Nic Narrates

Warning: In light of Halloween this weekend, allow me to share with you now a gruesome story. This is the part where it gets graphic and grody.

In a recent effort to take better care of myself, I am going to be all of 30 next year, I finally had a dermatologist check out some of my wonkier looking moles and the whole experience has left me feeling a bit like Swiss cheese.

In particular, I have delightfully colorful gouges on my hip and back where the “doctor,” if she can be called that, butchered me. I should have known it wouldn’t turn out well when they suddenly got a bit frantic.

“Did you take any aspirin today?” the nurse asked, as the “doctor” ran away to get more gauze.

I hadn’t. Why was she asking that?

“What about any vitamins or supplements?”

Nope.

“Have you had anything to drink?”

Yeah, lady. I’ve been hitting the sauce under my desk at work a la Mad Men. It was two o’clock on a Wednesday.

“You’re bleeding quite a bit…we can’t stitch it up…it’s not cauterizing.”

If I was nervous about having the moles removed going into the appointment, I immediately had the wild eyes of a caged animal once I heard that. Once I smelled, but thankfully could not feel or see, them try to burn my flesh into submission no less than seven times. What. The. Hell.

Ultimately, the carnage resulted in a virtual bloodbath overnight when, unbeknownst to me, my back opened back up despite three internal and five external stitches, making a mess of my sheets, comforter, nightgown, and mattress. It was like that scene in The Godfather when the dude wakes up and there’s a horse head in his bed and all his sheets are bloody and gross and he doesn’t know it until he pulls them back. Yeah, it was like that, minus the poor horsey.

To keep things interesting, about a week later when I had the stitches taken out, the newly unstitched skin on my leg ended up pulling apart later that evening, exposing the internal stitch which I proceeded to pull out because I didn’t know what it was. Believe me, if I had known what it was, I’d have left well enough alone and spent my time puking in disgust instead.

As it is, I’m now staring down the amount my insurance provider will not pay- $348. Three hundred and forty-eight dollars for what? To find out that despite a youthful proliferation of second degree sunburns I’m perfectly fine? To be given two very large, very purple, very itchy scars that are sure to remain prominent figures for years to come? Of course I’m glad everything turned out to be normal, but each time I undress I’m angry all over again at how she’s mangled me. I’m hideous. Hideous.

That bill is now 60 days passed due and I could care less. I know I’ll have to pay it eventually, I know that. But I don’t want to pay that effing bill on principle- why reward her for a job botched? I’ve never been so unhappy with how I was treated by someone in the medical profession.

For now, I don’t know what to do about it other than withhold payment until I figure out some kind of recourse. And believe me, I have a shitty enough credit rating to do just that.

Filed under: going postal, hateful, is janky the same thing as wonky?, so what if i scream?, things people say, WTF by Nic