My parents sleep with the door open (don't get me started) and our bedroom doors are separated by a 2 square foot bit of carpet at the top of the stairs. The main part of our house, our bedrooms and the living room and kitchen beneath them are over 100 years old and were part of a farmhouse before the area was made residential. People that have been in my house would think this is weird considering that my house, along with a few other houses both on my street and in the surrounding area, is a duplex. The interesting thing about that is that all of the other duplexes are laid out exactly the same way, exactly the same as my neighbor's side of our house and Herbert's a few blocks away: a basement, 3 rooms downstairs, 2 upstairs with an upstairs bathroom, and an attic.
But my house isn't laid out that way, and it's the only one not-- so basically things were built up and around these four little rooms. The point I'm trying to make is my house is old, and the stairs between my bedroom and my parents bedroom are old and creaky, and I have to go down them to get to the bathroom because our bathroom is tacked on to back end of the downstairs because our house was built without a bathroom. That's how old it is.
So the point I'm trying to get at is I often wake my parents on my way downstairs to shower, so it's not unusual that I wake them, then they have to use the bathroom because they're really old and always have to go to the bathroom (Hi, Mom!).
The other night this happened, so I wasn't surprised to see my mother in our living room on my way back upstairs after my shower. I was surprised she didn't need the bathroom...and I was even more surprised that she was crying.
Like so many others, we're struggling right now, financially. We're only getting a fraction of what we should be because my father was forced out of a job when he retired from his union and they threatened to take away his pension and benefits if he took a position having anything to do with plumbing-- which is ridiculous and illegal and we can't afford to press charges. I'm not going to go into the levels of sick there.
So now we're trying to find me a gynecologist, but since New Jersey raised the doctors' malpractice insurance rates to the highest in the country a lot of specialists left the state, so only the really wealthy could afford to stay, which means they're all at least twenty minutes away in the "old money" section of the state or in Pennsylvania- so I can't find a male gynecologist within a half-hour of my house that takes our insurance. Yes, male. I'll post about female doctors one day, but not today.
And I have to leave my regular doctor. I stopped seeing a pediatrician when I was 6 when he almost killed my brother Mick. So I started seeing our family doctor, so now it's been-- what, 17 years? But my insurance no longer takes out-of-network doctors so I have to leave him. There aren't any in-network doctors nearby, so we have to go to an out-of-network doctor that at one time was a business partner of my now-ex doctor but they split up their practice after they got caught taking bribes from a lab to only use that particular lab and then not claiming it on their taxes. So they broke apart the practice. Anyway, so we have to go to the other guy, but he charges 3 times his usual rate for the first appointment and we all need to go see him because our prescriptions are no good because they were written by the other doctor, so no longer covered so we'd have to pay full price for them.
Full price for prescriptions. To put this into perspective, I take 11 pills every morning, and 11 pills every night.
That's 77 pills a week. My stomach medicine alone, with insurance, is $50. Without insurance? $1500.
The good news is if I do have endometriosis (that's the good news!!) I can stop taking those and go on a cheaper stomach pill-- but I'm going to need more medicine for the endometriosis.
So you see why my mother was crying? And why our family's theme song is "Living on a Prayer"?
God, I need a job.
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