Who would have guessed I would be invited back to guest host SNLC? ChingChongChinaman, who is otherwise indisposed, must be just that desperate. Alas, I will have to be your host for the night. And may I suggest, you start the night out with ARCHER FARM BURUNDI KAYANZA COFFEE? I'm in love with this stuff.
But on with my story of fighting Pacificare and scrotal cancer at the same time. It might be better if you avoid solid food for the rest of this.
Before I begin with my story, let me self-promote for a moment. I have a weekly series of my own, Thursday Classical Music Blogging, which analyzes famous classical music pieces at a fun and didactic Music for Dummies level. It's a mixture of history and music theory and vicious rumors and philosophy and coffee and lots and lots of musical youtubes. You're all encouraged to drop by, any Thursday, 5pm PDT. This week, we did the second and third movements of Tchaikovsky's Symphony #6, Pathetique. Next Thursday will be the finale. As DallasDoc himself said, "It's probably the best series on DailyKos right now."
/...On to my health care horror story./
It was about three years ago when I first noticed there might be something wrong with my scrotum. There was a lesion that just wouldn't quite go away. The skin of the left side of my sac hardened up and became desensitized, like it was made of thick dead leather. I made an appointment with my Pacificare primary care physician who forwarded me on to a specialist.
Unfortunately, with Pacificare, you don't get to exactly pick your specialist, and if you have an unusual condition, you're pretty much stuck with whom you get, unless you're willing to relocate. The doctor wasn't really bad, but it would turn out he wouldn't be the biggest problem I would face.
He looked at my sac, pulled and prodded it, tested for desensitized spots, then took a biopsy. I was called in a few days later, and told that I had tested positive for malignant cancer of the scrotum.
I was horrified. "Are you going to have to cut off my balls?" I asked. No, he assured me. Just the sac. The testes were fine. But there were obvious mechanical difficulties with living without a sac. "What will I do?" I asked. He told me, don't worry. Pacificare would provide for a scrotal prosthetic. He showed me a book with pictures of different scrotal prosthetics. They all pretty much looked like rubber chickens. I was in tears, thinking that was going to be my fate. But, he assured me, he could save my testes. I was too distressed to see the good in that, at the time.
"Shall we begin?" he asked, reaching for a local anaesthetic. He planned to do it with a local. I was horrified and told him, no way, I wanted general, when in rushes the nurse, breathless, to whisper something in the doctor's ear. He listened, said, uh huh, uh huh, nodded his head, grimaced, said shit, then looked at me and said, "You are so screwed."
"What's wrong?"
The nurse explained. "Pacificare won't pay for the scrotal prosthesis. You'll have to pay in advance for a prosthesis before we can proceed."
Fuck Pacificare. Okay, so I'm not rich at all. I went back through the book, looking for the cheapest scrotal prosthesis they had. It was made of vinyl, shiny red. I swear it looked like a big clown's nose. And it was thousands of dollars more expensive than anything I could afford. And think about it, how much can it cost to make a fucking vinyl ball sac? I know, it's a medical device, so technically they can charge you up the wazoo for it, and oh boy, do they! But you'd be surprised. And fucking Pacificare was going to leave me in the lurch, holding my balls in my hand!
"Can I do this on credit?" I asked. They shook their head. "We'll give you some time to arrange your affairs. When you have cash, let us know. We can't operate without a prosthesis ready."
In the waiting room again, I was cursing my luck, when I heard a whisper coming from behind a potted palm. "Pssst! Over here, jefe!" A man with a thick moustache gestured to me to join him in a corner, where he handed me a card. "You need the sac, we got the sac! lots of sacs. You choose!" The front office nurse, finally noticing him, shooed him out of the clinic.
The card had the address of a Dr. Vasquez, not very far from this doctor's office at all, so I walked, despite my nuts chafing with every step. With each step, before my eyes, the neighborhood declined. I found myself standing before an indoor swap meet. Dr. Vasquez's office was situated in a cubicle with minimal privacy between a stand selling watches and another selling candles dedicated to various saints.
"Ah! Jose must have sent you. Pacificare must have denied you. Sentado, sentado!" he said, gesturing to a lawn chair. He looked at my sac and said, "I do it now, but no prosthesis. Is very sad, no? Maybe Obama fix healthcare and you get very nice prosthesis."
"But what will I do in the meantime?"
"You hold your balls like this!" he said, gripping his own balls. "I fix you up cheap, but no prosthesis."
Seriously, I didn't know what to do! I was shit out of luck if it came to rounding up the money to pay for that shiny rubber nose prosthetic, but the Pacificare doctor wouldn't operate without one. And without it, I was likely to die. I gritted my teeth. In tears, I told him, "Go ahead! Take it off! Do it now before I lose my nerve!"
"Bueno! Bueno!"
I insisted he at least swab the area with a disinfectant. There was no anaesthetic at all except a bottle of tequila, which I imbibed rather generously. This was one of the worst experiences of my life, and I don't recommend it for anyone if you can avoid it. Seriously, do NOT get Pacificare.
When I was over, with me drunk, woozy, moaning in pain, slightly doubled over, trying to keep a grip on my two loose testes (they felt slippery, like little hard-boiled eggs and I almost lost my grip) through my pants, I stumbled out. Oh, how I bemoaned my fate, and the fate of all of us that suffer under the current state of American healthcare. In my inebriated state, I drowned in self-pity. My poor sac!
But as I was sobering, I saw Dr. Vasquez's next patient, holding a bandage to his privates. Dr. Vasquez had removed both the man's testes. And I thought to myself, I felt sorry for myself that I had no sac until I met a man who had no balls.
