Waiting Out the Nothingness with an Eye Toward Sticking It To Big Insurance and a Passion for Reallllllly Looooooooongish Post Titles

Sunday afternoon, sitting in bed, dining room table shopping on the Internet, refraining from saying the hateful things that spring to my mind periodically as my uterus tries to cramp the rest of me into tearful submission.  I’m pretty much done with the crying.  Even if uterus and broken cervix team up, I’m more apt to say unkind things to them than to start blubbering again.

It’s been a little over three weeks since the ultrasound that revealed The Nothingness.  And a little over three weeks of living The Pregnancy That Is and Isn’t.

After the initial posts about it, I’ve taken a couple weeks off topic.  Or just off, period.  The Sisterhood is a powerful force, several dozen of you responding with words of encouragement and “me too” stories and, failing all else, confirmation that sometimes things are just suckful but if they have to be that way at least they are suckful in the company of friends.  You were all “look, we’ve got cracks, too, and it’s okay” and by doing, helped put the pieces of me back into their relative places.  As a result, I haven’t needed to say too much more about it.

But in the interim: the second, higher-dosage attempt at the misoprostol did not work any better than the first.  When The Doctor called to check on me, I lamented to him again that my cervix is apparently broken.  No, no, he more or less told me, the uterus clearly isn’t contracting either, so it’s not entirely the cervix’s fault. Always quick to assess just how empty the cup is, what I took from that was that my uterus is broken, too.  Eh, whatever.  With age comes broken parts, I guess.

The bigger issue in the conversation with The Doctor was What To Do Next.  And here’s where you might get a little judgy on me: putting aside my reluctance to have the D&C and all the varied medical reasons and vain excuses related thereto, I cannot stand the idea of meeting my insurance deductible and a significant portion of my annual out-of-pocket maximum in mid-December, only to have both amounts start over at zero on January 1st.

Despite The Husband and my mother telling me I really should not consider that, it became the focus of my frustration.  Maybe because it was something a few thoughts removed from The Nothingness.  But in any event, it was consuming a fair amount of my attention as I ran numerous mental calculations on the combined hospital and doctor bills and considered, if only those bills accrued a few weeks later, all the twelve months of 2010 in which I could take advantage of having maxed out my out-of-pocket.

When The Doctor outlined the two options (wait-and-see-a-little-longer or D&C) I confessed my deductible-based frustrations.  And, adding to the list of reasons why he is My Doctor, he validated my frustration instead of suggesting I need to let it go.  And told me that if I wanted to wait it out until the first week of January, it is medically sound at this point to do so.  After all, had I not opted for the early ultrasound, we wouldn’t have known there was a problem (absent my body figuring it out on its own) until the December 30th appointment.

So, woo hoo, I had permission to wait and boy did that ever feel like I was sticking it to the insurance company.  Which might not make a lot of sense, but Big Insurance and I had just weeks before concluded an exchange of words over their erroneous written instruction to me in July 2008 that I did not owe a $300.06 hospital bill from The Child’s birth, that Big Insurance had advised the hospital of that, and that I did not need to pay the bill or do anything else absent further instruction from them.  Further instruction never came.  But reporting of that bill to the credit bureaus apparently did, as I discovered when we applied for the mortgage on the new house.  Oh the irritation!  The amount of $300.06 was a drop compared to what we paid out-of-pocket for the bills related to The Child’s birth.  Also? We are meticulous bill-payers, careful to pay on time every time, partly because I have an aversion to owing anyone anything (except the mortgage company, I’m cool with them) and partly because having worked as a collections and bankruptcy attorney I have seen many examples of how not living within a budget and staying on top of bills can quickly mount into significant trouble if there is a crisis in the household.

