With the rising inflammation, my cardiac cough has made a comeback. Love that lupus, too.
My husband’s employer with great fanfare in November told us that they now had an advocacy setup for healthcare for the chronically ill among their employees’ families; someone to turn to if insurance was being difficult over a needed med.
My Dr. R called me today, frustrated. Our Blue Cross PPO was resisting ok’ing the Humira; he was hoping I would nevertheless get a phone call from Caremark, their pharmaceutical distributor, today, saying they were sending it, and he made a point of telling me to tell them to FedEx it, to tell them it was an emergency. Well, yeah–and I’d pay the extra for weekend morning delivery too if need be in a heartbeat.
I decided to call that advocacy number; it was morning, when my energy is at very low ebb, but I needed to get the ball rolling. I got an RN willing to answer health questions, but as for the promised service, well, I guess someone got laid off? The nurse transferred me instead to the number at Blue Cross so I could go argue for myself.
And she sent me to the wrong number.
The person who answered didn’t know how I got there, but knew, after taking my identification, that I was in the wrong place and started to tell me that. Lucky for me, I was too deaf to immediately get what she was saying, and in a voice that surprised me at how very thin I sounded, with no whine, no complaint, I simply stated a terribly-vulnerable truth: “I am trying not to die.”
That stopped her short. I continued, “I need Humira.”
We spoke slightly, and I said, “I have Crohn’s. I’ve run through every other drug on the market. I need Humira.” It took me several breaths to get that out; I guess morning was the right time to call after all.
Her voice softened a bit. She told me this was the provider line, that I needed to call the patient number on my insurance card. I thanked her, and meant it; that little bit of improvement in her voice, no longer resisting me, was important to me.
I didn’t call the patient number. Dr. R’s working hard enough and I was hesitant to go further to mess things up for him. I was too tired to hold the phone any more at that point anyway.
But I realized I had been routed to the same number where Dr. R would have been passionately arguing for me. And I knew I had offered this woman a stark moral choice: would she, on whatever level was available to her, advocate now for me? There was no denying the truth in my words–I knew she felt them.
Or would she turn away?
It’s after 5:00 pm Pacific, and Caremark has not called me yet.