S-P-L-U-R-G-E!

Today I splurged.  Today I spent.

Today I watched Pres­i­dent Obama address the Con­gress about health care — after spend­ing $925.00 on health care for my family.

Shall I start at the beginning?

I’d for­got­ten that I had a den­tist appoint­ment today.  Luck­ily the office gave me a reminder phone call which I didn’t retrieve from our voice mail until about 11pm last night but that’s my fault.  So this morn­ing, because it was Wednes­day and I don’t have a car on Wednes­day, The Hus­band came by and took me to the dentist’s office.  I was there because I need a crown.  My sec­ond crown this year.  On top of that, I had my first two root canals done this sum­mer, one just two weeks after the other.  Can we say b-u-m-m-e-r?

Turns out root canals aren’t the awful pro­ce­dures every­one makes them out to be.  No, what’s awful is the pain one endures in the days (or weeks, depend­ing on one’s deter­mi­na­tion to avoid the den­tist) lead­ing up to the deter­mi­na­tion that one needs a root canal.

That’s the phys­i­cal pain one suf­fers.  There’s another type of pain asso­ci­ated with a root canal — the finan­cial pain.  One crown and two root canals put me well over my $1,000 max­i­mum annual den­tal insur­ance pay­out.  So a por­tion of the sec­ond root canal had to be paid out-of-pocket.  And this entire sec­ond crown is out-of-pocket.  Sure, I could have tried to put it off until next cal­en­dar year but here’s the thing (actu­ally two things):

1. The tooth in ques­tion had a frac­ture and a few weeks ago I started expe­ri­enc­ing a good deal of dis­com­fort (read: pain) when I ate on that side of my mouth.  Since that’s where I just had two root canals, I will admit to being very jumpy about any pain there.  Another root canal?  An incom­plete root canal?  Will it hurt the way the other ones did?  Will I sur­vive a third round of pain on that scale in less than three months?  Do I want to?  Are all of my teeth going to fall prey to some mys­te­ri­ous spread­ing infec­tious dis­ease, like white domi­noes tum­bling one after another inside my mouth?
2. As of Sep­tem­ber 30 of this year, our cur­rent insur­ance pol­icy through my for­mer employer is kaput.  Done.  Gone.  We’re des­per­ately try­ing to secure health insur­ance for me and the kids but it’s look­ing pretty ugly at this point.  Even if we do man­age to find some­one who will insure me and The Son, after the insur­ance pre­mi­ums will we also be able to afford den­tal insur­ance?  Or will we have to self-insure our den­tal health mean­ing just pay for every­thing out-of-pocket, even pre­ven­ta­tive care?

So come 10 am this morn­ing, I was sit­ting in the dentist’s chair dis­cussing my fears and con­cerns.  The den­tist con­vinced me that the source of the pain was most likely that frac­ture and the best course of action was to pro­ceed with the crown prep.  This made a great deal of sense to me — more so that my tooth’s root some­how spon­ta­neously regen­er­at­ing like some super­nat­ural crea­ture com­ing back to haunt me with unbear­able pain.  He worked his magic and seated a tem­po­rary crown.  The office will fol­low up with me on Fri­day at which time it is hoped that the pain will have been alle­vi­ated and I’ll give them the go-ahead to send the moulds to the lab who will pre­pare the per­ma­nent crown.

[See I’m a bit panic-y about the prospect of hav­ing a per­ma­nent crown seated only to dis­cover that some­how the root canal didn’t take prop­erly and we have to drill through the new crown.  My first crown of the year is over the first root canal; that’s the tooth that seems to hurt.  But it’s right next to the sec­ond root canal/temporary crown tooth and it’s very, very dif­fi­cult to iso­late the pain and iden­tify exactly where it’s com­ing from.]

So, that was my morn­ing.  An hour and a half in the dentist’s chair and a $900 bill for the priv­i­lege.  No, I’m exag­ger­at­ing just a tad.  The bill was actu­ally $967 but that cov­ers the entire pro­ce­dure — what they did today plus the mak­ing of the per­ma­nent crown, plus seat­ing the crown, and any nec­es­sary follow-up work.  But the bill was pre­sented in whole today and by pay­ing in full I received a 7% dis­count which brought the total, put on a credit card that will net me another 1.5% cash back reward, to exactly $900.

~ ~ o o O o o ~ ~

Ah, but I was not yet done spend­ing money on health care.  The Daugh­ter needed to see her doc­tor.  She called me this week­end very upset.  Her period had just started.  Again.  For the third time in less than a month.  Each period lasted 5 to 6 days.  Then it would start again in less than a week.  She was in tears.  I could com­pletely emphathize.

In June she was diag­nosed as being hypothy­roid and put on a thy­roid replace­ment.  A low dose.  There was no way she was going to escape thy­roid prob­lems.  Every sin­gle per­son on both sides of our fam­ily has thy­roid prob­lems.  It was just a mat­ter of time.  And the time was this summer.

One of the more com­mon symp­toms of hypothy­roidism is heav­ier than nor­mal peri­ods and worse than nor­mal PMS.  I know this from expe­ri­ence.  The Daugh­ter has always suf­fered from PMS and her peri­ods had increased to once every three weeks.  Those symp­toms, and the fact that she sim­ply could not stay awake all day long, were the rea­sons I took her to see my endocrinologist.

