#I'd go to the doctor but I spend $500 a month on insurance that NO ONE WILL TAKE and thus cannot afford extra visits

[thresholdbb]

Could really go for a hypospray right about now

[corvid-language-library]

General Updates

I had my end-of-year evaluation the other day and I thought it went terribly BUT my supervisor clearly disagreed because he gave me 90% and said it was just little things and maybe on a different day I'd have done certain things better. Also I was at a new school, one I've only taught at once before, so it was basically impossible to showcase my relationship with the students and parents because there isn't much of one yet.

But also. I had a massive panic attack the night before and then burst into tears at the end of the feedback meeting yesterday. So I guess you could say my mental health is in the gutter right now.

On top of that I'm running a fever of 38ºC right now and slept about 12 hours last night and have a nasty cough soooo guess my physical health ain't great either (negative covid test though dw)

I have money concerns thanks to my cat being poorly and needing a some teeth out and insurance is like ahh sorry we don't cover dental work so -_-

ALSO there's work that needs doing on my house back in the UK which will cost another £500 I just. do not have.

My dad's ill. He has a history of telling me he's ill and exaggerating symptoms so I talk to him more, but the fact he's said he's actually going to the doctor is making me concerned

It's also that time of year where I need to think about booking flights back to the UK for the Christmas holiday period, which is stressful enough as it is. Throw in the fact I do not like Christmas and I do not have any particular desire to be in the UK and yeah, not my favourite thing to dwell on.

The colleague I really vibe who's only been working with us for like 6 months is already quitting and I'm genuinely sad about it

I've barely studied Japanese since I signed up for the JLPT and I'm almost wondering if I should just withdraw

I'm building up a habit of studying Norwegian again (in a passive sense - listening to the radio, reading news articles etc)

I've been doing Inktober. It's challenging but I've drawn some things that I'm quite proud of given I'm very much a beginner still and many of them are things I'm attempting to draw for the first time

Actually, I've been drawing daily for 18 days now! (Feels like a lot longer though for some reason? Maybe because it's the longest I've gone without getting fed up and giving up.) Sometimes I just trace something, sometimes it's a little doodle, sometimes I spend quite a while on a sketch. But it's going well, and I'm gradually building up my visual library, as it were.

[nokki1]

Just need to vent a moment.

I finally had to bite the bullet and visit a dr for the first time in years because I'm having some concerning health issues, and I just want to know if I'm dying.

So when I got an appointment with a new doctor, it started off with the him calling me "fat" even though I'm only 140 lbs. But I had to grin and bare it because my insurance would only let me see the specialist that I wanted to go to for my issues with a referral from the doctor.

Luckily I did get the referral and was able to see the specialist. And I also had blood work done for both doctors. Everything looked fine except for one test which had really high levels. But then this morning, I get a fun email email telling me that I owe $500 for one of the visits and $50 for the other even though they're supposed to be fully covered by insurance. They also told me I have additional bills on top of that for the blood tests, which once again, are supposed to be fully covered by insurance.

So now I have to spend one of my days off trying to fight these charges, which idk if they'll be willing to drop. But if they still make me pay for it, then I'll be cancelling the upcoming tests that the doctor also wanted me to do and all my follow up appointments.

Thankfully since all my test results are posted online, I know exactly what's wrong with me now without needing to do anymore visits. And I can try some herbal remedies to at least assist with my issues instead of having to get a doctors prescription for medicine.

Funnily enough, the disease I have turns out to be a hereditary thing. And I’ve been mentioning these issues to doctors my whole life, but they always just shrugged and told me that it was “normal for women”. But it wasn’t until I had a period that lasted 51 days that they were like “hmmm maybe something is wrong…” 😤

It's just so frustrating that this is the state of healthcare in this country. I pay $800 a month for insurance and still it won't cover the medical fees for visits that they're telling me I need to do annually. And I have to become my own doctor on top of it all.

But I've stopped caring. I'm too exhausted to care anymore. I work 11 hours a day at my job, which is not only physically tiring, but mentally exhausting and stressful as well.

