Updates: Books and Money

Back at the start of January, I wrote about money and what I thought 2018 would hold both in terms in income and outgo. Well, January is two days behind us and here is where things stand.

Combined groceries and household (soap, sandwich bags, shampoo) for January; $159.44. Of that, $147.60 represents food, $11.84 is what we spent on household items. So I came in under the $175.00 a month I dreamed about but was skeptical I would hit.

The surprise item was eating out. I commented in that earlier blog that we rarely ate out, which is true. That being said, we ate out twice (one lunch, one breakfast) in January. Those meals, along with two post-chemo fast food stops (so we both can get some lunch in us before Warren heads back to his office and I head home to unwind) and a cup of tea with a friend at a local coffee shop, came to a whopping $44.14 ($4.00 of which represented tips). Holy smokes! For us, that's a huge amount. (I'm not being facetious. That is a huge amount for us for a month, unless we are on the road to/from Mayo.)

However, I can say with pretty good certainty that the February figure for eating out (including take out) will be significantly less because in the last two weeks we also got to the bottom of my foot issues.  The MRI revealed a badly torn peroneal tendon in my right foot (it's around the ankle). Next Thursday I go into surgery to have it repaired. I will be housebound and non-weight bearing for a week, then back at work and non-weight bearing for three more weeks, and then in a weight bearing boot for another three to four weeks after that. There's not going to be a whole lot of coffee dates, let alone lunch or dinners out. (Let's face it: there will be ZERO coffee dates during that time!)

I'm glad the food costs in January were so low, because I have already shelled out a lot of money for doctor appointments, equipment, and my 2018 out of pocket (met) and personal deductible (almost met) for my medical insurance. Ouch.

Good thing there are books. Because reading is what I plan on doing that week I am housebound. Since posting my first ten titles of 2018, I have added to the list. To wit:
11. The Cliff Walk by Don J. Snyder (Subtitled A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found, this was a reread)
12. Corazon de Hojalata/Tin Heart by Margarita Saona (the author's poems about her heart failure and eventual transplant, in Spanish and English)
13. So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo (Read. This. Book. This is one of the 46 titles by women of color I referenced in my last book post)
14. Elmet by Fiona Mozeley (a deftly written, disturbing modern tale set in Yorkshire)
15. Planting Dandelions: Field Notes From a Semi-Domesticated Life by Kyran Pittman (quirky essays by a writer I first met in the pages of Good Housekeeping)
16. Reset: My Fight For Inclusion and Lasting Change by Ellen Pao (Pao fought her termination by a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm; although her lawsuit for gender discrimination was not successful, I read this book thinking "yeah, you lost the battle but you have made major offensive progress in the war.")

After finishing Pao, I started the massive (MASSIVE) tome, The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume I: 1940-1956.  For someone like me, who has read most if not all of the Plath biographies, having her letters published without extensive editing and suppression, has been a revelation. Kudos to Frieda Hughes, the daughter and only surviving child of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, for releasing this collection, which takes Sylvia from childhood to her marriage to Hughes. I feel like I am reading and hearing a Sylvia Plath whom I could only catch glimpses of before. Just reading her letters to Ted after their secret marriage gave me a whole new perspective on and appreciation of just how much in love they were and how from the outset they were each other's critics and editors.

The Plath letters weighed in at 1339 pages (not counting the introduction and forward). The book is so imposing and heavy that when I accidentally dropped it on my foot (my left foot, fortunately, not the right), I limped around for 20 minutes.

I finished Plath last night, bringing my 2018 totals to 17. I am two-thirds of the way through Matilda, by Roald Dahl. I have read very few of Dahl's books, including this one, so this has been fun. And as I type out these words, I know that there are three books at the library just waiting to be picked up and two more en route (from branches) that should be in later today or tomorrow. That should get me to the surgery next week and into my convalescence.

Onward to February!

One Dime, One Day

I have been struggling with money issues as of late: some of them in my wallet, more of them in my head. Monday, I contacted our local hospital where I do all my oncology work (lab work and consultations) to find out why I was no longer receiving hospital bills. Our local hospital is part of a larger conglomerate and it turns out that somehow, somewhere, between April 2010 and October 2010, the system's computer resurrected my old mailing address (last used in October 2008) and was shipping everything to that address. That explains the recently received collection letter on a bill from October that I never received and never saw, and that explains why I only just learned the April totals.