But at almost the same time, she asked me to set up an appoint­ment with a physi­cian to dis­cuss birth con­trol pills.  [Yes, I was slightly taken aback, at first.  Then I real­ized how very lucky I was that she had asked.  After all, legally, she doesn’t need my per­mis­sion. ]  Her rea­sons for want­ing to go on birth con­trol was to help alle­vi­ate the PMS, to reg­u­late her peri­ods, and to help with her acne (which hon­estly is barely there but I remem­ber what those years are like).  Any­way, I rea­soned that at 17, she’s not more than a few years away from needed birth con­trol for a com­pletely dif­fer­ent rea­son (no, I’m not being naive, she really is not sex­u­ally active yet and doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to get there at this point).  And I’d much rather that she have found an effec­tive pill and that her body had time to adjust to it long before birth con­trol is nec­es­sary.  Or as the boy scouts say, be pre­pared.  This time next year she’ll be away at col­lege; this will be one less thing she’ll have to worry about on her own.

But the birth con­trol pills could also be the cul­prit in the period-every-other-week thing.  So yes­ter­day I was able to make her an appoint­ment to see a P.A. in the doctor’s office.  She came home from school, picked me up, we drove to the doctor’s office, I paid the co-pay fee, she talked to the P.A. (who appar­ently ordered a pre­scrip­tion for a dif­fer­ent med), and we drove home.  This was the first time she didn’t ask me to come into the exam room with her.  I was proud of her.  It was good, though I still can’t quite believe that I’m the mother of an 17-year-old-high-school-senior-preparing-to-go-off-to-college-birth-control-taking-independent-minded daugh­ter.  Wasn’t it just yes­ter­day that she was learn­ing to walk and talk­ing about how dog­gies say “woof, woof”?

So there went another $25.00 for the office visit co-pay.

After get­ting The Daugh­ter back home, I headed into town to pick up The Son.  I’d for­got­ten, how­ever, that I’d told him to walk to the cof­fee shop with his class­mates after school.  I wasn’t sure how long the doc­tor would take and I was afraid I’d be late pick­ing him up.  Hav­ing to wait around for a par­ent is prob­a­bly not any teen’s idea of fun but for my Aspie son it would have been akin to ask­ing him to put his hand in a wood chip­per.  Painful and unpro­duc­tive for every­one concerned.

The cof­fee shop was the per­fect solu­tion.  But as I said, I for­got so I got to the school just a few min­utes after class had been let out.  The only thing worse than being late would have been mak­ing him can­cel his plans to join his friends at the cof­fee shop.  So I thought I’d kill some time in the local bookstore.

It’s a mar­val­ous book store and it’s pretty rare for me to leave a book store with­out a pur­chase of some kind but today I was unin­spired.  And, frankly, bored.  So I left the book­store and, on a whim, entered the music store next door.  I usu­ally hate music stores.  They’re loud and the music is usu­ally some type of heavy-metal head-banging stuff that gives me an instant headache.  And all of the music is incred­i­bly expen­sive.  But this store was dif­fer­ent.  They were play­ing a beau­ti­ful piece of clas­si­cal music at just the right vol­ume — I could hear it but no one had to talk over it.  And the first row of CD’s I came to were all rea­son­ably priced used discs.

So I splurged.  I haven’t bought a CD in so long that I have no rec­ol­lec­tion of when it was or what I would have bought.  It’s been a really, really long time.  I had no inten­tion of buy­ing any­thing.  And I almost didn’t find any­thing I wanted to buy.  But then, boom, one right after the other I found two out-of-print discs that I couldn’t talk myself out of buying.

The first was David Bowie Changes­bowie.  As I said, it’s out of print and a phe­nom­e­nal album.  I knew that not only would I enjoy it, but so would The Son.  It was pricey:  $12.99.

The sec­ond, and my age is prob­a­bly really show­ing now, was Kate Bush, The Whole Story.  Like the David Bowie album, it’s out of print.  Not only that, but my favorite song from the album, Run­ning up that Hill, isn’t avail­able from any of the legit­i­mate down­load sources I know about.  I’ve checked.  Unlike Changes­bowie, the Kate Bush album isn’t chock full of songs I love.  But I do like a few well enough that I felt the album worth the $6.99 they were charg­ing.  Besides, I can sell it back.

The funny thing was, today being 09–09-09 and the day cho­sen to pre­mier the new Rock­band game, The Bea­t­les, this par­tic­u­lar music store had all of their sin­gle remas­tered Bea­t­les CDs on sale for $9.99 (new, not used).  There were peo­ple load­ing up with every sin­gle Bea­t­les CD on offer.  But pass­ing up that offer was easy.  Not that I’m not a Bea­t­les fan.  I’m nearly a devo­tee.  I wasn’t tempted by the sale because I already have nearly every Bea­t­les CD; well, the ones worth own­ing any­way — which is most of them but those that I don’t already own were not worth the $9.99 price tag, no mat­ter how deep the sale.  The only album I would have bought was the White Album but as it’s not a sin­gle, it wasn’t on sale.

Back to sell­ing CDs, I’m pretty excited to have found this source.  I have a stack of CDs that need to go.  I just haven’t known what to do with them.  So, Kate Bush will most likely be ripped, enjoyed in the car a few times, and then sold back to the store.  Sure, I’ll get a frac­tion of my pur­chase price back but it’s a price I was will­ing to pay for a rare indulgence.

So, quick recap:

• Den­tist — $900.00
• Doc­tor — $25.00
• Music Store — $22.60

Good night.  Be well.

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