My first memory upon opening my eyes Friday afternoon was Dr. John Armstrong holding a jock strap.
“Everything went well,” he said.
This will be my new apparel for a couple weeks.
I was alive after blacking out. I prefer to black out on my own terms. It’s good to be alive, if sore, and back to reality. It’s Sunday morning and I am in a light fog of painkillers, listening to Nikki Haley talking about pardoning Trump since it was just a “documents case,” and Mike Pence wondering in his ever-so-serious sanctimony and ignorance: What about Hunter Biden? It makes you want to go back under.
As noted earlier, toting that barge and lifting that bale left me with a hernia on the left side of you-know-where. I had a similar surgery on the right side a few years ago, and feared this one coming.
You find, generally, that front-line medical services are outstanding. The backside of it, the bureaucracy, can make you want to give up and call Nate Jensen for a nice warm cremation.
Dr. Armstrong has an excellent bedside manner and an apparently steady hand. He also has a sense of humor, which helps when the patient thinks there is a good chance that death is near.
The nurses likewise. After the intrusion into my plumbing, I could not tinkle for a time so the nurses had to put a catheter in me. I squealed like a piggy and swore like a sailor and I grabbed the nurse’s arm while another clasped my hand. I imagined that I went through about 30 seconds of what it must be like having a baby. I wouldn’t blame them if these strong women were laughing at me down deep, but they certainly acted empathetically. That nasty business done, they wheeled me to the front door with cheers, best wishes and detailed instructions.
That’s worth the estimated $14,000 cost. It was also estimated that I will have to pay nearly half of it, despite being on Medicare and having a supplemental policy from Aetna that isn’t gold but wasn’t supposed to be coal. We shall see if the estimate was correct, and it probably is, because our health care finances are a mess. I have been on a fixed to declining income the past 30 years, and $6,500 does not just fall out of a tree.
You also play hell getting to see the doctors through the scheduling maze where nobody in a small town seems to know each other’s phone number. My doctor told me that I must be my own patient advocate, and she is right about that. Someday I might make it through one of these patient portals they send me on my cellphone. Or not.
Such is the nature of our modern world governed by corporations.
A person should be able to get a hernia surgery after a lifetime of diligent, if not hard, labor for something less than $6,500 out-of-pocket. More like $65. I think those nurses should make top-dollar, too, along with the surgeon. It feels like the corporate part of the system is there to fleece you while telling you how much they care about you. There has to be a better way.
That said, it is good to be alive thanks to the competent front-line medical care we do receive, if at the highest cost in the world. I can shuffle down the block and back. Bad things that could have happened probably won’t now.
I am grateful, even if it doesn’t sound like it. Thanks to those who endure me through it all. Those nurses especially.
It takes a month or so for basic healing, at which time I return to the grinder of the medical-industrial complex for another check of my plumbing by the urologist, Dr. Christ, an excellent physician with large hands and a most unpleasant task. I would rather be on the receiving end of that for four years than a Mike Pence presidency and a pardon of the most criminal politician we have seen. It’s enough to give you a pain in the derriere. I shall now apply ice.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
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i feel your pain. i had knee replacement surgery in clarion in february. i had to pee before they would let me go home. i could not pee,if my life depended on it. drank a bunch of water, vomitted it up.had to be catherterized. they kept me an extra night. the next day i was able to go potty. check out the inflation reduction act. there was something about reimbursing people with drug costs higher than $2000. maybe that will apply for your out of pocket expenses that aetna won't cover.i can't remember if that takes effect in 2024 or 2025. check with congressman feenstra. i doubt your bill collectors will wait until 2025.
"Sticker price" in medicine is designed for those with no insurance and lots of money--Mayo in Rochester, M.D. Anderson in Houston, Memorial-Sloan-Kettering in NY, etc. benefit greatly from this given all the patients they see from overseas; in fact, that is their business plan. We citizens also benefit as the overseas subsidies enable our insurance companies to negotiate even greater discounts, often more than 50%, even 70%. This foreign subsidy does not reach into Iowa but we still benefit as the out-of-pocket costs to the patient cannot stray too far from the mean or non-emergency care would go elsewhere (see: Medical Tourism).
Point is: don't write the check, yet! Await the EOMB from Medicare and your supplemental insurance and see where you end up. Setting aside co-pays (usually trivial) and deductibles (very variable) I suspect you will be much closer to $65 than $6,500. LMK where you end up.