The April total was higher than I anticipated. Had I known, I would have been paying on it but I didn't and I haven't been, so now I have a whopping bill to pare down. (Before you say "but April, surely you knew you had a bill, why weren't you more proactive?," let me add that I also have a pending application for financial assistance and I initially thought the bill was being held up while the assistance application was being reviewed.)

So by 5:00 Monday night, I was thoroughly demoralized. But then I rallied: I will pay it off bit by bit; yes, that means stretching some other things out a little further, but I can do it; it will be okay.

That was before I looked more closely at the account sheets and saw something on the master account called "bad debt balance," with a large sum after it. A large sum as in four figures. Where did that come from? When I applied for financial assistance last time, the counselor referred to some unpaid (and unmentioned ever) 2004 charges that should have been picked up by Medicaid or bundled into my bankruptcy in 2005. Could that be them? What charges are they? And why that amount?

I don't know about the figure; it apparently is written off but still pops up in internal documents (which is what I was looking at as we tried to figure out where my bills had gone). Regardless, it is so discouraging. As I told Warren when I related the day's discoveries, I pay and pay and pay, get close to finishing off a major bill of some sort and plan on adding that payment to another bill's payment (the snowball effect), and then learn I have new bills. Or older bills newly discovered. By the time I pay my share of the household costs and make payments on the bills (now including the new ones), there is little left to my paycheck. 

It's hard. It's hard to be perpetually tight on funds. It's hard to realize that some necessities I have delayed spending money on are just that much more out of reach, even with being hyper frugal with my dollars. It's hard to not feel that even a small item once in a great while is an extravagance I should not indulge in.

But like so many times when I am feeling stressed or struggling to cope, all I really needed after Monday was a different perspective.

A change in attitude.

A reminder of just how much I am blessed.

What a difference a day can make.

The first reminder, small and sweet, happened when I dropped Warren off at work yesterday. After he got out of the car, he bent over and reached down to the curb. Had he dropped something?

Warren straightened back up and held up a slim dime. One thin, silvery dime. "It can go in the vacation fund!"

We both laughed. We are ten cents (ten cents!) closer to whatever we are doing next summer. And the dime knocked my perspective a little closer to center. It doesn't have to be all about the money. It so rarely is all about the money. So many times it is about other things: emotions, anxieties, stresses. But it is so much easier and convenient to blame it on money rather than deal with those messy, squishy topics. 

The second reminder was neither short nor sweet. Last night at 10:20 the phone rang. In our household, phones ringing after 10:00 are usually not pleasant calls. This one held true to type.

Our "almost daughter" Amy was on the phone. She is at risk to lose her already insecure housing situation (she lives with her dad) due to family conflicts, she is at risk to lose her already insecure means of transportation due to family conflicts, she is underemployed and has not found additional work that would give her the financial ability to meet the risks, she is going hungry more times than she will admit, and she is so emotionally battered and worn down due to family conflicts that she is almost too numb to respond to the immediate crises. I tried making suggestions, until I finally realized I needed to shut up and listen because she was in no shape to hear the offers of help. Amy talked and cried, cried and talked.

Then she blurted out, crying even harder, "and we only have a half roll of toilet paper left and I don't get paid until Friday."

That I could respond to concretely and immediately. "Amy, come over here right now. We have toilet paper."

I went upstairs and gathered some rolls of toilet paper. I also raided the vacation fund box, which held a few dollar bills (along with Tuesday's dime and some other loose change), and Warren contributed a few more. The toilet paper went into a grocery bag, the dollar bills went into an envelope.

When Amy pulled up five minutes later, I met her on the lawn. I handed her the grocery bag and the envelope.

"This is a gift from us. It'll help you get closer to payday. And here's the toilet paper."

We hugged for a long moment. Amy is thin and shaking and sad. It breaks my heart to see her that way. She is so young to have so many sorrows and difficulties. I walked her back to the car, thanked her friend who brought her over, hugged her again.

