Friday evening

I'm so mad, I could spit nails.

I got a call at home tonight from the disability insurance company. To make a long and incredibly frustrating conversation shorter, when the disability insurance company approved my doctor's request that I be permitted to go back to work 3/4 time (6 hours a day), they FAILED to tell me that nonetheless I would be charged 1/2 day of disability for every day I worked 6 hours. In other words, they would treat me as if I were only working 4 hours a day. The result is that I will use up my short-term disability twice as fast.

I am so pissed, I want to throw something breakable at a wall, I want to heave big stones in still water and watch the surface crack up. I want to bang my own head on the floor. I want to crawl into a dark space and not come out ... well, you get the idea.

If I had known, I might have scheduled the radiation at a different time of day - early morning or later - and worked 8 hour days as long as I felt able to, to husband my remaining days of short-term disability for the end of radiation when I expect to feel more tired and the next chemo session. Now, it could turn out that my short-term disability is used up just when I am going back in chemo, if not sooner. And I am sure the reason this happened is that "my" case manager at this stupid company is herself out on short-term disability. I have spoken to people there probably 6 or 7 times, and have never spoken to the same person twice. And yet, they claim they assign a dedicated "case manager" to every case. Great customer service, right?

The most ridiculous thing of all that this woman told me tonight is that since this is a new calendar year, if I come back and work even just one (1), a single full 8-hour day, my "bank" of short-term disability will reset and I will have 13 more weeks of short-term disability available to me for 2010. But of course, I want to use up everything from 2009 that's available to me first. (What if - God forbid - the cancer came back in August or September and I have to go out on disability again in 2010???)

Dealing with this disability insurance company feels to me like being a bug that inadvertently fell off a wall into a bathtub, and now it can't climb up the slippery side of the tub to escape so it scrambles around, afraid and pissed off, as it waits for the water to come rushing out to flush it into oblivion. And if this is how I feel, a person who HAS disability insurance, who HAS health insurance, what about the rest of the world?

Nonetheless I broke down and sobbed after I got off the phone with that woman. It was almost as if all the anger and sadness about this whole cancer thing came pouring out of me more forcefully than since this whole thing started. Of course, I am sure it will work out - one way or another. It's just horrible to be treated with such polite (she kept apologizing) indifference. (The bug is thinking, "Come on, just step on me once and for all and get it over with!)

I'm tired. I'm going to bed early.

Peace. Soon. Please.