And if I'm going to be forced to spend so much on medical services, I'd rather use that money to live comfortably instead. Because I literally can't afford those medical bills. My rent already takes half of my monthly income, and groceries and other bills take up the rest.

So I'd rather live a short life and try to enjoy every minute that I have of it, then to save up for a future I may never get.

[fratboykate]

I'm about to show you how the American Healthcare system fucks everyone over. Americans have NO idea how hard they're getting jipped at drug stores each day but I'll give you a glimpse.

So I have really bad asthma, right? My inhaler is my life line. I've been living in the US for ten years this year and I've never, not once, bought an inhaler here. My parents send me a package with them and other meds from about 4,000 miles away every few months or maybe twice a year. You can't just mail medicine internationally but specifically things like inhalers. None of the carriers - not the post office, FedEx, UPS, or any other - will ship them because they're gas or something. I don't remember the specific rule but they just won't let you do it internationally because they're little canisters. Seeing as my parents can't simply mail the inhalers, they have to find someone that is flying from the DR to the US, have one of our doctor friends write that person a prescription for the inhalers, and staple copies of the receipts to the prescription because if Customs stops them at the airport to ask about it they have to show both things. Then the person bringing them to the US has to pack the inhalers, go to the post office, and mail me the package. Most of the people we know live in the East Coast so once it's flown over an ocean and arrived in a different country, my medicine still has to trek all the way to Los Angeles.

Why and how is any of this convenient you ask? I'll break it down. An inhaler lasts me between 15 days and a month depending on how bad my ashtma is at the time. This means I could go through anywhere between 12 to 24 inhalers in a year. At least. Could be more.

I got this package today:

Ten inhalers and hard core pain meds because my migraines don't just go away with Aleve.

This is how much those ELEVEN things were in the DR:

$873.60 Dominican pesos. My parents just sent me AT LEAST somewhere around six months worth of inhalers for $873 pesos. They also sent the same pain meds my mom takes for the extreme pain she suffers on her body as a result of being in a wheelchair so like...hardcore shit. I received enough to last way longer than six months. That is included in the eight hundred but for the sake of simplicity let's pretend it isn't.

Before I tell you how much this is in dollars let me show you how much one of these inhalers cost in the US without insurance (aka the same way my parents bought these in the DR).

With coupons they cost at least $60 and without coupons they can go all the way up to $85. I didn't have insurance for approximately the first 8.5 years I was here. Now that I do have insurance my lowest copay for medicine is $25 and that's for the generic stuff. That's the minimum I pay for every item on each of my prescriptions and only for generics, if I want/need the name brands like these inhalers are it goes way higher. So EVEN WITH MY INSURANCE, every month I'd be spending no less than $25 to $50 on inhalers depending on whether I went through one or two that month.

Now that I've told you that, this is the conversion of Pesos to Dollars.

My parents spent SEVENTEEN DOLLARS AND TWENTY NINE CENTS on ten inhalers and another medication. My parents sent me ten inhalers from half a world away for what I couldn't buy one here even with insurance.

Those ten alone would've cost me no less than $250 with insurance and at least $600 without insurance. That is if I only went through one of them a month and was lucky enough to have coupons.

If I used two a month - twenty total - for ten months I'd spend no less than $500 with insurance or between $1,200-$1,700 without insurance.

My parents would be spending about $35, maybe $40, in the same twenty inhalers.

Same medication, same brand name, same results.

Keep in mind that inhalers require prescriptions. All of this is not including the cost of a doctor here in the US. Before I can even buy my inhaler I have to pay to go see someone so I can get a prescription and that's at least another $50 with my doctor visit copay or like maybe $100-200 for someone who doesn't have insurance.

Americans love to call other countries "Third World Countries" and "sub-developed" but we at least don't have to sell our souls to stay alive. I'll take being Third World but being able to breathe for six months for less than what I spent on dinner last night.

And that...that is how Americans get fucked every single day. Coming from another country, the health system here is mindblowningly gross and idk how people still haven't burned everything down to change it.