Yesterday C introduced me to what she called "poor people insurance care". I got to see first hand what life is like when you're on state or low income insurance. My friends, it was not pretty. We left the house at 9:40 and didn't get back home until almost 2pm. It started with her having to call multiple places to find an ortho who would take her insurance. The closest one was 30 minutes away. She was told to get there before 11am or she wouldn't get seen. No actual appointment, just get there before 11. Um, okay? We get there at 10:16 thanks to construction and traffic. I get her inside and what a varied slice of life I saw. We finally get back after 12. The doctor while kind was clearly in a rush. They made her take more x-rays which was good. I saw the actual break. It's minor luckily. Minor enough that the doctor decided she should just have a short boot. Wait? A short boot? But the break is up much higher? This is what I am thinking in my head. But not my injury, and I kept my reservations to myself. Turns out I was right but more on that in a second. They went to get her a boot but said "oops, thanks to your insurance we can't give you the boot directly. You have to go to this completely other place to get the boot". Gee, thanks. Before we left I apparently committed a faux pas by asking if they could give her anything for the pain. I wasn't asking for anything specific. C later told me if you do that at these lower income kind of places you get flagged as a drug seeker. I was like wtf? I just wanted you to have something. They did in fact write a scrip. They said they would do prescription Tylenol or Motrin. Okay, that's fine for me. They would only send it direct to the pharmacy. Um okay, also fine? This is but one of many things I noticed different between my medical experiences and C's. First off, my PCP would have done the x-rays, the boot, and everything in one place with an actual appointment. Second, the quality, layout, and general vibe of my doctor's office is very different. VERY different. There would be no running, screaming children. There would be no 900 year old mentally unstable people in wheelchairs. There would be no large groups of families all shouting in different languages. No. My doctor's office has video games and hypoallergenic cats and quiet private rooms. Had I asked for pain meds at my doctor, I would have received Vicodin or hydrocodone without any hassle or fuss. Not poor C. We then went to our next stop where we had to wait, again. This time with an ortho boot specialist at a place that does this kind of stuff, CPAPs, wheelchairs, etc. We wait more. Go back eventually and the dude looks over the order, asks C where the pain is, and declares why the hell did they offer you a short boot?? No, long boot is what you're leaving in! See, I was right. He boots her up, has her take some tentative steps. While all that is going on, I order her one of those iWalk things that I used when I had my Achilles injury. Fuck crutches. I also had it ordered rush. It almost beat us home. Thanks to more traffic and construction, it took us another 50 minutes to get home. I get her settled in and oh look, the package arrives. I then spend the next hour getting that ready for her. I then order us sushi for dinner because she had a fucked up day and deserved it. 6:30 her prescription is finally ready. I go to pick it up for her and they've given her prescription fucking ibuprofen. What the hell?? Okay whatever. Go home, get a pill in her, and try to make her comfortable. From there we played diablo until about 11:30. Took us until midnight to get into bed because she is moving slow but here we are. 4-5 weeks in this boot, less possibly. She can start putting test weight on it in about a week.
As for me, I had a good session with my therapist before all this happened. We had a good talk about how I get frustrated that B is going to Hawaii with A but wouldn't go for me. My therapist did put some of the blame for things like that on me. I enabled. The difference between me and A is that A is autistic enough to say "I'm going to Hawaii for my cousin's wedding, you can go if you want" and stick to that. Not out of malice but because that's what she does. I on the other hand would always say, fine, we don't have to go and miss out. This is where much of my resentment started. In having to compromise on things I wanted in order to appease them. But yes, that did make me a bit of an enabler. Had I held my boundaries, would things have been different? Unknown and irrelevant because now I have a partner with whom I can have those kind of boundaries. We both agreed that this is probably the healthies relationship I've ever had for reasons like this.
Going to set up the pool today. Then, soak my ass.
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