Y'just never know...

Y’just never know…

I barely noticed it at first. A twinge, momentarily crossing into awareness, then vanishing amid the day’s distractions. But it kept coming back, a little more insistent, a little more intense. The more I tried to put it out of my mind, the more it crept back in.

As a gentleman of a certain age, a persistent unexplained pain along the breastbone, however slight, tends to focus attention upon itself. Tums didn’t make it go away. Advil didn’t make it go away. A deep and profound belch had no effect whatsoever. It didn’t fit the dire descriptions of impending coronary shutdown that turned up on Google and dwelt in my mind, but still … my chest hurt.

And, I remembered how, paycheck after paycheck, that insurance premium was taken right off the top.

Therefore, I had no good excuses to offer up to St. Peter if this was what I was convincing myself it just might be.

I checked into the ER to be checked out.

Within minutes I had enough wires attached to me that I felt like a one-man Googleplex, lighting up a small roomful of monitors that commanded the attention of a rapt audience of several.

The result: Nothing. But the soreness had not gone away.

More tests.

Nothing.

Now this was several years ago, in mid-February, a few days after a nasty ice storm. When the ER doc asked if anything unusual had happened to me recently, I related that coming out of the house I’d ignored the ice and executed a spectacularly undignified pratfall that left me sprawled flat on my back down the front steps, head on the porch, feet on the sidewalk…

With an “ah-ha” look he did a bit more poking and prodding and pronounced me out of mortal danger, suffering from the aftereffects of an unfortunate gravitational encounter. He prescribed time and three-days’ dosing of super-Advil and sent me on my way.

The bill, they sent to the insurance company. Which, as was appropriate, paid it.

That that might happen in the future is not so certain.

Earlier this month the nation’s biggest medical insurance company announced that it was no longer going to pay for emergency room treatments unless, in its view, they were real emergencies. A great hue and cry resulted in their temporarily rescinding the decision, but once the current “national health emergency period” is over, all bets are off.

In other words, the ultimate decision on whether your medical emergency is really an emergency will not be made by you or your family, but an anonymous back-room data-gnome whose job evaluation hinges on money saved for the company – well after you’ve been diagnosed, treated and discharged.

And if what you thought might be a heart attack wasn’t, well…

In other words, if they decide your owwie wasn’t bad enough, you’re stuck with the bill. All those premiums they collect? Fuggetaboutit…

Now I’m guessing that that pixel-pushing gnome would likely take a dim view of an ER visit to deal with minor soreness from some three-day-old bruising that was easily treated with over-the-counter analgesics. But that wasn’t the diagnosis in my mind as I made last-minute revisions to my last will and testament as the electrodes were attached to my chest. Sick people, hurting people, scared people aren’t necessarily the best diagnosticians, ill-equipped to determine if a sudden abdominal pain is an appendix about to rupture or a temporarily trapped fart.

That pain, that odd feeling, that persistent feel-bad? It could be nothing. Or it could kill ya … in which case you want to do something about it. Now.

That makes it an emergency. Better to be relieved of bad gas in an ER cubicle than to have an infected appendix go pop! in the living room.

And if the greedy little gnomes don’t like it, maybe they should start paying for funerals.