This will be a brief post. While visiting family in Maine, I am pretty sure I slipped a disk. It hurts like hell down my left leg, thigh and shin, there’s shooting pain in my buttocks, and muscle weakness. I’m limping like an old mare that’s ready for the glue factory. I’m a pretty athletic guy, so this is a real problem.
But I got laid off from work several weeks ago, and don’t have a stable income. I can’t afford an ACA plan. Not that I ever got got a call back from a healthcare navigator in Tennessee, the state where I live, when I called to set up a plan. No one answered the phone, no one responded to email, no one responded to voicemails.
Tennessee is also a state that didn’t expand Medicaid and is in the process of dismantling its state-based health care program for low-income residents, TennCare.
So I’ve been doing stretches, trying to avoid lifting, and making sure I don’t drive for too long without getting up to walk around. Some days the pain is worse than others, and sometimes it disappears entirely. Mornings seem to be the worst.
But hot damn: if I have to go to the doctor it’s going to take a bite out of my savings. I can’t imagine if surgery is required. I may have to relocate back to Pennsylvania (and quickly!) if I want to get care that seems to be pretty necessary. That state, for all its flaws, was smart enough to replace its idiot Republican governor with a Democrat, who immediately expanded Medicaid. But even that will take a few weeks or days, and I have things to attend to in Tennessee.
On a semi-related note, I’m writing from Montréal, where I dropped my kid off with his mom. I typically stay over for a day or two after the trip (if you don’t mind saving money going the hostel route, and I don’t mind at all, I highly recommend Alexandrie Hostel Montreal).
Every time I come up here, I am tempted to just never come back. The fact that health care is available to everyone in Canada—REALLY available, not this verkakte “health care access” as we pretend in the US—is one of the many reasons why. It ain’t perfect up here, but at least you can get a standard of care without going bankrupt.
In the meantime, ouch.
The only way out of this fucking mess is single payer health care. Insurance companies have to be relegated to supplemental insurance only, . Corporations should be required to contribute a percent of compensation to Medicare to help pay for it.
Since you are in Canada, can you get help while you are there?
Who is going to administer the single payer plan? How will the system work? In Canada a large bureaucracy has been built in every province to deliver the services and work done by private insurers in the US. Fifty states are going to build the infrastructure, hire and train staff, and then actually efficiently do the work of delivering healthcare to three hundred and fifteen million people? How long will that take?
Sounds like sciatica.*
Try ibuprofen 800mg every 6-8 hours…assuming you aren’t allergic or have any kidney issues. You can also take 500mg Tylenol with the ibuprofen as long as you aren’t allergic, or have any liver issues/daily drinker. It should help a little bit with some of the pain. Just make sure you stay under 3 grams/day of Tylenol.
If you can find a cheap one, try getting a massage.This might help with some of the potential muscle inflammation.
You could also try an urgent care. You probably don’t need an XRay, just something to help with the pain.
The US Healthcare system is inherently bad. It is so expensive that people don’t use it at the beginning of an issue, and then an acute condition becomes chronic. So, I’d try to get yourself into an urgent care when possible.
*None of these are diagnoses, and if its sciatica, it’s likely going to be a chronic and permanent issue. A MD may give you something like meloxicam, cyclobenzaprine, or even gabapentin.
Maybe these are just in Canada, but I have seen also some “pain clinics” which offer physiotherapy, massage, and acupuncture to help with chronic pain, as well as lifestyle advice like occupational therapy to prevent recurrences. They might want you to have an xray first to make sure of the diagnosis. Good luck and hope you are better soon.
Our health care system, such as it is, is more than stupid; it is cruel.
The other day I read of a murder-suicide involving an elderly couple who, in their suicide note, said that after bankruptcy and continued medical bills, they had no other option. That people like them regularly find themselves in varying degrees of a situation like that in a country that is as wealthy as ours, is an absurd cruelty that happens damn near nowhere in the world but here.
Ours may be the only country in the “developed” world where you can work your entire life, and then because the company you work for decides to lay you off through no fault of your own, suddenly you are no longer *deserving* of healthcare. Or lose everything as a result of getting sick, even with health insurance.
That is because healthcare in the US is a profit center to be exploited, which makes it diametrically opposed to being a right; it must be “earned.”
America’s god is not the god of the Christian Bible, as the pious here never miss a chance to insist; its money. Money is America’s god.
Got that right. They will drive you to bankruptcy and hound you to the ends of the earth. Because profit.