Yay for meeting your deductible, I guess.
Confession: I am (slightly) bad about paying bills. Not destroy-your-credit bad, but it stresses me out which means that I typically put it off for as long as I reasonably can. I seriously think this is some sort of PTSD from when I was completely broke in my early 20's and having to make decisions about which bills to pay each month, and how little I could reasonably eat and still survive. Oh the joys of (my) young adulthood.
As a result of this, we are one of the few families where the husband does the monthly bills. I have been refusing to even look at them for almost as long as we have been together, and he is extraordinarily responsible, and he doesn't have a panic attack when facing a monthly pile of bills, so I leave that squarely on his shoulders.
All except my and T's medical bills. I don't know why, exactly. I would just as happily give him my HSA card and let him have at it. I think he's got some idea of "teaching me some responsibility" like he's my dad and we're talking about my long distance phone bill to my boyfriend in the next town or something. (I had a "boyfriend" in the next town when I was in middle school. My long distance phone bills were quite a source of contention at the time, because I was constantly sneaking calls to him ;))
Anyway, medical bills are the one thing I do pay, and even though I have money in my HSA (and more in my bank account if that runs out) it never fails to make me feel anxious, and so I put it off as long as I reasonably can.
All drs bills say the same thing: "Payment Due Upon Receipt." Which I take to mean that they want me to have the payment out in the next day's mail. Which I think is obnoxious and can therefore be disregarded. So my idea of "waiting as long as I reasonably can" is somewhere around 2 weeks. Then I start getting nervous that the Medical Bill Gods will send a thunderbolt to hit my house or my credit rating, and I work my state up into a stomach churning nervousness about the whole thing until I finally bite the bullet and start sending them in. To be completely honest, I don't even open them before then. I just hoard them in my purse and stress about it.
So, this morning I finally got around to paying my recent medical bills. I have a lot of them! All of that testing I've been doing had racked up a bill from my GP, one from my OBGYN, one from LabCorp, and one from my hematologist. Plus one for T's pediatrician. I was sweating it as I went through and opened them all. And....all of that for less than $160! Considering the size of the bills I was paying before we hit our deductible for the year...that sounds like a great deal. I think I'm going to go do what people are always saying about UHC and go order up some unnecessary medical procedures....just because I can. :lol: I've got between now and the end of the year to convince my doctor that I need one of those full body scans...and maybe get my ears pinned back or something. :lol:
How sad is it that I've spend so much freaking money on medical bills this year that a) I hit my deductible way before the end of the year and b) $160 feels practically free?
Went to see my doctor yesterday
So, the good news, I guess, is that at this point my hematologist is not recommending daily shots of Lovenox if I were to get pregnant. I say "I guess" because the test results continue to be unhelpful. My clotting levels are still elevated, but just like last time, they are not elevated enough to get a clear picture of what we're dealing with. They didn't go up or down from last time - they're just hovering there right above the line for the normal range. My doctor said that he's suspicious that I actually do have a clotting disorder, but it may not be one that they know about yet. Perfect. And what they do know about and can test for falls just shy of a strong recommendation for blood thinners. So for now, the plan is to forge on without them. Which is good. I guess.
The other thing is, my test results combined with some other symptoms that I have been having including aching joints are pointing more towards lupus. DH and I watch House, and when I told him that they were thinking about lupus, he joked "It's never lupus." (On House, they always suspect that it's lupus. But it never turns out to be lupus. This has become a running joke when we watch it.) But anyway, I guess sometimes it could be lupus. Rough. So I may schedule to go see a rheumatologist at some point.
That's about it. This is the first cycle of TTC'ing again, and I have to say that thusfar I am feeling way more mellow about the whole thing, which is a relief. I don't think I can take another 6 months of the kind of manic obsessiveness that I went through last time. I just don't have it in me.
