I received a survey from IU Health concerning my recent stay at University Hospital. They are soliciting my opinions and observations of my experience, which I should not have trouble sharing--what was good there was excellent. Their nursing staff was incredible, the doctors I encountered were great (mostly the team attending to me, though), my ICU room was off the hook excellent...my progressive care room was, I thought, likely to give me herpes... but that was the discordance in an otherwise good feeling I have of what happened to me.
I haven't filled the survey out because a few days ago, I received a bill from the hospital for $230,000+ of which I owe $109.00. Frankly, I'm so happy about that amount, it would be hard to be critical even of my progressive care room which I thought had enough tire tracks in it to function as a ghetto alley.
The very first day they confirmed to me that I had cancer and that I would have to have this surgery, I cried. I walked out of the doctor's office at University Hospital and made it as far as the atrium of the cancer center and I just started crying. I was shocked, but to some degree I had begun to wonder how this horror in my mouth couldn't be cancer. I was surprised because I felt so betrayed by everyone else who had misdiagnosed me. I was angry because some along the way had assured me I could do this solely with chemo and radiation and the experts--well it was left up to them to tell me I'd have to be cut apart in ways I feared.
But I cried in that beautiful atrium because I feared bankruptcy. And throughout this ordeal hanging over me has been the threat of huge, unpayable bills, the type most unavoidable because avoiding them would mean dying in excrutiating pain. I could see that I would never get to travel again, or go out for a dinner--I would be chained to flipping every coin I had into the gaping maw of healthcare because my fucking tongue was a piece of shit tumor.
I allot myself five minutes and then I get over it. I get up, I walk, I express, I do what I have to do but it's done. The hissy fit and the girly tears are no more. And so it was, walking to the Vermont Street Garage, a man with a bullseye, a mouth torn up by cancer, a checking account about to experience date rape on a scale it could never imagine.
Charles, Scott, other people--they all tried to tell me that it would be fine--that my plan had out of pocket yearly limits, and that would protect me. I figured they would finagle around those rules, squeeze and slither through the fine print to take more and more from me.
So far, I'm wrong. I'm being treated, I'm getting better, and yeah, I'm poorer than I was but I'm alive, I'll work again someday, talk and eat in a semi-normal manner. I'm already interested in things that guys like to do...but of that, I won't say a whole lot more. Let's leave it at the fact I was surprised to find out how quickly some interests return.
Tomorrow, after I write that check, I'll tell them they have incredible nurses, and they do. I'll let them know I appreciate the doctors' and their expertise, and how I believe they contributed to my well-being. I might mention that a rehab of the progressive care unit and a hose down with a tanker of bleach wouldn't hurt, but I'm going to say it nicely.
In a week's time, all of us, working together, got me out of that hospital on my way to the next rehab, the next mile marker. It felt easy, but it never felt cheap. And it wasn't, but the best usually isn't. And trust me, I got something quite like the best out of them.
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