It's apparently been figured out, for the most part.

Saw my doctor today for my PID followup through his office. That took all of thirty seconds to go over, before we launched into discussions about an allergic reaction I had to witch hazel, of all things, and some other stuff.

He's of the opinion that I have Fibromyalgia. More specifically, a "mild" case. As in, I can still function without a problem, aside from being sore constantly.

Least it has a name, now! He also has other patients with the same problem, just varying degrees of it. Wants me to look in on Yoga, and to start stretching twice a day so I can keep ligaments and tendons somewhat limber as things progress, if they progress. I've also been instructed to keep an eye on any oddness with my sleeping habits. Namely, if I'm not getting restorative sleep, or I start having insomnia problems beyond a normal scope.

As of now, I haven't been refered to anyone else about the pain, nor have I been thrown on a bunch of medications to stop it/manage it/whatever else. It's just business as usual, with some minor adjustments, to see what's going on.

I'm going to go back to taking advantage of a day where my arms don't ache. Painting and such. Yay!

Getting my medical bill with Nashoba Valley Medical Center taken care of was ridiculously simple.

I went over there this afternoon, just to make sure they'd gotten the same letter I had from the state about my UCP coverage. They had, and they'd confirmed that I was covered just to keep things on the up and up. So, that end of things is taken care of. I was then advised that I should call the other outside billing sources to let them know what was going on, now that everyone actually had paperwork noting things were all set.

I just got off the phone with both places. All I need to do now is fill out a couple of fax cover sheets, fight with the fax machine upstairs, and send them both the letters stating I've got UCP coverage. From there, they will look into things, as for some reason neither of them can access my coverage information online like they should be able to, and adjust the bills to reflect what's going on.

So, for the moment? $2500 emergency room bill is gone. The other $597 for my ultrasound and just seeing the physician working in the ER are in semi-limbo, but look like they will be going bye-bye shortly as well.

It feels very nice to have been able to get this dealt with without asking my father for a solitary penny. He has offered to pay the remaining $597 worth of bills, as I got the gigantic one dealt with. I told him no, since I wanted to see what I could do with the UPC stuff first, and he just let me know that if I can't get those covered, he'll still foot the bill without a solitary word. I'm keeping it in mind, but I clearly don't think it's going to be necessary at all.

*Snoopy Dance*

I've gotten over the plague. It took some Zithromax, and a bunch of Mucinex, but things were finally booted out of my system after about a week. Yay!

Heard back from MassHealth, after the hospital in Ayer suggested I apply for Uncompensated Care Pool coverage for the biggest part of my bill, and also for general health care coverage as well.

It looks like I'll have UCP coverage. They said they "may" cover it, but after a phonecall I didn't even make to ask some questions (go go gadget dad, on that one), someone working in their offices said all I need to do is just talk to folks at the hospital again. Which was what I figured was the case to start with, so later on, I need to wander over to Ayer with my notification letter, sit down with the folks in billing, and get this hashed out. No big deal, there.

What is a bit of a big deal? They denied my health care coverage. Some crap about my income level (I'm unemployed and broke, so I know it's not that), my family size (it's just me), and my disability status (I'm not) preventing me from getting it.

However, the letter then proceeded to say I'm on a waiting list, as I do qualify for a program. That's where the big bout of confusion ensued, since they'd denied it for the above reasons, but suddenly I'm wait listed. Dad managed to weasel more info about things out of the person he spoke to. I'll explain why it was him in a few moments, here.

According to the person he talked to, the program has a cap of 43,000 people. There are 12,000 on the waiting list. And as of quite recently, they've been told to not release anyone into the program from the wait list, because the program is out of money.

So, anything that's being said by our lovely state government about how all sorts of federal funding goes toward all state health care programs is, essentially, a huge crock of bovine defication. It's also going to be a requirement as of next year that all residents of this state carry health insurance.

