This is the book I'm reading, Midnight's Children by Salman Rusdie and a pill bottle. The book is one I'm enjoying more than anything I've read in decades. In fact, in the front it's compared to The Tin Drum and 100 Years of Solitude and those are my favorite two books ever. It's just delicious language.

The pill bottle holds some little beta blockers which I've been taking for about a month. I got to the point that I dreaded nighttime because I'd go to bed and hear my heart beating .. beat, beat, beat, nothing, beat, beat, beat, nothing. This makes it better but how much better I don't know because I'm uninsured and broke and this is a cheap fix.

Yesterday as I was eating lunch at work, parts of my left hand became numb. I noticed a red spot near the thumb but didn't know why it there. I said outloud, My hand is numb, but the person I was talking to didn't hear, I guess, and continued with what she was saying. I thought I'd heard that this kind of thing was a sign of a stroke so I left work, went to the emergency room. I called my doctor first and he said go to the emergency room. I knew what he meant was I'm going home soon so go bother somebody else but what could I do? Waiting til the next day was advice I wouldn't have given anyone else.

At the ER, they did the following list:
1. EKG
2. Blood work

The bill isn't determined yet as something happens in their system at midnight but it's over $5,000. That's all they did. I didn't see a doctor, I saw a nurse and Physician's Assistant who told me that everything was normal and it was probably a pinched nerve. He sent in a wheelchair to take me to x-ray to have a CT scan done of my head but I refused to go. That was just incomprehensible to me.

On the way out, I was asked for a $500 deposit and I'm sorry to say I paid it with a credit card that I just paid off. When the office opens, I'll call and ask if they have charity care or any other ideas because I can't pay this bill. I'm billed out.

The morning, I got email from the credit card company I'd just paid off telling me my new bill is online. The $500 hasn't posted but my bill was $22.48. What? I had paid the whole thing. Everything it said I owed, I paid. So I called India and had the mechanics used to calculate interest explained to me. I pretended to listen because I didnt understand it all then whined that I had given them a lot of money and it took me a long time to get that money and couldn't they take this $22.48 off?? They ended up taking off $10 of it.

Honestly, I am trying to so hard to get out-of-debt. I have dear human people I owe money to and I regret that the most. Or, I mean, they most deserve payment. But I can't pay them until I feel a little less wobbly here.

It's a wonderful book. I wonder if the two young ladies at the credit company have read it. I think it's set in their country.