A Spork in the Road

Right after I finished chemo, I received a card with the following text from the inimitable Jeff Dow, who sent me a card every week while I was in treatment and thus, although he lives a dozen blocks from my house, was my most faithful correspondent during the six months of chemo. The card accompanied a lovely tome called The Elegance of the Hedgehog (L’elegance du herisson) by Muriel Barbery.

I reproduce his note here in its entirety, with his kind permission.

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I could not allow the occasion of your last chemo to slip by unobserved. So please accept my small offering of the written word. Hedgehogs, in my estimation, are underestimated, Sonic notwithstanding.

However, don’t make me send any more cards. No backsliding. You’re healthy, stay that way. No more heading down that slippery slope. Not a good place to go. You’ll break Lil’s heart. She won’t be able to handle it. She’ll crack. She’ll sell the house, buy a green 1968 VW Bus and drive north – first to New Orleans where she’ll discover that the Desire streetcar hasn’t run for years. Then she’ll drive to Tucson where she’ll start a commune of retired investment bankers. They’ll live in the Sonoran Desert for eight years, but will end badly when one of the bankers – a New Hampshire native named Sharon – steals her Pez dispenser shaped like Jean-Luc Picard. She’ll drive north to Denver where she’ll become a cat lady even though she secretly hates cats. She’ll start freebasing Little Friskies, and when she tries to buy a kilo of catnip from a less than trustworthy Siamese by the name of Ling Tso she’ll be arrested. The prosecutor will want three years, but her court-appointed attorney will bargain it down to six months rehab plus time served. But in rehab she’ll meet a Canadian emigre named Martina who will convince her to steal a 1976 red Camaro and drive to Montana where they disappear. The police find the car outside Gorman’s Diner in Butte.

So don’t go there.

Jeff

Dear Faceless United Healthcare “Golden Rule” Bureaucrat:

Of course I mean “faceless” metaphorically. I’m sure you have a face. At least I hope you do. If you don’t, you have my full sympathy, and I hope you have health insurance and that your facelessness was not ruled a pre-existing condition.

I mean, how much would it suck if you got health insurance and then your provider found out from a check-out boy that once when you were at the grocery store an herbalist told you your face was looking a little saggy and you might want to have it checked if it didn’t firm up, and then one day your face fell off, and now you don’t have a face OR health insurance?

I certainly hope that’s not what happened to you.

What I do hope is that you, or someone you work with, will review my case and say to yourself (and then to me), “Wow. This girl had lymphoma, which is a famously sneaky cancer, and let’s all be honest, there’s really no way she could have known what was going on in advance. Let’s be reasonable and find a way to get her coverage back intact, because you know and I know that the state of health care in this country really is ridiculous.”

That’s what I hope.

Hope springs eternal, right?

Sincerely,
Beth Adele Long

Let’s talk about legality.

So I’m still investigating the details of this matter, but let’s look at how things are laid out right now.

Because I went to a massage therapist off and on last year… and because the massage therapist mentioned I might want to see my doctor if the swelling by my collarbone didn’t go down… and because the swelling DID go down and I figured that was that…

My health insurance company dropped me entirely when I needed insurance the most.

Is this legal? Possibly.

But then, depending on whom you ask and how you ask it, so was walling prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. (”Walling,” in case you’re not in the know with government torture terminology, is what officials in the Bush administration called the procedure of ramming a prisoner’s head into a wall during interrogation. It earned at least one ranking Guantanamo Bay officer a commendation after he cracked a prisoner’s jaw open and documented the results with photographs.)

Ironically, if I had been less attentive to my health over the past couple of years — if I had not bothered with yoga classes or massage therapists or the like — I might be in a different situation with insurance. Of course, everyone is telling me that health insurance companies do whatever they can to deny coverage, so I suppose none of this should have come as any surprise.

No matter how things pan out with my personal crusade against United Healthcare’s “Golden Rule” (cue hollow laughter), I want people to look at the mess that is our healthcare system and stop accepting the appalling state of affairs.

I thank all that is holy and good in the universe that this nation elected a man who would look at torture and condemn it as corrosive to the character of the country.

I have high hopes that the torture chamber that is our health care system will be similarly overhauled.

Last year I signed up for health insurance.

I had just turned thirty, and mortality was on my mind. I had never had any health problems, I come from a healthy family, and I had figured it was just easier to run under the radar. When I turned thirty, I thought it was time to get some emergency health insurance, “just in case.”

Overwhelmed by the labyrinth of healthcare options, and intimidated by horror stories of evil insurance companies, I started to sign up for a plan on eHealthInsurance. I got partway through the application and stopped. A company representative called me; I started again. I stopped again. He kept calling. He suggested United Health Care’s “Golden Rule” plan; it had a high deductible, but a lower monthly payment, and our family doctor accepted it.

Fine.

I finally got everything set up and — voila! — I was covered. Whew! What a hassles, but worth it. I scheduled a physical for the end of September, when I was home from Italy and the insurance coverage had kicked in to cover the visit.

Then I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s.

Everyone told me how lucky I was that I’d gotten health insurance before discovering this. I was dazed with relief. A quarter of a million dollars in six months, on top of lost wages, would’ve been overwhelming if I weren’t insured.

Then the insurance company launched a “routine investigation” into my case. The investigation continued. Finally, months after my diagnosis, when chemo was starting to kick my butt and I was not at my brightest, alertest, or strongest, I got a letter.

“Golden Rule” was ruling my cancer a “pre-existing condition,” and moreover if they knew that I’d gone to a massage therapist for back tension over the previous year, they’d never have covered me in the first place. So they were dropping me. I was free to contact them if I had questions.

Really?

REALLY?

For a while this blow paralyzed me. But you know what? There’s a fabulous story about a kid named David who went up against a giant he wasn’t supposed to be able to beat. Within minutes, he was lofting Goliath’s gory head by its hair.

I know which character I plan to be.

I abhor the colloquial use of “literally” as an intensifier.

“She literally took forever to answer my question.”
“He was literally foaming at the mouth.”
“I was literally burning up.”

I’m all in favor of colloquial speech. I think casual grammatical structures are a natural consequence of how the brain operates in conversation, and I don’t expect myself or anyone else to preserve elegant syntax when chatting at the water cooler.

But must we really abuse the word “literally,” a gentle word that has done no violence to us or our loved ones? Can we not restore it to its natural meaning, rather than yoking it to wild metaphors that are in no way meant literally?

Please, be conscious of your use of this lovely word. Use it advisedly. Or I will hunt you down and make you suffer.

Literally.