There's currently, at last tally they put out, at least 500,000 people in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts without coverage. With the deadline being July 2007, I've got this sneaking feeling that the plan the legislature put together is going to cause one great big migraine for anyone touching the budget, at this stage of the game. There's other stuff involved in this mess that I'm not overly fond of, like the $1,200 tax penalty you face if you hit the two year mark and still haven't gotten coverage. And the fact that they haven't figured out how they're going to do premium caps based on income levels for the state plans. I get the point of it, but unless they intend on having folks enrolled that can't meet the premiums without ditching off on other things like groceries and maybe paying another bill every month, it's looking like it may get quite interesting quite quickly.

As to the reason dad called? Well. He pitched a bit of a nutty when he saw the reasons in my denial letter. Years ago, well before I was born, he was denied coverage by the state for himself, his wife at the time, and their then unborn child. All because he made fifty cents more a year than he should've been to qualify for assistance with health coverage. So, he saw that I'm broke, and they cited my income level, and just went through the ceiling.

Can't say I blame him. He also made the call while I was asleep, so I had no idea he'd gotten ahold of anyone until he announced such when I got out of bed. Whoops?

So. I still can't afford to get all of my prescriptions filled. I have appointments with doctors that I need to either consider cancelling, or change around so that certain tests won't be run until I can afford them. Which means my gyn appointment now goes from being a follow-up to the PID and an annual exam, down to just the follow-up. I can't afford the hundreds of dollars in lab work that the pap smear will add up to, which means calling Planned Parenthood and having it done up there on a sliding scale, then carting my results over to my gyn's office when they roll in. Pain in my ass. I also have an appointment with my primary care for a PID follow-up in June. He just wants to make sure I'm okay on his own, and go over some other stuff, like how my migraines are doing and whatnot.

My physical is in July, so I've considered cancelling the June appointment. I won't, though, since I've got other things I need to discuss with him at that point. Like the chronic pain problems I've developped, getting more samples of Nasonex and Imitrex, and a couple of other things.

I've got job applications out there. My resume's been sent to a few places. Here's to hoping I actually find something.

Went to the movies with her, Justin, and another friend over the weekend. She picked something funky up at work, and naturally, as my immune system is about as useful as tits on a bull, I'm sick again.

Low grade fever, my throat feels like I've been gargling glass, I'm coughing so much I'm nearly throwing up, and some other fun little things. Yay, me!

I'll have NyQuil shortly, though, so I can finally get a nap and some relief from all the coughing. Back to bed I go.

Good things about today:

1. It was warm out. 72 degrees, windows were open, fan was on, all was nifty.

2. Dad's tax stuff to fork over to the accountant is pretty much done. Expenses for 2005 for his business. Yaaaay.

3. Might have employment lined up, depending on some stuff I have to do on Monday. Double yaaaaay.

4. Now that I'm done with the tax stuff, I can smite things on Guild Wars.

Sucky things about today:

1. Dad's expense reporting into QuickBooks took me 8.5 hours. My brain has leaked out of my eye sockets as a result.

2. Cramps. Thank God for darvocet.

3. The $2442.23 hospital bill from Nashoba Valley Medical Center for my emergency room visit, blood work, cultures, ultrasound, and miscellaneous doctor fees. The profanity was quite loud upon opening my mail today, thank you very much.

Time to shoo my cats out of here, shut the door, and run around in Guild Wars as my Elementalist. Yay, burning things!

Yep. You read that right. I'm feeling better than I was before.

I'm still keeping an eye on things, just to make sure nothing creeps back up to slap me senseless out of nowhere. In the meantime, I've been doing a vague amount of job hunting, while trying to get on top of spring cleaning. That hasn't quite worked as well as I'd have like it to, but whatever. I'll figure that stuff out eventually.

Now I'm mostly lamenting the fact that our tiny burst of warm weather went away. Which agitates me something fierce, since right before it went poof, I bought some paint that I can't use unless I'm in a well ventilated area. Being as it's currently 34 degrees outside, I really don't feel like jacking up our heating bill by opening windows, dressing like I'm going on an expedition to Anatarctica, and taking over the kitchen to paint a box I'll be storing perfume in. So that gets to wait.

