Under the seams runs the pain.

-Anne Carson

While I admit to being on the lucky end of the spectrum of American Healthcare users, in that my partner and I both have solid jobs with decent medical coverage, it’s still a hell of a thing to navigate. At the end of last year, we finally ditched Kaiser and moved over to Blue Shield.

Kaiser is fine if you’re healthy. It’s convenient, everything is on one campus, their online interface is pretty good when it comes to making appointments and ordering prescriptions. However, if you have some on going medical issue or got forbid you’re trying to figure out what’s wrong with you, Kaiser is a nightmare. After like, seriously, twelve years of working with Kaiser to try to figure out my health and why it IS the way that it IS, we finally decided that something else couldn’t possibly be worse than constantly being gaslit by Kaiser about what was or was not in my head.

So in January of this year, I had to learn how to navigate an entirely new system. The system assigned me a doctor that I didn’t care for, so it took time to research and find a new one, and then I had to wait for the beginning of the month before I could schedule an appointment with her. Then, she gave me some referrals in March and I could schedule those appointments for July and August respectively.

I’m pretty good at navigating complex systems and bureaucracy because of my job, but I can’t imagine being successful at this if I was working two jobs or had minimum education or didn’t speak English. God, everything is so needlessly difficult.

The good news is, after seven months of no migraine medication, I now have a neurologist and am back on the juice. But I realized I’ve been really, truly, extremely struggling to accomplish things this year and it took me a while to connect that with the constant searing pain in my brain. Probably because of the constant searing pain in my brain, actually. But now that I’m medicated (and medicated at the right dosage, thanks for nothing Kaiser), suddenly I can do things again. Write, edit, sit at a computer.

So hopefully things start to flow a little easier. The fact that I actually want to write is a great sign. I have a lot of irons in the fire; I’ve always been the kind of person to work on multiple projects at once, so it’s always fun to see what makes it to the finish line first.

I hope that not everyone has been struggling as much as I have, but things are looking up! My brain hurts less, I’m suddenly and suspiciously cautiously hopeful about the upcoming election, and with the end of summer comes the beginning of Halloween season, THANK GOD. 🎃 Truly my time to shine.