we stopped in the kitchen to feed the dogs their kibble and Mommy a few corn chips.

As I expertly held The Boy with one arm and reached for the chips with the other, The Boy's eyes bugged and his body jerked. About a gallon of vomit cascaded over the chip bag and onto the kitchen floor.

When you have been a mother for 13 months -- 6 of which involved a child with reflux so bad he seemed to spit up twice the amount of milk you had just poured down him at every single meal -- a little bit of vomit doesn't panic you. Even a lot of vomit.

In fact, a few months ago, I watched all of Superbad covered in The Boy's vomit. It was only the second time we'd been out to see a movie since his birth, and I really, really wanted to see it. It probably helped that the theater was dark enough that I didn't see just how much vomit I was sitting in until the lights came up and I had marginally dried out. Hubby claims he missed the vomit entirely and got to watch the movie blissfully unaware of just how groce his wife has become.

Now, as The Boy vomited his way down the hall to the bathroom, I calmly stripped off my chunked cashmere sweater and filled the bathtub. My excuse was to wash him off, but honestly The Boy loves his bath, and, sure enough, it seemed to fix everything.

The next day was what we in Asheville like to call a "snow day" -- about an inch of white stuff on the ground and temperatures reaching the low 40's, so it's pretty much all gone by noon but everything closes down anyhow so no one has to risk driving mountain roads in "weather."

In this case, the "weather" meant the cancellation of the "pre-op" appointment I didn't want to have. Hmm. Maybe there is something to this winter weather.

Furthermore, much as I look at every school closing as a personal affront to my efforts to locate something called a life in the mess of my days doing nothing of permanence, I had to admit it was just as well The Boy's school closed as well or we might have caused an epidemic. Not that I knew anything much was wrong until the afternoon, when I took the first of The Boy's temperature readings and discovered that he would have been sent home from school if he had been there.

Out came the trusty Tylenol. I remember vaguely the days when Hubby and I resisted putting any sort of evil drug into The Boy's perfect system and how I would cry every time I gave in and dosed him at 2:30 in the morning to ease his teething pain. By now, however, we recognize Tylenol for what it is -- our drug of choice to make our boy smile again. I should be embarrassed to admit that when he catches sight of the bottle he reaches for it with great urgency, begging for a squirt of its cherry-flavored goodness.

This time, however, Tylenol let us down. I held him in bed, rather relishing the chance to just read a book and let everything else go to hell. Until I took his temperature again. It had climbed to 103.8. Definitely high enough to justify a call to the on-call pediatrician.

"Try Motrin," she suggested.

Out went Hubby to CVS and back he came armed with substantial bottles of both berry-flavored Motrin and some back-up Tylenol. The Boy and I cuddled up for a night together, banished Hubby to the daybed in the office, and, with him well dosed, we had a peaceful night.

Until Friday morning hit me and I realized that -- much as I would have liked to let the pre-op appointment slip away unnoticed by all but myself -- I had to be responsible and reschedule it.

Which is why I found myself at 1:15 sitting in the waiting room of the satellite office. The last time I had been here, the receptionist had kept me waiting 45 minutes past my appointment time, blandly assuring me that I was signed in and everyone knew I was waiting . Until I huffed out and told her to cancel my appointment because I had a child to pick up from daycare. Only then did she mention that she was waiting for my records to be faxed over from the other office and thus had not even put me in the queue.

This time, I had Hubby sitting next to me missing work and holding a baby who, it was becoming increasingly clear, was not just tired from being rudely pulled away from his nap, but who was feeling really lousy. I sat in my seat brooding and fighting the urge to walk away from not only the pre-op appointment but the op as well.

Forty-five minutes later The Boy was feeling even lousier and the receptionist was blandly assuring me "they haven't forgotten you."

Fifty minutes later, Hubby sprang into action.

There's nothing like watching an angry man clutching a sick baby telling off the receptionist for rolling her eyes at him. "I want to talk to someone who can tell us what's going on," he stormed.

Wouldn't you know it, within minutes we were ushered into a private waiting room by a nurse plainly trained in sweetly handling irate patients. She explained that the doctor had arrived late from the hospital and wouldn't have time to see us for 45 more minutes.