I'm also debating the merits of trying to get a new blender. I don't know what happened to the one we have currently, but it decided it didn't want to totally blend the ice I was using for a daquiri a bit ago. Not that it mattered. After I got everything partly blended as far as the mix and ice were concerned, I realized we don't have any rum in the house. Spiffy. Oops? Drank it anyway. Partly, at least, before it mostly melted. Blech.

Off to do vague housework and such. Yaaaaay.

I'm officially a week in with my antibiotics. Have they helped? Yep. Do I still feel absolutely horrific? Yep.

Saw my doctor Thursday afternoon. He warned me that this infection has the distinct possibility of giving me scarring in some not so happy places. That stuff could also render it tricky, if not impossible, to have kids further down the line, if any shows up and happens to be bad enough. This falls right into the "shit I didn't need to hear" category. Can't do much about it, except what I'm told, which is to wait until I see the other doctor dealing with this in May. She might run another ultrasound to check things, blah blah blah.

Right now, due to a few other things going on, I'm absolutely exhausted. All I want to do is curl up in bed and sleep. I also had a fairly disheartening moment over folding some laundry today. Seems my shoulders and arms got eight towels in, decided to feel sore and like wet noodles, and I had to give up. Putting this on top of all the weird aches and pains I've been getting over the past six months or so, I'm looking at yet more medical crap I can't afford at the moment just to figure out what's going on. Thrilling. Better to know than not, though.

In some vaguely amusing news, it has been discovered that one of my cats likes pickles. Jynx ate a piece of one that fell out of a sub dad got me for dinner earlier. After that, he proceeded to stand on the kitchen counter, trying to stuff his face into my food to tug pickles out for himself. Loki, the other cat, stood there with this look of "WTF?" on his face the entire time.

I'm going back to bed. Bleeeeh.

No, really. It's totally screwed up. All that sleeping in funky positions from Thursday until the abdominal pains went away really messed it up.

Saw my chiropractor today, after dad pretty much booted me toward the phone to give her a call. She couldn't do any structural work on my spine at all, since everything in my back, and apparently everywhere else, is too tensed up to let anything happen. So, what I got was some kind of muscle work to try to move things around a little bit, which made it feel slightly better.

I'm sure by the time 10:45 tomorrow morning rolls around, it's going to be back to how it was earlier this afternoon. Which is to say, I was shuffling around the house hunched over like an 80 year old man. Spectacular. I know at least one side of my back is pinching a siatic nerve. The other seems to be partially there.

And because of what I was told at the hospital on Wednesday, I'm leery about taking any of my Darvocet to try to get my back to relax, which is something I'd do at any other time to ease things off. I'd be even more willing were it Vicodin.

Whatever. I'm going to go throw my heat pack in the microwave, and see if that helps a little bit.

I spent Wednesday night in the emergency room over in Ayer. Absolutely thrilling, let me tell you. Felt kind of crappy that morning, didn't think much of it, started having abdominal cramps, and just went back to bed after I ditched my NuvaRing. I did call the doctor when I took it out, since there was some abnormal stuff going on, there.

I woke up at 7pm in vast amounts of pain. We're talking weird cramps that made me cry. I was like that for about four hours solid, before I finally went upstairs after dad went to bed to let him know it had gotten worse. He asked if I wanted to go to the hospital, and my uninsured self was in the car pretty promptly at that point.

We were there until about 5am. My discharge sheet says I was discharged at 4:22am, but I had to wait half an hour for them to take out my IV, give me my aftercare stuff, my prescriptions, and the shot they required me to have before I could waltz out of there. I fear this bill. I also fear the bill for the ultrasound I was required to schedule and show up for later in the day.

What it boils down to is this: The NuvaRing can kiss my lily white ass. It gave me, over the course of the month I went from the first one to the second one I put in, a raging case of something called Pelvic Inflamatory Disease. Which is just a general catch-all term for a bacterial pelvic infection caused by a variety of different possibilities. Mine just so happened to be my birth control method.

