Part 2 |
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Day 3: Saturday. I don't go to work. I spend the day playing phone-tag with my HMO, the car insurance, a directory and my husband for moral support. There are no doctors within the two nearest counties; I find this impossible to believe and, as it turns out, they exaggerated. (Of course there are doctors in your area! The last operator must've been mistaken. Ha ha! >snarl<) I am shaky, irritable and so so tired. It prompts a desperate move I don't encourage: I find the painkillers for my previous back injury, take one tablet and have my first full-night's sleep in days. 
Day 4: Still nothing from the HMO all day; finally, I call and get the answering service. I inform the secretary that I want to leave a message. She says she can't do that. I'm confused; isn't that what a message service does? She says she takes emergency messages for the company. I say I've been in a car accident (never mind how long ago it was) and I think that might qualify as an emergency! She advises to call back during normal business hours. I hang up on her. Why does my money pay for a message service who won't take messages?!? I file that one away for future complaint in one hell of a letter once I can type! Day 5: I called the HMO first thing in the morning. I finally have an appointment with an orthopedic doctor...tomorrow. It's been four days (four days?!?), but I'll deal. However, they do need one, tiny thing: the X-rays. The ones from the hospital. In the city. 45 minutes away. I burst into tears (more as a release of frustration than anything else). I explained that while I understood the doctor needed them, I can't get them. Can't he take new ones? No. [Insert quick call to the HMO.] Well yes, but they're useless without the originals and I can't have an appointment without them. My husband works until late [where late = around 10 p.m. average] but he volunteered to pick them up after work...however, my presumption that a hospital is open 24 hours is only true of the ER. Jon takes over the phone at this point and asked if they could possibly leave the X-rays and a release form in the ER for him to pick up? No, they couldn't possibly do that. Why not? "Regulations." It occured to me that people have stopped being people and are now just mindless drones to The System. Thus, going outside The System is my only course. Jon went off to work muttering that we may be able to go to the hospital, pick up the X-rays and be back in time for my morning appointment... I nodded, gave him a kiss and headed for the phone. Friends: the willing allies! I am not afraid to ask for help and thankfully, I know people who aren't afraid to be helpful! Thanks to our friends, I managed to get the care I needed. Not, of course, from the health professionals (I dare not tell you my HMO's name; the irony would kill you), but from my karate teacher who picked up the X-rays before he went to work, from my classmate who was willing to go get them although a visiting teen student made it unnecessary: she volunteered to drop them off at Jon's workplace, which was near her home, and he brought them home to me. If not for these people's willingness to be extraordinary, I may have missed my doctor's appointment by several more days! (Thank you thank you thank you! to all those who know who they are and Shame Shame Shame! to all the health care industry workers -- see what real dedication can do?) |
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Day 6: I am very appreciative to the nice doctor who examined my arm and said while the hospital's X-rays are very well done, they don't show the break he suspected was there. He scheduled a bone scan. I acquiesced. He began filling out the paperwork when he threw another mid-form-filling curve ball reminiscent of my religion-of-preference query. 
"Are you pregnant?" This simple explanation brought up a few key points for me: 1) As a recently-married lady, I have considered the possibility of a family being moderately important to me right now, sort of like breathing air; 2) As a person not entirely ignorant of radiation and its effects on the unborn, I believe I'd like a little more information than just this flippant how-de-do; and 3) I hate needles. I mean, as in "boom=faint" hate needles. The result of this was another rather quiet nervous breakdown as I called friends, family, doctors and scour the Internet to find out more about this procedure... what I found made my head swoon with words like "percent failure to heal", "bone grafts taken from the hip" and "reinforcing screws". There was nothing anyone could tell me about the injection's effects on eggs or ovaries. (My GYN helpfully explained that he wasn't an OB/GYN and whatever my orthopedics person said must be fine. Thanks, asshole.) I slept amongst uneasy tears. Day 9: (Notice the skip? I had to work!) Silly, silly me for my fears... the radiologist assured me the half-life of the radiation is about six hours and that the doctor must've been totally over-compensating to be safe. Gee, I'd've loved to have known that yesterday! Who needs a good night's sleep? The three-hour procedure was done calmly, efficiently and with casual good humor; it was perhaps the best medical care I have ever experienced. (Thanks, ladies!) My arms showed up on the screen like star charts, the dense constellation of white specks blazed furiously at the wrist below my thumb, just where the doctor supposed it would. It was fractured and I'd be wearing the cast for months. At least I'll finally get some medical care. |
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Day 12: (Skip = Weekend) My sky blue cast clashes with everything, the weight is awkward and the pain is dulled but recently accompanied by itching. But whyever should I complain? American medicine is said to be the best in the world! (...I'm sure seconded only by their insurance agencies, lawyers and boiler-repairmen)...but that's another story for another time. 
