All right all you friendly people.
The good news is my wife's kidneys aren't completely ruined.
The bad news is my wife's kidneys aren't completely ruined.
...
In more specific terms, the Dr. we saw described my wife's kidneys as stage 3 (on a scale of 1-5, 5 being the worst).
Now they are trying to figure out what is causing the damage. They want us to get a biopsy of this gland by her ear that has been swollen for a couple years, in case she has lymphoma or something. He said he didn't think she had lupus because the protein in her urine is very low, and high would be indicative of lupus.
He said that based on her other symptoms she might still want to get an ANA test (or something - for lupus?) and my wife said "they are so expensive though," and he said, "Are they? I have no idea." This is forgivable because he had a laminated newspaper article written by his Dr. partner about the necessity of Single Payer health care. But it is illustrative of, of something.
The problem is that if my wife was at stage 5 kidney failure, we could get on medicade and get her blood cleaned out through dialysis. As it is she still just feels really really sick, and she's having pretty significant peripheral nueropathy - type symptoms, lots of numbness in feet and hands and chest - up to her chin. My wife thinks she could probably use a diabetes test, and I wonder why regular 400 dollar blood tests wouldn't include a test for that, but I am not very health-smart.
My wife is thus literally feeling like she's just waiting for her kidney to get worse, hopefully sooner rather than later, so she can get affordable health care. As a note, and some of you know this, if I get a graduate instructorship for this fall at the university I attend I will get insurance- I don't know if I have to pay for it all, but all I care about is that it will cover her while no private insurance will of course.
My wife wants to try to get on medicade, but I think we have to get on disability for her first (although 'm not sure, and I must admit that between end of the semester and several trips to various doctors and taking the GRE this morning - 600 verbal 740 Quant - I haven't been able to read all the fantastic comments on the old post. I read all the ones about medicare because we sort of guessed they might be more pertanent to our case, so now I'll probably read the medicade ones.)
The point is that if we have to get on disability to get on medicade my wife is upset that she may not be able to work. Is that the case? If she gets disability, will she be banned from working? She's such a lazy liberal, sucking the system dry - her body is full of toxins and she's upset that she doesn't feel good enough to work and if she gets the health coverage to make herself feel better she will lose it if she starts working...
That's all for this edition folks. I'm absolutely drained, having somewhat crashed after the last four days of going going going. I would have posted yesterday but I wanted to study for the GRE (till 4 this morning!).
Thanks to all of you who have commented and all of you who have emailed. Some of you have even paypalled some dollars, which is just absurdly kind. Thank you very much. My wife does like to know that people are concerned, and that her story matters. She often feels invalidated, and has been invalidated her whole life. It's very nice to be able to tell her she's cared about by faceless friends.