"We love you. We are here for you. You can stay here while you figure things out."

After Amy left, I walked back into the house and plopped down beside Warren on the couch, drained. We talked a little about what had just happened, about what we can do for Amy. It was still on my mind as I fell asleep. This morning, Warren said "I think Amy was in my dreams last night."

Yeah, mine too.

Amy was the big jolt to my perspective, a real live reminder of just how much I have. I have what she is lacking presently, starting with toilet paper, food, and a secure place to live. Most important, I have a loving home to shelter me when times are tough.

I have a different attitude today. I still have a large pile of medical bills that I will need to pay down bit by bit. I still have some important purchases that I will need to defer yet a little longer. I still have an anemic checking account balance which will rally only briefly on payday for some time to come. We even have a little tiny vacation fund that might just maybe allow us to get away for a few days next summer.

And I still have a wonderfully loving household where Warren and I work together to make the most of what we have, dime by dime, day by day.

Hard Times

Times are tight all over. My older son Ben is looking for work again, having been recently laid off. I know of at least two high school classmates of his who are working three jobs each. My older brother just broke his leg in a freak accident and is out of commission (and work) for at least six to eight weeks. Someone else I know has a home in foreclosure, a chronic illness, and a soon-to-be ex who just left the country, leaving her and their nine year old son, who has his own medical problems, without insurance, without money, without support, without anything.

That last individual recently asked me to please set aside any "extra garden bounty" I might have as we would be seeing each other later in the week. So yesterday before meeting up with her, I picked some tomatoes from our wreck of a garden and even found a couple of red, ripe King of the North sweet peppers to add to the sack. There was a zucchini in the refrigerator - the last from my dad's garden - that my hand hovered over. We love zucchini. Then the bakery scene from A Little Princess, during which a hungry Sarah Crewe divides six hot rolls with a beggar child, came to mind:

Sarah took out three more buns and put them down…

"She is hungrier than I am," she said to herself. "She's starving." But her hand trembled when she put down the fourth bun. "I'm not starving," she said - and she put down the fifth.

The zucchini went into the bag.

My overwhelming social impression as we drove to and from Montana last month? Hard times. Call it what you want - a recession, the Great Recession, or (what I believe along with columnist Paul Krugman) possibly the Third Depression - the signs are evident everywhere. Empty houses, starting on our street and lining the route all the way to Helena and back. Empty storefronts to go with those empty houses. Signs for food pantries, even in towns of 150 or 200.

Increasingly, we are all impoverished. If not literally, then figuratively by the spreading poverty around us. Our piggybanks are worn and chipped. So are our spirits at times.

In the middle of opening wedding presents, Alise suddenly said, anguished, "we can't accept this gift from [a family member]. They can't afford to give us this." She bent her head down, it hurt so much. Her father, a wise and compassionate man, told her to appreciate the love behind the gift and to accept and use it in that spirit. Several times that morning, as other gifts were opened, he or Alise's mother quietly mentioned how certain family members had clearly dug deep into their pockets to gift the newlyweds.

I suspect the newlyweds, on their own shoestring budget, will never forget the love and hope woven into their presents.

Warren and I feel the pinch at times. We each have modest incomes. After he pays support from his and a monthly payment for back taxes comes out of mine, they are even more modest. I'm helping Sam tackle college in my own limited way (his father and Financial Aid are doing the bulk of it). There are always medical bills, and overdue (and uninsured) labs and an oncology appointment loom for me in October. Warren's truck just gave up the ghost after many, many, many, many miles, so there is a replacement in our future.

Warren recently said, as we drove home on a day that had already been too long and during which we had both been stretched too thin, that he wished things would ease up a bit for us. Me too. I worked on the household bills this morning - my income is still recovering from August - and I winced when I summed up the total and then looked at my checkbook. At least I have income with which to pay those bills. I am grateful for that, because there were times during my illness when I didn't have the money or means to pay. There are many around me who do not now.