Now, I don't know what kind of world the receptionist lives in, but I tend to think it's only polite to inform someone that she won't be seen until TWO HOURS after her appointment time, oh, when she checks in. "They haven't forgotten you" is just not an adequate substitute.

Happily, the nurse gave us the option of seeing a different doctor, as the one we were scheduled to see wasn't the one scheduled to do the surgery anyhow. Since, remember, my appointment was supposed to be the day before at a different office. Damn winter.

The doctor who did see us was perfectly nice, but what she did just didn't seem like something a doctor was needed for. Or an office visit, for that matter. All she did was ask me some questions that we in the law business like to call CYA. Because lawyers are both painfully unhip and overconfident of their own importance, I'm willing to bet that it doesn't take a law degree to know that CYA means Cover Your Ass and that the waste of three hours of my day was nothing more than a requirement of the insurance companies. Maybe they imagined that if allowed to, say, answer a few questions over the phone, I would lie about not smoking and they therefore needed me within sniffing distance of the person doing the asking. And maybe -- I don't know, I don't have medical training -- but maybe doctors are better able to smell the lingering odor of tobacco on a lying surgery-patient's clothing than, say, a nurse who wouldn't have arrived late from the hospital and hence have a backlog of patients. We live in North Carolina, where people smoke, so this is entirely possible.

At any rate, by the time I got The Boy home his eyes were glazed, his mouth hung down in the corners like an upside-down slice of mandarin orange, and he had a cough that hurt to hear. His temperature 20 minutes after a dose of our savior the Motrin was 104.

This merited a call to the doctor's office. Which, of course, was closing. The doctor told me to bring him in to the Saturday sick clinic in the morning and go to the hospital if anything at all changed in the middle of the night.

These are words that can make a mother already freaked out and frustrated about impending invasive surgery cry.

"I think he has pneumonia," I sobbed to Hubby. "And we're going to have to go to the emergency room."

"I think he's just fine," Hubby said in that way of his that treads the line between soothing and dismissive. He might have even smirked just a little bit at the doctor's the next morning when their thermometer suggested that That Boy was, in fact, Just Fine. (Okay, that was for effect. Hubby would never smirk at me in a doctor's office with our sick boy. In fact, he is not a smirker at all. But, in these circumstances, he could have been.)

Ah, but there is a reason we see doctors instead of merely thermometers. Doctors can do things like look into ears and announce that The Boy has a nasty ear infection. They can validate mothers by saying that The Boy's cough does sound bad, even if they can hear nothing in his lungs. And they can prescribe cherry-flavored antibiotics with just the right amount of apologia for giving him antibiotics to make you feel like a good parent who wouldn't resort to antibiotics if it weren't really, really necessary.

And so we spent a weekend fever-free. The Boy continued to sleep with me, and Hubby continued to sleep on the daybed in the office. In all honesty, he probably preferred it that way, as I spent much of my time shuffling through the house moaning about not wanting surgery. It gets to be a drag after a while, I know.

By Monday morning, we were discussing why we should still take our on-the-mend boy to the doctor because, even though the antibiotics seemed to be working, that cough was worrisome.

"Remember she said it sounded like pneumonia," I said as I wiped The Boy's bare bottom and grabbed a clean diaper. He laughed and wiggled his legs.

"What's that?" Hubby demanded. By "that" he meant a sugar-coating of red spots all over The Boy's chest and back.

As is apparent by now, we are not fans of medical intervention. So, naturally, we blamed the antibiotics.

Off we went to the doctor's office. She examined him, growing more speckled by the minute. She quizzed me on what medications we'd given him -- none since a bedtime dose of Motrin the night before. She listened to his lungs. She spoke to him instead of me, perhaps to remind me that I was holding my baby and not to do anything sudden or violent.

"You're going to have to get a chest x-ray, buddy," she said.

There are any number of good reasons the radiology technicians might prefer to have the father stand in the room wearing a metal apron and holding the baby's arms over his head as he is fitted into a plastic sheath and made to sit still and scream while his chest is x-rayed. It could be because fathers tend to be taller. Or stronger. They are definitely, one hundred percent certainly not pregnant. And -- and I think this is the deciding factor -- they are less likely to grab their screaming baby and flee from the room.

