Shrieking. Olive woke herself up last night more times last night than I can count, each time shrieking as if in real pain. It was the second toughest night of her life thus far, the first being when she was sick at three months and couldn't breathe through her nose. And that was worse for me than for her; she mostly slept if she was propped upright and I lay awake for eight straight hours watching her with lemur eyes.
So last night I had just gratefully poured myself into bed around midnight when she awoke howling for the first time, and I knew we were in for it. Today she had gobs of saliva everywhere so I'm wondering if she's getting some teeth coming through- one or two or, hopefully, all of them all at once.
Friends, today was not a day for the books. If this day is ground into the sidewalk of oblivion by the spiked high heal of time I should be grateful for it.
After a rather bleary eyed morning, I decided to take the plunge into some unresolved billing issues from the last year, the year in which I was pregnant and gave birth, and apparently I am the first and only woman to ever carry out such a stunt, judging from the utter upheaval it caused in insurance agencies, various medical care establishments and all the mysterious invisible middleman companies across the state.
From a financial standpoint, everything about the birth that could have gone wrong did absolutely on all fronts and from every angle go wrong. And this afternoon I learned that I can now say the same about the nine months that led up to the birth as well.
What I learned today was that none one of our many, many claims from the birth center actually made it through to our insurance because of a 'technical glitch' in one of the aforementioned mysterious invisible middleman companies, this one called Athena. The suspicion I'd been harboring for the past few months was correct- we'd overpayed by over 2,000 dollars and that money is just out there, swirling around, and while all parties agree that it belongs to me, nobody is exactly sure of who is responsible for returning it.
Oh, is it gauche to discuss money in such specifics? Well I think you're gauche. I THINK THIS WHOLE COURTROOM IS GAUCHE!
What astounds me is that It's taken almost a full year to even learn about this glitch, and only because I made a LOT of phone calls and studied a LOT of claims and essentially became my own private investigator, accountant, insurance commissioner, lawyer, and secretary.
All this comes after a six month long fight to the death with insurance and Mission Hospital that actually got Olive and I on the local news because it was so outrageous.
It just never ends. This thing drags on and on. Once it gets resolved (and my goal is to have it all resolved by the time Olive turns one) I never want to think about it again, but I do want to remember my tenacity and endurance in fighting it. Because it's taken some grit. That's all I'll say about the matter for now.
In Olive news, today she refused to put a chunk of banana into her mouth, even though she put everything else into her mouth, including tonight a slick bar of soap. She's onto my dastardly plan to replace some- just a few for christsake's- of her daily caloric intake with a food source other than that which comes from my boob and she is determined to foil me at every turn.
Meanwhile she grows bigger and more active and thus hungrier and hungrier, so between the phone calls and the feedings neither of us stepped outside today. I don't know what the weather was today. I'm not even sure we had any.
Olive, kid, I love you. But you're gonna taste that banana chunk. Mom's going to win this one.
You hear that, all you glitchy shady technically inept insurance fucks? Mom always wins.