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“A mild cold,” Scott says. He grabs the phone and calls the clinic to explain the situation. “The letter said we should have her tested if she shows any signs. Okay. Alright.” He hangs up. “Ten o’clock.”
“For what?”
“To have her tested. They said we need to.”
“We don’t have insurance,” I remind him. With all the state cutbacks, we’ve been dropped from medical assistance. If we go to the doctor now, we’ll have to pay the whole bill. We can barely afford our groceries.
“We have to get her tested," Scott insists. "For one thing, if they catch it early it isn’t as severe. Plus it’s the responsible thing to do. If she has it, we don’t want her to spread it to others.”
So I go to work and Scott brings Morgen into the doctor. They perform a nose swab by sticking a giant Q-tip up her nostril and then sending it away to be tested. Four days later we receive a letter that she tested negative, and a week after that we receive a bill for four hundred dollars. I can’t believe they charged us that much.
I call the clinic and ask to talk to billing. “I’m calling about the invoice we received for a little test we had for our daughter. We just received a bill that we feel is very expensive, and that quite honestly, we can’t afford.”
“What test?”
“It was the whooping cough test. And the only reason we did it was because we were told that she may have caught it from a community member, and that if she had it she could pass it on to other community members. So we thought it was the responsible thing to do.”
“Yes, it was.”
“Well, I just feel like if she was exposed to something and we were just checking to make sure she wouldn’t expose others, we shouldn’t have to be stuck with a bill like this.”
“You ordered the test. The test was for your daughter, right?”
“Yes, but what I mean is that we did it to be socially responsible, and it seems like we shouldn’t be punished with a big bill like this.”
“I don’t know what you expect us to do.”
“I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem right. We can’t afford this!”
“Have you looked into the sliding fee scale?”
“Yes, I have.” The sliding fee scale is set up to subsidize low-income households but, amazingly, we don’t qualify. The figures they use to determine qualification don’t reflect the actual cost of living here. I don’t know how anyone could qualify and still survive here.
“Well, I can’t help you any more than that. Sorry.”
Maybe she is sorry, maybe not. Even if she is, there’s nothing she can, or will, do about it. I sit down, defeated, and let the bill fall from my hand.
Dreams
The is the fifth nightmare I’ve had this month. I’m outside planting flowers and I hear something in the distance. It gets louder and louder until it’s almost unbearable. Then other people are around me, and I shout, “Why is it so loud?” but nobody can hear me. The noise is so loud by this time, and so close, that I have to stop what I’m doing and run for cover.
I wake up then, shaking and sweating. It takes me a while to unwind enough to fall back to sleep, and when I wake up in the morning, I feel un-rested. I have to drag myself out of bed and get ready for the day. It’s Saturday, and Morgen wants to go to Mrs. McKinley’s house. I throw on an extra sweater before I climb down the loft ladder. The cabin is freezing.
“It isn’t right,” I tell Scott. “It shouldn’t be this cold in April.”
“It’s just another cold spell. It’ll warm up soon.”
I stoke the fire and go into the kitchen to get Morgen some cereal. “What should we bring for Mrs. McKinley today?” I ask.
“Bread,” Morgen says.
“We haven’t baked any. How about some of the leftover chili from last night?”
“Okay.”
I dish up a tupperware container of the chili, which I was planning on having again for dinner tonight. We’ll have to find something else for our meal, but I’ll deal with that later. I don’t want to go over to Mrs. McKinley’s empty-handed. It’s my little way of helping her out. I’d do a lot more, if I could.
We bundle up and head out into the cold. I buckle Morgen into the backseat and let the jeep run for a minute before putting it in drive and heading out of town. We drive up the long, lonely driveway and climb the steps of the run-down little house.
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