Many months ago, when we were just starting our relationship, Warren wrote: "you probably aren't going to get Europe, diamonds, many expensive meals or lots of shoes." As I told Warren in response, I never cared for diamonds or shoes, and I can make my own great meals fairly inexpensively. I've seen Europe, albeit many years ago, and there are places in this country I want to see before ever returning. Fortunately, we each learned, separately and a long time ago, to make the most of what we have, including financially, and in that regard, as in so many other ways, we are very well suited.

When it comes to the hard times our nation, my community, and my friends and family are going through, my focus is small and local. I can't fix the Third Depression; I can only hope that thoughtful analysts like Krugman point the way for our otherwise entrenched and polarized politicians.

But I continue to chip away at the grassroots level, one zucchini at a time.

A Wedding, A Death, And Life

My son Ben and my almost daughter-in-law Alise have set a wedding date for this August in Helena, Montana.

I'm thrilled! I'm overjoyed! I love Montana! I love Ben and Alise!

And I'm looking at my budget trying to figure out how on earth to manage it. (Don't worry, you two, we'll be there. Oh, we'll be there!) Earlier today I was running trip estimates and despairing each time a new balance came up on the calculator. Warren could hear it in my voice when we talked on the phone.

In all fairness, it's not just the expense of that trip that is on my mind or in my voice right now. Yesterday I saw Tim, my oncologist, for a quarterly checkup. While I got good reviews, we talked at length about the costs of tests and how far apart I could space them before he started losing vital connections to my health history. I told Tim I needed time to pay off the medical bills that have accumulated since Dr. Bully put me behind on the count and could we delay everything for another six months? I knew from his face and carefully worded response that he was uncomfortable with that option. He had questions of his own. How much did it cost just to see him? What if I saw him in 90 days without any testing? Could I afford that? We compromised by agreeing I would see him in three months - without any labs or other tests - and then repeat the kappa free light chain assay, one of the best tests today for myeloma, when I see him in the fall.

I said to Warren as we drove home, "Tim doesn't like my IgG." It hasn't moved upwards since last July, but it hasn't moved down either.

So that is gnawing at me.

Interlaced with my medical and medical/financial concerns, our household is running on vapors right now. I have taxes bumping aside the medical bills in the next two weeks. Both of us are writing grants for our respective employers. Our weekday schedule has changed now that I drive Sam to and from work every day and we are still all adjusting to the new schedule. Warren has been playing concerts all over, has more coming up, will be playing Easter at Maple Grove, has the May concert and the composer residency bearing down like a steam locomotive on him and the Symphony, and is trying to finalize another food pantry benefit concert, all while trying to finish building a vibraphone for the May concert (as well as have a set of crotales cast so he can machine and finish them in time to play in the same concert).

And our friend and neighbor Tom Prengaman died last week.

Tom was only 57. He had had three bouts with lymphoma over the last 17 years. It sounds as if his death was caused by a recurrence of it, although he didn't live long enough for his oncologist to run definitive tests. If the cause of death wasn't lymphoma, the lymphoma was the major contributor.

I'm sad and upset that Tom died. Besides being a friend (along with his wife Kris and their now adult daughters, who I have known since they were in grade school) and our backyard neighbor, Tom lived in Cancerland. Just like me. When I was facing my first stem cell transplant, Tom sought me out at a barbeque and talked about his own experiences and transplant. He talked directly and bluntly about his illness, which I appreciated deeply.

Tom's death is gnawing at me. I know it is and I know why. Those of us who populate Cancerland live with the reality of the cancer someday coming back with a vengeance. We know it. We don't always face it, but we know it deep in our bones. Tom dying last week made me face that it could happen to me too.

It could happen to me too, but it is today I must be living. And while I pound away at the grant application, or shuttle Sam to and from work, or rework the figures on a trip to Montana, I need to keep that thought - that it is today I must be living - first and foremost in my mind.

Funeral processions have the right of way on our roads. We pull over and let them go by; if we are at a light and it turns green, we sit and wait until the last vehicle in the procession clears the intersection. Besides being the law, it is the remnant of a time when we knew our community well enough to know who was being buried and stood silently by in respect as the procession went by.

In the Jewish tradition, however, the outcome is different in one situation. If a funeral procession meets a wedding procession at a crossroads, the wedding procession has the right of way. The rationale behind this custom is that life always takes precedence over death.