Anyway,  $300.06.  On my credit report.  About which I wrote to Big Insurance to request assistance in having it removed, reminding them of their written instruction that I did not owe and did not have to pay that amount.  They confirmed I did not owe the bill.  I again requested assistance in removing the matter from my credit report.  And then?  A month or so later?  Turns out, said Big Insurance, I do owe the bill and need to pay it.  I complained that their incompent handling of my original inquiry in July 2008 created the entire problem and demanded that they assist in removing the mark from my credit report because but for their instruction that I did not owe it, the bill would have been paid.  The response?  They sent the claim to an appeal process (which was not requested by me) to re-evaluate whether I owed it. Then, and HERE’S A SHOCKER, decided that they were right the third time and I did owe the bill.  More than that, they told me,  I should not rely on the written instructions from Member Services (the department I was told in July 2008 to send my question to about the bill) about coverage or benefits.  What a crock.

But whatever.  I promptly paid the bill to the hospital, with apologies for the delay caused by Big Insurance’s negligent handling and instructions to me, and fired off a You-Are-Wrong-and-You-Know-It-You-Big-Bully-Plus-You-Just-Called-Your-Own-Member-Services-Worthless letter to Big Insurance.  And that venting relieved some of my irritation.  But not so much as the opportunity to let Broken Uterus and Cervix try to get their act together by the first of the year and if not TAKE THIS BIG INSURANCE.  I’ll meet my deductible the first week of January and then it’s a medical free-for-all for the rest of 2010.

This coming from the girl who in 2009, for example, visited the Doctor because I was convinced a white spot on my toenail was either fungus or the early sign of some condition I found on the Internet–turns out he pointed out how my shoes were pushing down on that toe in that very spot and recommended I quit wearing them for awhile to see if it went away and what else can I say: The Doctor is wise, even about girly shoes. And that was before I pulled a muscle in my shoulder and the pain extended into the muscle behind my breast but when the shoulder quit hurting and the breast muscle didn’t I was sure I felt something different so I scheduled an appointment to make sure it wasn’t cancer. It wasn’t. And that was before I broke the toe, which was actually broken. And that was before I was convinced of a few other girly things (let’s leave it at that) that weren’t. And then, of course, The Pregnancy That Is and Isn’t.  There’s no telling what kind of ailments I might become convinced warrant investigation if not constrained by a deductible.

So, maybe basing medical decisions on the hospital’s rules for arrival in a state of hungry, thirsty, un-made-up-ness is no better than basing them on an opportunity to stick it to Big Insurance (and I know “stick it” isn’t quite correct because I would still have to meet those maximums next year, but still).  Nevertheless, it’s a welcome distraction from the reason a decision even has to be made.

(And, by the way, Big Insurance: thy name is Aetna.)

Also, it might be a distraction from something else bothering me: the couple of people I had thought close to me who have failed to say ONE SINGLE THING to acknowledge the loss.  Because it is still a loss.  I don’t need to wallow in it, and I don’t even need (or want) to have a conversation with them about it.  I mean, I get the verbal blurts anyway and conversations that go “eh, I’m still carting around a placenta attached to nothing, umbilical cord flapping in the amniotic wind while I wait for my girl parts to get a clue” are, well, kind of awkward.  But it turns out that I did need an acknowledgment from a couple of women who heretofore had been close friends of the long-time and/or kind-of-family variety.  Just a “this stinks, I love you” text would have sufficed.  And having seen one of them a couple times now without so much as a “how are you?”  In honesty, it has greatly changed our relationship.  And I guess she might not even know it.

At first I thought it was kind of small of me to visit my need for comfort on them and that maybe I was just transferring grief over the confusing loss of a baby who wasn’t, to a more tangible-feeling sadness over a friend who maybe wasn’t the friend I thought and maybe hasn’t been for a while and I just hadn’t realized it before.  Follow that?  Nutshell:  it’s easier to grieve the friend I know I used to have than the baby I now know I never had.

Psychological introspection aside, I’ve decided that needing an acknowledgment is normal.

In large part, it comes from the emotional boost that encouragement from The Sisterhood has brought.  With each message, my spirits lifted.  The Sisterhood’s messages gave me permission to be mad and disappointed and sad and frustrated and irrational . . . and reminded me that everything might not be in the color or shape or outline that I imagined, but it will all still be okay.  The Sisterhood is made up of women who prove it will all still be okay, even if it’s not what I thought it would be.