I'm not quite as miserable as I was Wednesday and Thursday. Yesterday wasn't a total cakewalk, between doctor office stupidity where they lost an appointment I made and swore I was supposed to be there Wednesday, when that wasn't the case, and going to the gyn department of Lahey Clinic in Burlington to see my gyn for a mandatory follow-up about this glorious case of PID. I also get to be poked and prodded more over it by my primary care physician on Thursday, since I'm required to see him about this, too. Spectacular! Ugh.

Over the past few days, I've also gotten something like 26 hours of sleep. I'm still in pain. My back still hurts, there's still some vague cramping here and there, I'm likely still running a bit of a fever (it was 99 when I was triaged, and 100 when I was discharged from the ER), and I'm just generally in a foul mood.

I'm also on two different antibiotics, and Motrin for the pain. So it's 500mgs of Flagyl twice a day for 14 days (this stuff makes everything taste like metal, to top it off), 100mgs of Doxycycline twice a day for 14 days (I didn't know until I read the prescribing info that this stuff not only treats bacterial infections like the one I have, but a few choice STDs, and Malaria...that's dandy), and 800mgs of Motrin three times a day. All of this causes my stomach a good clip of upset. I don't like it, but there's not much I can do about it.

Oh, and Motrin really doesn't do a whole heaping load for the pain I'm in, since all it is is ibuprofen in the first place. I've been taking 800mgs of ibuprofen for normal aches and pains associated with damn near everything in my body since I was 17. I think I've built up a large tolerance to it, but...this is what they gave me, and they swear it'll do the job. I've eyed my Darvocet a few times, but I have no idea what that'll do when thrown down with the other crap I'm on, so I haven't bothered.

I think right now, I might cart myself the few feet back to my bed. Sprawl for awhile, and see if my cats decide to curl up and purr alot to make me feel better. If not, I'll just take a nap or something. Yay, sleep.

Ugh. I'd like to find out who gave me this bug I've come down with. I think it was dad. If it was, I should really kick him for it.

Either way, I feel miserable. My sinuses are so clogged that nothing is moving. For the past four days, it's been all yellow gunk out of them, anyway, which generally indicates that my sinusitis problems have come around to punch me in the skull. Yay for chronic sinus infections. And I'm out of Nasonex, which seems to be the only thing that prevents this shit from happening on a constant basis.

Trying to track down an accurate temperature is like herding cats, on top of everything else. One minute, I'm baking. The next minute, I'm freezing and sweating. Then this stops for a few hours, and starts up again. I normally run at about 97.5 for a body temp. Everything that keeps popping up on the thermometer hasn't gone any higher than 98.6. I hit 99, I usually feel like I'm sitting at somewhere around 101. Bleeeh.

Thank God I have boxes of Sudafed Severe Cold, DayQuil, and NyQuil in the medicine cabinet. Took Sudafed a few hours ago, and got some crap to drain out of my sinuses, which is good. I can breathe a bit better. Otherwise, it didn't do much at all to help. Not that I'm shocked or anything. I'll take more before I go back to bed.

Speaking of bed, I went to sleep around 5am. I didn't roll my ass out of there until about 10pm. 15 hours of sleep, without the benefit of anything that knocks me out for that long. I am, according to dad, officially sick as hell. He left me alone all day, and when I woke up, he seemed to be a bit concerned until he said hello, and heard how I sounded when I retorted. Made pancakes for me, so I had something to eat. After those were consumed, I got on the phone with Chris, and crawled into bed to watch Impact.

Now I'm just waitin' til I get tired again. We're also supposedly getting a blizzard today, so it's not like I have anywhere I need to be later. May also sling half a Xanax at my system, so my TMJ doesn't decide it'd be nice for my jaw to weld completely shut. Sinus pressure on top of that would likely wreck me at this point. Plus, if my jaw's all screwed up, everything gets so tense that nothing drains out of my sinuses in the first place.

Murr. Gonna go make another mug of tea, or somethin'.