It's always something.....

Hardly a year seems to go by anymore that some part of my body doesn't give me problems. Lately it has been my left shoulder and elbow. I know what the problem is with the elbow. It's technically called "lateral epicondylitis", or to put it quite simply, tennis elbow. I had it in my right arm a few years ago and received physical therapy for it, but now I can no longer afford to do that. The shoulder has been nagging me for a few weeks now and I have already had one massotherapy session for it, which was terribly painful, but gratifying. It was painful in a good way. I don't know what the problem seems to be. I suspect a touch of tendinitis or something. I don't know. All I know is that the pain radiates from the top of my shoulder down the outside of my upper arm. It's quite frankly driving me quite nuts and I hope that my left arm is fully healthy by the end of summer. I will be receiving monthly massotherapy treatments and doing what I can do stretch and strengthen my arm as much as I can tolerate, given how painful it has been lately. I wish I could afford physical therapy but they usually want you to go at least two to three times a week for 6 weeks and that can add up financially, so I can't really afford to do that anymore with the co-pays. I can't even afford to go to my orthopaedic surgeon because with my insurance, if I see anything other than my primary care doctor, I am charged as if I have been in the hospital, and I just can't afford that. My health insurance basically means that I pay the bill for my health care, not them. So it's quite pointless to have health insurance when it doesn't pay for anything anymore. All I can hope for right now is that self treatment combined with regular massotherapy treatments will help to heal my injuries and get me back to my old self again. It's just a shame that the older I become, the less insurance I have. I am now among the ranks of the underinsured, and there are millions of us in addition to uninsured people. There's definitely something terribly wrong in the richest country in the world when probably over half of the population finds itself dangerously vulnerable to not having enough access to health care due to the financial burden of paying for it. Shameful. Sadly, it's going to be impossible to change anything because there's too much money and power wound up in our health care system to change it to give everyone access, regardless of age, gender, health or what have you. So I will be patient and hope that the pain in my left arm mends over time without access to standard medical intervention that I can no longer afford.