And then also, from one of The Sisterhood came a book recommendation:  An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, by Elizabeth McCracken.  The short book is a memoir of the author’s first pregnancy and first child, a son who was stillborn at nine months.  Poignant, honest, captivating–I am so grateful that my friend recommended the book.  As explained by McCracken, some of the hardest parts for her (after the loss itself of her child) were the non-acknowledgments of the “deadbabydeadbabydeadbaby” that overshadowed awkward conversations and interactions.  Acknowledging doesn’t require rehashing the loss or the events (or non-events) leading to it, but it gives air to the suffocating need to just grieve it.

I have a couple dozen friends (as I now know) who have lost a pregnancy.  I have several friends who have lost parents.  I have a friend who lost her son, stillborn at 28 weeks.  My best friend lost her brother, almost 12 years ago.

As I read An Exact Replica and I hungrily devoured each message from The Sisterhood, I realized that in many, many situations I have not been good at acknowledging a friend’s loss.  Terrible, really.  My thinking was that by not saying anything, I could not make the friend’s grief worse.  What I didn’t get was that the “worst” had already happened; the rest is just the suckfulness that follows in its wake.  Remembering a person who was loved is not the thing that hurts, it’s the loss that hurts.  And maybe sometimes the seemingly not remembering.

So I suppose that the lesson, imperfect and blurry and rambling as it is, that I take from The Pregnancy That Is and Isn’t: acknowledge the loss.  That’s what You Sisters have done for me.  And my loss?  It is comparatively small (as though grief has degrees of worthiness).

Beyond acknowledging, I remember with you.  The dads you lost.  The mom.  The son (maybe I didn’t get to know him, but I know he will always be your child; I know his name).  The brother.

Thank you Sisterhood.  For a lot of things, not the least of which is taking your time to acknowledge little ol’ me and my nothingness, and for assuring me that I am in good company, even in less than good times.

Thank you Best Friend, in particular, for being so quick to confirm that my chosen course of action (or inaction) is exactly what you would do if you were in my shoes.  It is not at all lost on me that you said this four different times:  first, as I concluded I needed the D&C and scheduled it right away; second, as I cancelled the D&C in favor of the medication, which you quickly took to researching with me at some ridiculous early morning hour, like 8:00 or something; third, as I opted for a stronger dose of the medication; finally, as I decided to wait-and-see, you raging along with me at insurance-generated frustrations.  For all of that I tell you:  I would have made the exact same decision to move your baby’s crib into your room that you did.  Shoot, if given the opportunity to bring a newborn home again, I probably will do the exact same thing, as an homage to this friendship.  For you.

And while I’m not generally a shout-out kind of writer, to Best Friend, just one more thing:  I remember your brother, too.  In the moments of his mention, even the one that came up at the girl-gab-session during this Christmas holiday, I am horrible at finding the right words–sometimes at finding any words.  But that’s just because I am afraid of adding to your sadness.  Not because he’s getting too hard to remember.  I’ll keep remembering with you until we’re old and gray and not even entirely sure who we are anymore.

As for this Sunday afternoon and the days that follow, I’m waiting out nature.  Nature has until January 4th to get her stuff together.  I’d like to think the cramping that sent me back to bed today is a sign that the girl parts are all communicating, realizing The Nothingness, fomulating a plan so that I don’t have to.  Who knows.

In the meantime, I’m shopping for a dining room table.  The perfect one is out there somewhere.  It’s just a matter of finding it.  And then finding it at a fantastic discount.  And then initiating one of those You Won’t Believe How Much I Saved You conversations with The Husband . . . .

(By the way: the friend who recommended An Exact Replica gave me one of her extra copies.  Knowing now how many other women have been touched by the loss of a pregnancy (theirs or someone they love), and knowing how helpful it was to me, I will gladly forward the book to anyone who would like to read it.  Just send your mailing information to me at: othersuchshelby at yahoo.com.)