The Demon Car is gone! Laugh as you may, I was singing this while bouncing around in my pigtails just as soon as the buyer was driving down the road with his new purchase, his banker's check lying quietly on my kitchen counter. Bye-bye! Bye-bye now! Tee-hee-hee...! Perhaps you are unfamiliar with my many misadventures with my Demon Car; the thefts, the break-ins, surprisingly broken this-and-thats, freak attacks of invisible used-car gremlins and other sundry assaults with deadly objects on the road? Well, if so, then read up on them in past exploits or take my word for it that "Bad Car-ma" was the name of the game and leave it at that. After the last jarring blow resulting in minor damage to my car, minor damage to me and a minor litigation suit on the way, I decided enough was enough: the car was going. I didn't care if it was $1000 on trade-in, I was not going to drive that car any more to give it another chance to kill me. First blood had been drawn and I was throwing in the towel and any other clichés that might have fit too. Ironically, I was having the damnedest time getting a certain used-car dealership to call me back and sell me a used car (a problem I have never before heard ANYONE having) and I decided to forgo trading after weeks of one-way phone-tag and just put an ad out in the paper when, as luck would have it, a potential buyer saw my car, took it for a spin and said he'd buy it. (?!?) I found a suitable used car through my in-laws in New York and only needed to schedule a visit and a banker's check to make the sale. It looked like a done deal all to be wrapped up neatly in the same weekend. Oh, so little I have learned... So, to set the scene: I am in a cast, a rented a car once I was able to do (some) work, the involved skid-ee's car insurance wasn't accepting fault (or damages or medical or rental etc.) and I was keen to get rid of my car ASAP. Right-o! I figured the buyer could come by on Friday, buy my car, and I'd be free to go into New York on Saturday, buy my car, and drive it back Sunday. Simple as pie (which already made me suspicious). First order of business: secure the sell. I was very honest with the young man who wanted to buy my car; I showed him all the paperwork, what had been done and redone, what adventures it had survived and what was still wanting. His answer? "I like to work with cars." O-O-Okay! Enjoy. |
He named a price, I asked for $500 more, sold. He'd be by Friday. Yay! I now began my real adventure: how to get the new car home from New York. I called the dealer who turned out to be an 80-year-old gentleman, John, with kindly disposition and hard-of-hearing. He handed the phone over to his wife, Ann, a lovely-sounding woman who unfortunately didn't know a lot of the details of the sale and referred me to their son, John. [You can hear the drum-roll from here, can't you?] Many calls between John, John Jr. and Jon made my head a little swimmy in the days to come, but the bottom line was that all three were willing to help me get this car any way we knew how...the trouble was doing it legally. For while I was willing to buy and John(s) were willing to sell, our states of residence had different laws about how you go about transferring a car across state lines. It boiled down to this: I needed two things, temporary plates and insurance coverage for the ride home. Not too tough, unless you are dealing with the System (i.e. Idiots). I called my insurance to inform them that the old car would be sold and the new car would have to be covered. No problem; once the Bill Of Sale is signed, the old car isn't covered. Cool. The new car can be covered once it's been registered. Oh, okay. I call the DMV, wait the prerequisite half-life of uranium on 'hold', then get my first hit: You can't register the car until it goes through the emissions test. (To get emissions clearance I'd obviously have to have the car already in this state.) But how do I get it here? Call your insurance agent. I call. No, they are quite adamant that they won't cover it. The dealer can put it on his insurance. I call the dealer. The dealer laughs. Um...no, he doesn't do that. He'll talk to the insurers. Three minutes later I have my insurance agent on one line saying my dealer must be a fraud and my dealer on the other line saying the agent is a !@#$%^&* telling him how to run his business and I am at the office pretending I actually work here. I call my father. How does this work? He's not sure about how they do things Out East, but at home, you can have one pass-through on the old insurance card in order to get it to the DMV for registration. I call the DMV. "Department of Motor Vehicles, can I help you?" |
I call the insurance company, not the agent, nearly after-hours. "[Name Of My Insurance], can I help you?" After intermittent waits and small check-ins to see if I'm still holding, totalling nearly 30 minutes of long-distance charges, I am given this startling reply: "You know, I have no idea how people do this. Sorry." I am stunned. So much for this weekend. Although Ann, John Jr. (called "Jay-Jay" I find out later in a confusing mix-up of phone messages at work) and Jon call me in a barrage of helpful attempts to secure New York temp plates, via faxed copies of my license, letters of persuasion and check-in calls with alternative ideas, there is no way we can actually do this by the weekend. Okay, maybe next weekend... Ironically, the buyer never shows up (or calls) about my car. Groaning that I might have somehow jinxed the deal, several phone messages are finally answered with an agreement that he'll come by and buy the car next Friday and we'll try this again. I now have a week of time to play with. Both my fathers volunteer to have it go on their "I'll take care of it." And she did, and it was, and my insurance card appeared in my hand as if by magic (once Ann sent me all the paperwork with just my word that I was really coming to New York and paying the price we agreed upon over the phone). Ah, if women ran the world! [Thanks Tammy! Thanks Ann!] Life was falling into place. I called Jon (my Jon). Wonderful! We'd go out Saturday night to celebrate in a revel with friends, leave and sleep over at his folks' house on the Island, buy the car in the morning then go see "Les Misèrables" [my favorite production and Jon's treat to me] which was playing in the city and then hop into Little Italy for dinner before the ride home. Sounds exciting, doesn't it? |