Life takes precedence over death. It is today I must be living.

We've got a wedding to get to in August.

Congratulations, Ben and Alise!

Last Year's Gardens, This Year's Gardens

I tramped out into the backyard this morning. It is a rainy, gray March day, but, un- deniably,  spring is on its way.

I walked down to the back garden for the first time since December. Until last weekend, the back garden was still under snow. It has emerged now: rough, grass-grown. I will need to rototill it again this spring and inch it that much more along the "real garden" continuum. It is just past being considered a raw sod garden, but not by much.

The garden by the house - the one I call the kitchen garden - is in much better shape. That makes sense as it was already established. It is too wet and muddy to begin spading the soil, let alone adding the compost, but that time will come.

Work lies ahead, starting with the seedlings. Actually, starting with the pots for the seedlings. I made them from newspaper last year, which allowed me to plant them directly into the ground. That method worked really well and I will do it again this year.

What better way to spend a gray, rainy, chill March Saturday than making seedling pots?

Last year I grew broccoli, tomatoes, peppers, onions, eggplant, pumpkins, zucchini, artichoke, and some potatoes. Plus herbs. All but the zucchini, pumpkins, and potatoes were in the kitchen garden.

Yeah, it was kinda crowded.

The artichoke never made it to the flower/choke stage; eggplants and peppers didn't do so hot either. That is because the broccoli overshadowed everything. I had no idea broccoli got so big and broad. So they are going down to the back garden this year.

I'm going to try the artichoke again in a large (very large) planter. The cherry tomatoes will probably go in planters this year as well, as they got lost in the uproar in last year's garden.

I will probably cut back on the herbs. I liked them for the smells they released whenever you brushed against them, but I never really used most of them other than the basil and the chives. The chives wintered over; I transplanted some of the ones that remained from Ellen's gardens from 30 years ago. A good friend recently rhapsodized about fresh cilantro and I promised I would plant some for her.

My biggest problem is knowing when to stop. Last year I wanted to grow so many things that the kitchen garden was way too crowded. Even after I ripped the broccoli out, the eggplants, onions, tomatoes, and peppers were constantly elbowing one another. Moving the broccoli from the kitchen garden to the back garden should help free up some space.

Maybe I can put some into my dad's garden. Yeah, that should work. Dad is here working on the house with Warren this morning, and I asked him casually if he would like me to start some plants for him. I'll slip in some of my own as well.

As I plan this year's garden, we continue to eat the bounty of last year's garden. As I type, peppers, tomatoes, and zucchini are thawing in the sink for tonight's meal. When I wrote about our grocery bill being less than $200 a month, last year's garden is a huge part of that.

Following up on the great food discussion, I tracked all of our grocery costs in February. We finished the month at $158.46 for groceries, with an additional $11.26 for household items such as dish soap and toilet paper. Our eating out bill for the month was $66.88, which we both consider higher than average but included the tail end of the New York trip as well as Warren taking his daughter out for her 16th birthday. During the month of February, we had friends over for dinner on three separate occasions and I was also the hostess for a quarterly potluck with girlfriends. (Being the hostess means preparing an entrée for five.) So our February grocery costs included four social occasions. (Okay, I'm bragging.)

I'm tracking our expenses for March as well. Halfway through the month, our grocery bill is at $73.59 and our eating out is at $7.90. I figure we will once again come in under the $200 mark. We couldn't begin to do that without our freezers and the gardens.

Besides the pleasure of eating food I grew last summer, our low grocery costs help on the money front.

Money is an issue because medical bills are an issue. I am still dealing with the economic fallout from Dr. Bully riding roughshod through my life. Even with the hefty discount I get from OhioHealth for being both uninsured and not financially flush, I am still paying off his charges to my account back in July and October, the bulk of which could have been avoided if Dr. Bully had just asked me the simplest of questions regarding my medical treatment. When all is said and done, Dr. Bully will have cost me almost $1000 in unnecessary and unwanted testing and OhioHealth almost $700 in write-offs. I see my oncologist next week and will ask him if we can push my next visit after that 180 days out, rather than 90, so I can get caught up on the medical bills.

