rainey 🌻It is Wednesday, everybody.
It's been a while. I can partly blame the ADHD, because it's hard enough to form habits with daily things, fuhgeddabout weekly things. I can also blame my sense of not having anything new to talk about, even though I know intellectually it's okay to talk about the same topic multiple times.
I applied for financial aid from the hospital and apparently a single-income no-kids (SINK?) blue-collar household with a modicum of savings isn't poor enough to qualify. And even if I did, they don't cover the separate bills from the doctors.
All associated bills have cost me a total of $968.66. Even if I subtract office visit co-pays and an extra lab test, that's still $826.89.
Very ouch. And that was for a single overnight stay with one CT scan, 4 or 5 rounds of IV antibiotics, and a few blood draws.
I recently heard from a friend of mine in Germany. He was in the hospital for an entire week and his total expenses were 60 euros.
And that's just my money woes! (I guess it's true: Wednesday's child is full of woe.)
Dietary restrictions suck. I've been vegetarian since 1997 and I'm not ready to give that up, but medically I also need to restrict
* salt (causes fluid retention and high blood pressure)
* carbs (I'm pre-diabetic)
* bad fats (I'm on cholesterol medication)
* ultra-processed foods (my colonoscopy had to remove a few polyps)
The first three are fairly straightforward, but the last one is insidious. There are some foods I truly thought were healthy that turned out to be ultra-processed. And I'd been eating them every day! That could certainly account for those polyps.
Any low-budget healthy meal suggestions that are low-carb vegetarian are welcome. I'm starting to go slightly mad. I will spin my wheels for two hours trying to figure out what to eat because I either want something I can't have or isn't in the house, or nothing we have appeals to me.
Cassi