Home sick.....

It's a typically snowy winter day here in NE Ohio and it finds me home sick from work running a low grade fever that is accompanying what seems to be a bad head cold. I feel perfectly miserable and hate to miss work when I have so much I need to get done this week, but you have to put your health first. Especially when you are my age (50), you can't just drag yourself to work feeling half baked and try to push your way through the day and then come home and collapse on the couch feeling sicker than you were at day's start. I have tons of unused sick time avaiable to me, so why not use it when my body says it needs to stay home and in bed sick? It makes no sense to contaminate other people at work and leave us even shorter handed than we usually are this time of year as it is. So I'm sitting here in my pj's feeling miserable and drinking hot herb tea and planning on catnapping off and on all day so that I can (hopefully) feel well enough in the morning to get back to work.

DOCTOR VISIT:
Ironically, I had to go to the doctor yesterday for a quarterly check up (and I felt fine when I was there, go figure...). In November I had chest pains that resulted in extensive cardiac testing and I found out yesterday that my heart is in better shape than some folks younger than me. I can thank doing fitness training for the past year for that. But one distressing bit of news is that the doctor, owing to my age, wants me to go for a colonoscopy in a few weeks. It sounds downright unpleasant and awful and I am dreading it to death, but when you get to be 50, they want to poke and prod and look inside and do all kinds of screenings and such. What worries me about this, besides the unpleasantness of it all, is that any kind of testing procedure is not covered by insurance, so however much it costs to do this test is going to come out of my pocket, and I am predicting that it will cost close to $1000, if not over $1000, to do this test. I am still paying down last year's deductible from an MRI on my left knee, so I am in no position to rack up more medical debt. It's a crying shame that these kinds of life saving medical procedures fall under "deductible" and that patients are expected to pay for them out of their own pockets. Is it any wonder that so few people go in for necessary medical screenings that could save their lives?

And sadly, Americans won't stand for anything that smacks of "socialism", even though we already have Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which are, in a manner of speaking "socialism". We need single payer health care, but I am not the slightest bit optimistic that it will happen in my lifetime. Most of the front runner Presidential candidates want to bring Big Pharma and Big Insurance to the negotiating table to talk them into lowering their prices, but we need to get these corporate leeches out of the picture altogether and just go with a good single payer system that will make everything far more streamlined and efficient and will let doctors and medical professionals practice their professions without the interference of the insurance companies.

I'm going to ask my medical insurer if this colonoscopy will come out of my own pocket, and if so, how much can I expect to pay. If it's going to be a big whopping amount, I might go ahead and cancel the thing until I can better afford it. I know that this is a needed procedure, but I am not made of money. Gas prices and heating bills are through the roof this year and I'm struggling just to pay those, let alone the cost of groceries and everything else. I can't believe how high gas prices have gone in the past year or two and they make all kinds of stupid excuses as to why, but when you figure the amount of gas/oil it's taking to fight this ridiculous war in Iraq, you can surely see why we're paying $3+ a gallon at the pump. Everything is linked, and no one sees why the cost of living has so skyrocketed in the past few years. Four letters, I-R-A-Q. But I doubt that we'll be out of there before my retirement in 2013. Endless war seems to be our lot in life. And no one's proposing to end it. They all talk perpetuating it until each and every terrorist is dead or captured, but they are like a hydra - kill one and more pop up to replace them. They are not going away until we stop our imperialistic adventures around the world. And even then....they have plenty of reason to hate us for the damage we've inflicted on their people and their countries and plenty of good motives to seek revenge.

Yeah, I'm hopping mad at pols....every reason to be. No one's got a good answer to the problems that the Bushites have created, and the talk is that it will take generations to repair the damage that they've done, but hey, people voted for these idiots, now they have to live with a damaged world that they are leaving behind as they skulk out of Washington in a year. I just hope that history is brutal with these people and that they go down as the single worst administration in history, worse than Harding and Nixon combined.

OK, this rather wandered off topic, but oh, well.....so it goes......