So the low monthly grocery bill feeds more than just our satisfaction in eating healthily and economically. It helps me thwack away at the medical bills as well, and allows me to feel a little less like Sisyphus toiling away eternally with his boulder. I am grateful for the bounty of last year's gardens in so many ways.

Except for the food we continue to cook and savor, last year's gardens are now a memory. This year's gardens are still a dream.

William Rainey Harper, on establishing the University of Chicago, said "now the dreaming is over and the real work begins."

I know just what he meant.

Changing the Channel

So here's where I'm at.

It is fast approaching Thanksgiving, Christmas is right around the corner, and I am looking at my oh-so-slender account balance and taking a deep breath.

Make that several deep breaths. Thanks to that one disastrous medical appointment in mid-July, I am still paying off the resulting damage from the doctor who ordered his "favorite" tests over my and my pocketbook's protests, reminding me that he was the one with 14 years of medical training and also insisting that if I were just "firm," the hospital would knock those bills down to nothing.

Add to that the recent email from my ex in which he asked me if I could cover Sam's December rent because he was "very tight" on money this month. (This is the same ex who at the time when I was recovering from my second stem cell transplant and had been unemployed for months, insisted he could not scrape up the money to pay one ( just one!) monthly orthodontia payment.) The ex had promised Sam he would cover his living expenses until Sam finds work. But wait, there's more! After I wrote back yesterday and said it would be hard but Sam and I would make it work for December, the selfsame ex (who is fully employed with benefits) emailed last night to ask me if I could take over Sam's monthly expenses until Sam finds a job.

I was momentarily staggered by his presumptuousness, but then remembered that this is but one of the many reasons we are no longer married.

All the same, it made my chest hurt.

Maybe I need to take a million deep breaths. My thoughts are looping on my grievances against Dr. Bully (now four months in the past) and my grievances against my ex spouse (too far in the past to count).

Several years ago when I was clawing my way out of the wreckage of my marriage, I had a great therapist who helped me put the pieces of my life back together. One of the things I learned from him was how to turn off the loop when it gets started.

You turn off the loop by walking away from it. Which in this case means I need to let go and focus on the present.

The present is this: I have income (freelance) coming in, I have a roof over my head, and there is food on the table. (And thanks to the gardens, in the freezer as well.) I have a wonderful husband who is always, always there for me and is honest and straightforward in our relationship. (And who loves me and never fails to show it. Wow!) I have much of my health. I have my younger son back in town and striving hard to get back on his feet again. I have my older son who is about to move with his amazing fiancé to a new town in the next step of their life adventure. I have family close at hand. I live in a community I love and in which I have invested my time and my heart. I have good friends - here in town, here and there throughout the country, and here in Blogville.

I have all of this in my life.

When I look at it this way - the only way to look at it - I am rich beyond measure.

We - Warren and I - will figure out something with Sam, something that disengages me from my ex and gets Sam on his feet. The hospital bills will get paid. My life will go on with richness and warmth and fullness, regardless of the balance in my bankbook.

And Christmas will come. Christmas will come with tinsel and bells and even a present or two, although in looking back at the riches I have listed, I'm can't imagine needing anything. (Well, maybe new oven mitts.)

My wonderful therapist from long ago often likened my painful memories and hurtful thoughts to a radio that played nonstop. He would say, "you may not ever be able to get rid of the radio, April, but you can learn ways to turn the volume way down so you don't have to listen to it all the time. You can even learn to change the channel."

I'm changing the channel right now. It's time for some holiday music.

Fragility

Being poor takes time because you live in such a fragile world that you spend all day worrying about and dealing with things, tangible and intangible, breaking down.

I recently attended a daylong workshop on the program "Bridges Out of Poverty," taught by Phil DeVol. He's the one who made the above observation. He went on to define poverty as "the extent to which a person does without resources." Resources include financial, emotional, intellectual, physical and other quality of life factors.

One Bridges exercise is to evaluate one's own resources in the different categories and rate them on a scale of 1-5, 5 being the best. I have not done the exercise in full, but it came to mind this morning as I dealt with some healthcare matters ("physical").