Back we went to the pediatrician's office. It was a long wait, but at least Hubby and I could take turns watching the DVD of Spiderman playing on the flat screen t.v. Until he had to go back to work and I got to hear the news that, yes, The Boy had viral pneumonia, and a bad case of it at that. He got two shots of antibiotics -- my friend at this point, I will never deride them again -- and nestled blearily into my lap while we waited half an hour longer to make sure he didn't have an adverse reaction to the antibiotics -- in which case I wouldn't have such good things to say about modern medicine.

When we settled back in the waiting room I was disappointed to discover that Spiderman had started over again, subjecting me to exactly the same scenes I had already watched. Finally, a mother complained that her three-year-old girl might be, say, frightened by such fare in the doctor's office, and they put in The Incredibles instead.

When I got home and crawled into bed with The Boy, Hubby suggested that at least this day had taken my mind off the surgery scheduled for the morrow.

"No," I assured him. "It just made me more miserable."

How miserable? Consider the odds that your child will be diagnosed with pneumonia the day before you are scheduled for surgery you would cut off your right arm to avoid. Add to this the unlikelihood that the appointment time the pediatrician has available to check on his progress is the very hour you are under edict to appear at the hospital for surgery prep. Make it even more special -- the day of The Boy's diagnosis, the day before your scheduled surgery, is Martin Luther King Day and your doctor's office is closed so you can't call the surgery scheduler and re-schedule.

It was touch and go Tuesday morning whether Hubby would successfully talk me into going through with the surgery. It must have been the combination of the surgery scheduler still not picking up her phone and The Boy's rash fading that found me entering out-patient admissions alone.

I mumbled to everyone I saw that my husband would be coming and must be allowed to come find me. They promised he would as they stripped my clothes, made me sit on a gurney, and tried four times to get an IV going without "blowing a vein." In case you were wondering, it is not fun to be fitted with an IV four times while your veins blow. Especially when you are grudgingly willing to even sit in the room, waiting for your husband to call to tell you the baby is fine and envisioning how you will rip the painfully inserted IV out of your arm and walk to the pediatrician's office if you find out that he is, say, having another chest x-ray.

Finally, Hubby called as I stubbornly sat up on the gurney, refusing to be a lazy body remaining inert for convenience's sake.

"He's doing much better," he assured me. "She's going to give him a breathing treatment to open up his lungs. I'm going to be here another half an hour."

"You probably won't make it here before my surgery," someone mumbled in a deep, toneless, I'm-not-really-here-but-sitting-on-a-beach-in-Hawaii voice.

"Probably not," Hubby admitted. "I love you."

I cried. Until the orderly came to transport me to the pre-op room in a wheelchair and I bitched at her about hating being wheeled around in a wheelchair because it makes me feel less human. She was kind of confused by me and unfortunately had no choice but to make my transport even more humiliating by loading me down with the white plastic shopping bags of my belongings that, by all rights, Hubby should have been holding.

It's only fair to say that everyone was really nice to me. In the case of the pre-op nurse, maybe a little too nice, as I promised her I didn't care whether the plastic glasses case we used was blue or purple. "Oh, the blue matches your eyes," she simpered. I wondered it she had ever had any luck at all making a single grown person about to undergo surgery smile.

Security came and took my things, the doctor had an honest and respectful talk with me, the anesthesiology nurse offered me something for my nerves which I heartily refused, and pretty soon after that it was over.

Plainly those drugs they gave me were good, because I woke up apologizing for my rotten mood and even smiled at the nurse in the recovery room.

It wasn't until a couple hours after I'd been home, when I'd lulled Hubby into thinking it was all over and my insanity had subsided and I was competent to take care of my child that the drugs wore off. "I'm depressed," I announced and dragged myself into the office to sleep on the daybed.

The Boy and I are both on the mend -- his cough subsides as my depression does. But the flurries outside my window don't bode well for our futures. Hubby must agree, as he recently purchased a light machine designed to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Personally, I think living somewhere where winter doesn't exist would be a better solution. But since everything else about Asheville is pretty okay, I'm willing to give the SAD machine a try.