Day 181: CPAP Supplies

I almost wrote that today had been a no-spend day. After all, due to The Husband’s sweet gen­eros­ity, I didn’t leave the house all day. I cleaned and orga­nized and unpacked and washed, dried, and put away laun­dry all day while he took care of get­ting The Daugh­ter to and from school and The Son to and from his classes.

So, since I never even left the house, I almost for­got that I man­aged to spend a boat-load of money today.

But thanks to the those instru­ments of tech­nol­ogy — the tele­phone and the credit card — I man­aged to spend over $200.00 on med­ical sup­plies from Apria.

My CPAP mask des­per­ately needs to be replaced. I mean des­per­ately. I’d been wait­ing to hear from Apria (the med­ical equip­ment com­pany) yes­ter­day but I was away when they called and didn’t get home until after office hours. So I called back first thing this morning.

I learned a lot of bad news. First, none of the local stores/centers had the mask in stock so it had to be shipped. They offered to ship it overnight (they pay ship­ping, not me) and appar­ently there is rea­son to hope that I’ll receive the ship­ment tomor­row (Sat­ur­day) and not have to wait until Mon­day. The other piece of bad news was that I haven’t met my $500 deductible yet so I had to pay 100% out of pocket for this order. How can a stu­pid lit­tle piece of plas­tic cost $200!? Man, I want a piece of that racket!

Any­way, I don’t remem­ber the exact charge to my credit card but it was some­where over $200 but less than $225. That cov­ers a new Clas­sic Com­fort mask, new tub­ing, and new fil­ters. And it rep­re­sents over $200 applied toward this year’s deductible.

With any luck, I’ll be look­ing and sound­ing like Franken­stein again when I got to bed tomor­row night. As much as I hate the thought of spend­ing that much money on a stu­pid piece of plas­tic, I have to admit I’m com­pletely lost with­out my CPAP machine. When things are work­ing as they should, it’s easy to for­get how much my health and well-being depend on the proper func­tion­ing of that box that sits on my bed­side table. The events of this past week have once again reminded me of sleep-deprivation hell that my pre-Apnea diag­no­sis and my pre-CPAP life had decended into.

~ ~ ~ o o o O O O o o o ~ ~ ~

As much as I’ve learned to never let my CPAP sup­plies sit­u­a­tion get this crit­i­cal again, I think I need to invest some time and energy into look­ing at alter­na­tive sources for those sup­plies. In look­ing on the Inter­net tonight, I’m begin­ning to fear that I really got hosed on the price of my sup­plies. Now that the machine is mine, I believe that I’m free to pur­chase sup­plies from any source I choose and I don’t have to stick with the out­fit that my old insur­ance com­pany referred me to. This sub­ject war­rants some fur­ther research and investigation.

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