On healthcare, I give myself a 5 (quality of doctors), a 2 (my overall health, which is pretty good except for incurable cancer), and a 0 (no insurance, no coverage, no nothing), for an overall score of 2.3. Because of the 0, I spent some of my morning visiting a financial counselor at the local hospital, which is where I see my oncologist (who is one half of the 5 score, my wonderful personal physician being the other half).

I went to see the financial counselor for two reasons. First, I receive a 35% discount from the hospital because I am uninsured. If I saw a counselor, that same discount would apply to all of my oncology visits at the hospital as well. That's about a $35 savings and given that I see my oncologist next week, I needed to do that. Second, I just had a very specific blood test done for next week's appointment and I wanted to know the cost of the test. (Note: Finding out costs at a hospital is surprisingly difficult, due to the labyrinth-like nature of hospital billing systems, which have been permanently warped courtesy of the insurance industry. We never did find that figure.)

So out I went, spent about twenty minutes with a harried but genuinely warm counselor, filled out some paperwork, and came home with more papers to retrieve and get back to her as soon as possible.

I need to get them back quickly not merely for my own benefit, but because it turns out that our local hospital, which was consumed several years ago by a BIG Columbus-based system, is closing its financial counseling office at the end of this month. Everything related to financial assistance will now flow through one central portal somewhere else.

The counselor made it clear, with a tone in her voice I could not quite decipher, that Corporate was calling the shots on everything. I would have to fill out financial aid papers, involving income declarations and proof of income, for the new system to evaluate my status.

Just hearing that brought me to tears. Admittedly, I was already on edge. Financial dealings having to do with my healthcare are touchy topics to begin with. Healthcare is my fragile world.

Being faced with paperwork was more than I wanted to deal with this morning. The counselor knew I was stressed. She probably talks to stressed individuals all the time. After all, we live in a country where we have historically chosen not to care whether medical care is available and affordable for everyone. (Thank you, President Obama, for saying that is so wrong.) In the midst of this Great Recession, my guess is that her cubicle is full of financial woes.

She all the same took the time to sit down with me, fill out the new paperwork, then list what additional proof Corporate would need.

I asked the counselor twice whether the 35% discount applied no matter what my income was. As sweet as it would be to get a larger discount, 35% makes a huge difference and I needed to hear, apparently more than once, that it applied to any uninsured patient. As it is, I can only afford to have some lab work done and see my oncologist once a quarter, which is shaving my healthcare needs very closely for the cancer I have. (I don't make huge sums of money, folks.) My repeated question is an indication of the fragility of my medical resources: tell me the discount I have will not be affected, because I am really, really counting on that resource to continue to exist.

I wonder if Corporate has considered the effect of eliminating the local office. People in hospitals tend to be people with lots of stress to begin with, regardless of their income levels. How to pay the hospital bills is only one of those stresses. People with chronic illnesses, like an incurable cancer, are constantly dealing with a fixed level of stress because they know that "chronic" means "always."

My stress level rises steeply when I have an oncology appointment approaching. If I had had to have the same discussion over the phone that I had today in person, I would have hung up and cried, then eaten all the rhubarb bread left over from last night's Legal Clinic. Instead, thanks to Susan the counselor, it took only three pieces to calm me down.

I will probably spend 45 minutes or longer gathering the paperwork that Corporate needs to determine if I qualify for more than the standard 35% discount. I will deliver it in person locally rather than ship it off into some unknown void, which is what awaits me after July 31.

Next week I see my oncologist and get my test results. I will try not to worry too much between now and then. The numbers are what they are and we will deal with it when I see Tim. I will also try not to worry too much about the cost of the test that was done yesterday. We need those numbers; I needed the blood test.

One thing I won't worry about is the financial paperwork that took up this morning. Ultimately I will get a determination as to whether I qualify for more than a 35% discount, but I know that in no case do I get less than a 35% discount.

What I don't know is what happens to the local financial aid staff when their office is closed at the end of next week. Has Corporate found places for them in the new department or is that function being outsourced? Has Corporate found other positions at our local hospital so they can continue to work in this community?

Or has Corporate given them a pink slip and shoved them into a suddenly fragile world?