Frosted

Yesterday I had two slices of chocolate cake for lunch. And yet another for dinner. This is so not my usual behavior, but then again, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Sigh. Desperate is surely an exaggeration but then again, this is undoubtedly an interesting moment in history.

2017 started off with a bang when I tried to pay my health insurance premium for January. To great consternation, I found myself locked out of my own online account. Never, ever, a good sign.

It was a holiday weekend so I had to wait until January 3rd to speak with a representative at BeneDirect, the company that manages my health insurance through COBRA. The pleasant young woman on the other end of the line confirmed that due to non payment in December my policy had been terminated.

Isn’t that an awful word–terminated? Right up there with terminal. No good has ever come of either one of them. Were I Queen they’d both have their heads lopped off.

Speaking of heads, what’s inside mine is nowhere near as sharp as it once was. I’d never knowingly miss a COBRA payment, understanding only too well how much is at stake. I am undoubtedly any health insurance company’s worst nightmare–having been in treatment for lung cancer for almost twelve years now. And being denied health insurance is my worst nightmare.

Fuck, fuck and more fuck. My only option was to file an appeal. Well of course I got right on that and faxed if off that very afternoon. And just to make sure nothing fell through the cracks, I call BeneDirect when I returned home to see if they’d received the fax. Confusingly, this representative told me that no, I had not in fact been terminated. That due to the holiday weekend lots of people had been late with their payments. And if I overnighted payment for December and January, my policy would remain intact. One more trip to FedEx and a big sigh of relief.

Until two days later when I received an email from the human resources representative at my ex-husband’s place of employment (they administer my cobra) informing me that in fact, my policy was kaput.

Many phone calls, emails, a few tears and several days of additional anxiety later, I logged on to see that my policy had been reinstated.

Man oh man oh man. I only have one more year of COBRA before being thrown to the free market (or the wolves, depending on how this administration sorts things out) but I’d rather not have to deal with that shit yet. Of course that doesn’t mean I can relax either. Like everyone else dealing with a chronic condition, I am nervous as hell that preexisting conditions and lifetime caps will in fact be reinstated.

And if that happens, we can always just eat cake.

xo