Year: 2006

Holly’s home. She’s doing so much better but isn’t 100% yet. If i had to pin it down, i’d say she’s about 66.2%, give or take about 1.3% or so. Roughly.

We had a tough time today. Since my blood pressure is somewhat high, i’m just going to cut open an artery and let it vent for a little bit and hope that you, good reader(s), don’t mind too much. Maybe you can even empathize.

2 pm: I get to the hospital about ten minutes after they told her she’d be released. Maybe an hour later, i’d stepped outside for a cigarette. When i got back, there were suddenly about 6 or 7 whitecoats standing around her bed, brandishing clipboards menacingly. I’d missed most of the sermon, so i’m of little help now and have to do a lot of reading. Their leader advised her that they’d need to get a quick blood sample from her before she left so they’d be ready for her appointment on Monday. The throng exited as one shortly thereafter.

Another hour and a half passed before a nurse came in and said that they already had blood from earlier that day that they would use and that we hadn’t needed to be waiting all that time. The lab rats (probably Umbrella Corporation sleeper agents), from their cavernous, heavily fortified underground lair deep beneath the hospital, never called the nurse to inform her of this fact. Being the messenger (and thereby the bearer of bad news), we shot her dead on the spot and ran out of there as fast as our little legs could carry us.

We got to the pharmacy a short time later. I was starving, but i acquiesced to Holly’s unreasonable demand for insulin. She is, after all, a diabetic, i suppose. Here’s what happened at the pharmacy:

First (to back up just a tad in order to give some indication of the trouble that was to follow soon enough), we found that the hospital had greedily stolen her temporary insurance card. I’d noticed most of the staff eyeing it covetingly, then glancing at us with great contempt, finally turning back to stare, drooling, at her little 2×3 piece of the American Health Care Industry Pie. Each of them followed the exact same pattern and had the same hungry, insurance-card-addled look in their hollow little eye sockets. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Now that i know for sure that there are indeed addicts working there, you bet your ass i’m going to report it to the FBI.

Needless to say, we got to the pharmacy, dropped off the prescription, and then had to trek back to the apartment to print another insurance card. The printer, obviously, jammed on us, leaving us with a crooked, besmudged piece of crap that no pharmacist, in their right mind or not, would (or indeed should) have taken. Luckily, the pharmicists were all definitely drug addicts and definitely not of the correct mental state required to do their job within the boundaries of good sense, as evidenced by this next bit, and by the fact that they were all shaking and jerking violently, and babbling in some foreign moon-speak among themselves.

Then… the idiot girl taking the prescription couldn’t spare the mental resources to navigate the tricky, tricky phone prompts while calling Holly’s new insurer. Since she couldn’t verify the coverage, she simply handed the card back to us and advised us of her incompetent state, albeit more vaguely than that, and not in so many words. She also made a big damn deal about not knowing what brand of lancets the doctor had prescribed, telling us as much as that she was entirely without the power to ask us if we knew what brand monitor we, obviously, already had. We showed them the monitor and explained that that wasn’t a big problem, but that we needed to get test strips and couldn’t find any; so being that Holly’s a newly diagnosed diabetic and since they must have them behind the counter, would they please give us more information? Not hearing this, they continued bickering about the godforsaken lancets.

Holly called the insurance “people” [citation needed] and straightened everything out, telling the pharmacist that she has to be reimbursed and that her coverage is only for $100 a year anyway. I wish like hell that the previous sentence was just some kooky hyperbole, but it’s not. Holly plunked down $160 and we were on our way to grab some quick dinner and head the hell home.

Except that we didn’t get the test strips. The god damn test strips that every diabetic from Moses to B.B. King must have to keep an eye on their blood sugar level. The things that keep a diabetic away from the brink of danger. The things we already made a big deal about, while they were busy making a big deal about jack shit.

We got the test strips. $95 for 100 of ’em. It wasn’t pretty, but we got them all right. Don’t tell Homeland Security you read anything here about the, uh, incident that happened at the Walgreens in Bellbrook, ok?