Bubble Boy

If all goes as planned, I'll become Bubble Boy shortly after 10AM tomorrow. I say if as I've got a little bit of an insurance hiccup I'm dealing with. Again, I've been very lucky and very blessed in dealing with all of this crap, but I hit a snag last week.

I need to get pre-certified by my insurance company before I can be admitted to the hospital. They told me the Dr's office should do it. So I call my Dr's office (not my GP, my specialist) and the "lovely" receptionist says the hospital needs to do the pre-certification. So I call the nuclear radiology department at the hospital (who have actually been pretty cool) and they are like, "Yeah, we do the treatment, but it's under your Dr's orders, so it needs to come from them." Which kind of makes sense (oooh, logic. Danger Will Robinson, Danger!).

Anyways, I call the "lovely" receptionist back and now she's singing a different tune. She'd do it, but she doesn't know the procedure code. And now I'm kind of tired of this BS. "You don't know the code? Isn't this a fairly common procedure for someone with thyroid cancer? Are you telling me you don't know the code?" I ask a little bit exasperated! Nope, she doesn't. But the hospital does. Agh. So I call back to the hospital. They are a bit surprised as well, but atleast they offer to call the "lovely" receptionist and "remind" her what the code is. And then they give me a call back saying it's all good. Well, almost. Because when I call on Friday to find out the results of the radiology pictures (which they won't give me, thanks!), the "lovely" receptionist says that my pre-certification is still pending. She says that she's called the insurance company several times and have given them all of the information. But right now my admission is still pending. Lovely. NOT!

So I want to be Bubble Boy. I've got this planned down to the wire on what I'm doing when. And I don't want to end up either staying longer in the hospital, or pushing this treatment back a week or more. Especially cause I'm kind of sick and tired of being sick and tired. I want the treatment over, so I can get on the long term thyroid drug and start to feel better. Damn IT!

So hopefully you won't hear from me till Thanksgiving! Have a good one!

Gouting Again

And it's really getting old. Wait, maybe that's me.

So when I wake up in the middle of the night and my heel hurts, that's a pretty good sign of my gout coming back. So limped around on Friday and I thought it was getting better (I was taking my drugs), but on Saturday I was hurting bad. Like almost crying bad and I've got a pretty decent threshold for pain.

But nothing less than death was going to keep me from SuperLawyer's 40th birthday bash. He so rocks. He had it catered from Red, Hot and Blue in the a ga-thousand degree heat. Oy vey. It's not like I wasn't in pain already, but then add the heat. Ugh! And he had a great mix of people, young and old, gay and straight, just very cool. So it was fun.

What was not fun is that he had a poster board of pics of him and one of them included me. I looked so good then. Dear lord, what has happened to me. Of course I cried while holding a delicious cupcake that he had made. And with the gout it's not like I could do some manic, obsessive exercising. Nope, it was just home and bed.

I did limp to church today, but that's it. Well I did limp over to Whole Foods to get some blueberries. I've read that they are like a homeopathic cure for gout. I hope so. And for $4 a pack for blueberries, I think my medicine is cheaper!

I sneeze . . . .

and then I feel it. The pain that seems to erupt from my shoulders, back, neck, and chest. And not a quick pain, but a nice building crescendo of pain that overwhelms me so that I'm double over for a good 15 or more seconds as it washes over me and then finally begins to subside. I fear for the next sneeze. The next wave of pain.

So I'm sick. I've been trying to fight it for a while. The scratchy throat. The stuffy head. The runny nose. It all sounds so sexy, doesn't it?

It doesn't help that I'm pretty much running myself ragged at work. Too much to do, not enough time, so the same ole stuff.

The good news is that I'll probably be sick for my company holiday party. I'm sure the combination of cold medicine and alcohol will blunt the pain and madness of the evening's "fesitivities".