I haven’t been writing this week because I have been sick, and in case I had some terrible chronic illness, decided I did not want to chronicle it on the internet. However, since I’ve now been to see a doctor, and there is a medical record out there documenting these symptoms, I don’t think blogging about it is going to ruin my future with the insurance industry. Also, it turns out I have allergies.
Allergies, you say? How could you mistake such a thing for a terrible chronic illness? Isn’t it kind of obvious when you have allergies? Apparently not. Or not to me anyway.
All of this started last Wednesday when I woke up feeling like I should not have woken up. I was exhausted, despite getting 8 hours of sleep, and felt dizzy. I went to work as usual, but had to keep apologizing all day for my stupidity. As I described it to a coworker, I felt like in the Sims (which, if you never played it, involved creating characters and having them walk around the house doing things to earn energy, health, wealth, and happiness points) when the characters run out of energy and fall asleep wherever they are standing. I felt completely drained.
Thursday morning, I dragged myself out of bed, and sat at the kitchen table feeling dizzy and exhausted… and then I went back to bed. I slept for a couple hours, hauled myself out of bed again, and decided to go into the office. By the time I got there, I was once more seeing everything through a blur. I could focus – but it required effort on my part. I stayed at work for a couple hours and then went home and slept for 11 hours. I spent Friday, Saturday, and most of the day yesterday in bed. I could get up to eat, each day I made sure to get out of the house at least for a quick walk, but my symptoms remained – I felt exhausted no matter how much I slept, and dizzy if I pushed myself at all.
By Saturday I was a little scared. There are a lot of possible causes for “fatigue” (other than not sleeping) and most of them are at least a little worrisome. On top of that, I have no health insurance, and no doctor in Philadelphia. On Saturday I started looking up free clinics, but they were all closed for the weekend, so I spent another couple days imagining permanent disability scenarios and trying to distract myself by watching movies on Hulu, which worked except when it started to hurt to look at the screen and I had to just lie there with my eyes closed, worrying. I really have way too vivid of an imagination.
This morning I went in to one of Philadelphia’s city clinics, which happens to be nearby where I am staying. I waited for 20 minutes, and then they told me their walk-in slots were full for the morning, and I could make an appointment… but to do so I would have to prove that I lived in Philadelphia. Unless they were willing to take the New Yorker as a reference, that was not a possibility. I walked home freaked out and despairing. I found another clinic online that isn’t too far away and called; to be a patient, they had to do a full physical, and couldn’t schedule one until November. I started panicking, and asked where I could go, and they said that I could go in as an acute patient walk-in. Off I went. I signed in at the clinic – in both clinics I was the only white patient and very aware of the fact that I am a visitor in the land of no-health-insurance, and not a permanent resident, which was a strange feeling. After a few minutes the nurse pulled me aside and told me that they could not see me because I needed to have a physical, and could I wait until next Monday? I broke down into tears. At this point I was on the edge of a panic attack; helplessness is my least favorite feeling, and five days of feeling unable to do anything had definitely worn on me. Add to that growing numbers of obstacles preventing me from seeing a doctor and getting fixed, and I fell apart.
Luckily, tears did the trick. The nurse found a doctor, and some tissues, and the doctor said in fact they could see me as an acute patient, even though I did not have a file. I took some deep breaths, stopped shaking, and went to fill out the paperwork.
How strange to sit down and tell someone that I have no income, and try not to feel shame. I know that I am doing something worthwhile; but at the moment, having given up health insurance, and a well-paying job, surrounded by people who haven’t had the privileges of education and access that I have had, who didn’t choose to be there, I felt ashamed of myself. Little white girl running off to save the world, cutting in line at the clinic with a few panicked tears.
Anyway, it was only $20 to see the doctor, and she pronounced pretty quickly that I have allergies. Even though I haven’t felt congested, she said my ear canal was plugged, and my nose was blocked up. The ear canal explains the dizziness, and the fatigue could be caused by bad sleep (even if I feel like I’m sleeping a lot, I could actually be sleeping badly because it’s hard to breath) or by my immune system releasing some kind of chemicals that make me feel tired so that I will rest and it can fight off the allergens (so says the internet anyway). She prescribed me a steroidal nasal spray, and gave me some children’s Claritin, which is all they had on hand. Hopefully these things will fix me in the next couple days.
I’m not quite sure what to make of the whole experience. On the one hand: I will be a lot more conscious about giving up health insurance in the future. You’d think I’d have learned that lesson already, with all the health problems I have had this year, but somehow it did not quite sink in until Saturday, when I started panicking about the fact that I could not just go to the doctor. (Though, in reality, I know that if I need to go, and couldn’t afford to, my family would step in and help me out, which again, sets me apart from a lot of the other people in that clinic today.)
On the other hand: this reinforces to me the importance of this election, and the importance of electing Obama. McCain’s “spending freeze” would definitely affect all the people getting primary health care in government sponsored clinics, and the people on Medicaid and Medicare. His plan for taxing employer-sponsored insurance would throw even more people off the insurance rolls. Obama may have a hard time of it, in the current financial climate, but I know he will at least push to improve the state of healthcare in this country, so that no one needs to worry about whether they can go to the doctor. So I’m glad I’m here, even if it hasn’t been very fun the last few days; as long as I can get back to work tomorrow, it will be worth it.
