I feel better on this Friday morning after surviving another painful week. This felt like a long one, full of stress and anxiety. My medical bill showed up in my inbox last night, and I wasn’t prepared for the cost. For the first time, a hospital had sent it to my email. I opened it to read VIEW MY BILL, and after I clicked on the link, my vision blurred when I saw the total. Over eight hundred dollars for my visit. The actual total was over fourteen hundred dollars, but my pathetic insurance covered only five hundred something after I’d waited to see a doctor for over two hours on a Monday night in a crowded room with a numb left hand. The doctor didn’t even touch me. Shouldn’t she have at least felt my hand for that much money? The nurses didn’t hook me up to anything. They didn’t use any equipment. She just diagnosed me as having ulnar nerve entrapment and referred me to a specialist who never called me back after a month.

The medical world today is broken. Doctors must be greedy. How else can I explain the cost of seeing one? This doesn’t include my trip to urgent care, where the doctor at least held my hand and asked if I felt anything.

I told him, “Yes, a little.”

“This could be a mini stroke,” he said. “I suggest you go to the hospital and get x-rays.”

…Only for the doctor at the hospital to roll her eyes and say he was wrong. Don’t I get a discount of some sort? And what does my insurance think to where they decide to cover only five hundred dollars of the bill?

I don’t have it as bad as my father. He broke his tooth from chewing on peanuts. Now he has been missing one since last November. He went to the dentist the same week, and the dentist told him he would have to wait for a new one. Where’s the tooth coming from? Singapore? Do they have to ship the new tooth by FedEx?

It’s now September of the next year, and the tooth still hasn’t arrived. The dentist will call him when he’s ready to apply it, and my father will have to pay over ten thousand dollars: the price of a used car. To believe he has gone this long without a tooth is nearly impossible. I would think it’s a medical emergency to miss one because people have to chew their food. And I could only imagine the pain my father was suffering after the tooth fell out. But he seems to be doing fine now without it.

Anyway, like I said, we have to value our health first and foremost, which is why it’s the most expensive cost of all. We work just to pay our medical bills, at least for me who doesn’t make enough already. I’ll have to pay for the bill with my credit card and fall deeper into debt after paying a speeding ticket which I’ll take blame for. My credit card was in such good shape a few months ago. Maybe I should’ve never taken myself to urgent care and left my hand alone. Thank God I can feel it again, and maybe it’s a blessing that the hand specialist will never call me.