I am really struggling today. 😦 My insurance company denied my doctor’s request for an MRI, so even though he got on the phone and argued with them, I received two separate letters “explaining” the denial. They want me to do six weeks of physical therapy in order for them to agree to an MRI. Does this sound even remotely cost-effective to any of you? Yeah, I didn’t think so. I will be writing my own appeal letter this coming week because, quite frankly, I don’t appreciate being told “Unless you have cancer…” as one of the reasons why they would be willing to pay for it. Most of their reasoning is bullshit, and they know it as well as I do. My doctor was at such a loss, because he didn’t understand their explanations, either. He asked me if I wanted to even pursue this further and I said “I need to know what is causing this and how to proceed. I don’t want to live with un-diagnosed damage.” He agreed with me, and I was glad that he’d spent a week arguing with them before calling me back. Very few doctors would be willing to do that.

My father experienced a lot of pain in his shoulder for months before finally listening to me and going to the doctor. He kept thinking, much like I often do, that he’d slept on it funny. An x-ray showed a broken shoulder and bones in his arm were also badly broken. The doctor was confused, because these aren’t normal breaks one gets without an underlying issue. Because x-rays only show bone (my x-rays show nothing but perfect bone), it was an MRI that showed a baseball sized tumor on his shoulder, which is what caused the broken bones and resulted in major surgery and reconstruction of the bones. It was a tumor that, when removed, it took additional time to get it out because it was bigger than what the MRI showed. I believe the words “It was more like a softball than a baseball.” were used. I don’t know what is going on with my neck at this point, but I do know I am in excruciating pain, experiencing a lot more paralysis (Most nights, I cannot move or vocalize the paralysis, so I just lie here, hoping it will pass. I am awake the entire time, even though it looks as though I am asleep. I’m not, but I can’t scream out for help.), and I can’t deal with it for another minute. Physical therapy will only result in me screaming the second someone touches me. This should be an interesting experience for someone trying to assess me.

There is legitimately too much stress going on in my life right now. Jumping through hoops for my insurance company isn’t on my list of “things I’d like to do”, but I am NOT forcing myself to do anything until I exhaust the appeals process.

As I sit here bone-tired from lack of sleep, feeling guilty that I can’t run errands like a normal person, I desperately want to sit and cry. Unfortunately, I currently lack the emotion to do so.

A rainy Saturday being ignored by my cats. When two feels like twenty, it’s terribly exhausting on top of the fact that I couldn’t sleep, have a migraine, and everything is dull and uninteresting to me. I hope I come back as someone’s beloved cat because being human isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. 😦