Limping home, I called around, trying to find somebody to help me round up the cash for a prosthetic. When I got my mom on the phone, she was silent for a moment, and then she said, "Sometimes it skips a generation?"
"What skips a generation?"
"Didn't they tell you? It's Barkin's disease. It's genetic You're not the first in the family. Your father didn't have it, but your grandfather did.
"Why didn't you ever tell me this!" I asked. How many other things had she not told me. "Oh God! What am I going to do."
"Sweetheart, don't worry. They make excellent prosthetics nowadays. I just don't have the money. But..." And here she paused. I heard her gulp. "You know who did."
"No! You can't mean. We decided we wanted nothing to do with that man or his money! It's blood money!"
"Sweetheart, listen, there's not much time. If you don't want it, I understand, oh God how I understand. But the will states that the inheritor of your late Uncle Mordecai's estate must spend at least one night alone in the house in order to inherit. AND NOBODY WHO HAS DONE THAT HAS EVER LIVED."
And they were about to bulldoze his house tomorrow! Goddam, I had a terrible choice before me. Could I live the rest of my life gripping my loose, slippery nuts with one hand? Could I manage a loan that would leave me in hock up to my ears just to get some shitty red prosthetic? It was a bad day to be me.
"Okay, okay," I grumbled. "I'll do it."
Mordecai's estate stood atop a tall lonely hill, one that is said had once been an Iroquois burial ground. When I arrived, bulldozers and men in hardhats were stationed just outside it. They tried to tell me I couldn't go in there.
"You can't stop me! He was my uncle."
A man in a suit with a smarmy expression stepped forward. "Oh please. We searched this house from top to bottom looking for your uncle's ill-gotten fortune. It's not there! We're bulldozing it tomorrow to make room for a mini-mall. Even if you live, you'll just be in the way."
"I have no choice," I told him. "It's either this or a life without a sac." And then I pushed my way past him and entered the house.
The house was covered everywhere in webs and dust. Square outlines of dirt on the wall showed the shadow of what had once been my uncle's perverse painting collection. As I stoked the fire with my one free hand, the fireplace's gargoyles stared at me, smugly, amused. Would I be found tomorrow, dead, like so many transients that had died before the crack of dawn? Or would I discover the secret of Uncle Mordecai's fortune?
And then I slept, beleaguered by the strangest dreams, of Nazi slave labor. My uncle there, laughing, cracking a whip, as he screamed, "Gold! More gold! More, more, more!" The hiss of his voice chilled me to the bone. I awoke, freezing, shivering, my breath frosting before my eyes, the air in the room unseasonably cold, colder than a meat locker. I heard a moan! "Who is it! I screamed?" And then there was silence, punctuated by -- what was it? -- the creaking of boards, or giggling of malign spirits.
I poked at the fireplace, angry that Pacificare had ever put me in this position. Goddam them! What the fuck do they do with the premiums anyway? I pounded and pounded the fireplace, when, to my astonishment, the back of the fireplace gave way, exposing a secret passage!
I extinguished what remained of the fire. Suddenly, even with the fire out, the room warmed up, abating that unearthly chill. Flashlight in one hand, balls in the other, I crawled through the dead embers of the fire.
Unlike the rest of the dusty house, this room was clean as a whistle, the inlaid wood paneling as shiny as if it had been polished with Murphy's oil wax just that morning. Rembrandts and DaVincis and Titians lined the walls. And, most prominently of all, a small single table of polished oak stood in the very center of the room. Upon that table, there was a black velvet pillow. And upon the pillow, there was something, yellow and gleaming. I reached out for it.
"My God."
It was a solid gold scrotal prosthesis, molded perfectly with small peachy indentations for the left and the right teste, all of it adorned ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Was this the sac of a once great pharaoh? How much could this be worth? Oh, Uncle Mordecai, you with your blood diamonds and war-profiteering and Nazi art looting, was this your biggest secret of them all? Perhaps Barkin's disease did not skip a generation. Perhaps it just skipped my father. But not my depraved and immoral uncle.
I lowered my pants. I slipped my nuts into the hollows of the gold sac. First the right, then the left. The grip was firm, perfect, with no slippage at all. Rather than feeling cold, it felt warm, and I felt empowered, as if the power of ancient unspeakable gods were being channeled through me. Both my hands were free at last! I pulled up my shorts and cheered aloud!
"I see you've found it," a smarmy voice behind me said. I whirled around to find a familiar man in a suit holding a gun on me. "We searched high and low for whatever was left of your Uncle's ill-gotten fortune. I had hoped that in bulldozing the house, as we will do in..." He checked his watch. "... two hours, that we might find something in the foundation or the rubble. But you have just saved us a great deal of searching. Those paintings alone will make me rich." He smiled. "The only thing keeping me from them, apparently, is you." He raised the gun and took aim.
But just at that moment, a ghastly white vision sprang from each painting. My eyes opened wide. I heard a gunshot, but it was not me he shot at. The walls rang with the sound of his gunfire as the ghosts of Nazi-era slaves buffeted him from all sides.
"Run, Dumbo!" a small echoey voice whispered. "We will take care of him!" I did just that. I ran. I crawled through the embers of the fireplace. The fireplace caught light again behind me, just as I escaped it, and then the room too caught afire behind me. With my new sac firmly in place, I raced for the exit, just barely making it in time before the entire house exploded in flame.
Anyway, that's my healthcare horror story. What's yours?