Bills, Bills, Bills

            I had my first dream about Colin in ages.  Once it became clear in 2019 that he was dying, I assumed I would have this kind of dream all the time.  Instead, they’re very much a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of event.  This one wasn’t even interesting.  It mostly involved trying to watch some city council meeting on TV.  I think Christina and I had been involved in some kind of city beautification project.  And Colin really wanted to watch the show. 

            I mean, like any kid, he did love TV.  But there are limits and I’m not willing to believe that he would have watched a city council meeting.  Then again, the last thing he said to me before I woke up was “Oreo,” which seems pretty much in character.  I had been aware in the dream that he had almost died, but we had pulled him back from the edge.  I was grateful he was there.  And then I woke up calling out “Colin, come back.”

            I could use more dreams like that.

            Instead, I have a blog that is continuously spammed by Russian and Chinese bots and now, weird memories of Colin’s sickness dredged up by Christina’s current fight with breast cancer.

            I mean, if I don’t keep my brain busy, I keep going to strange places like “Maybe there was a deal, and we had to give up Colin so Christina could survive her therapy.”  As if you can negotiate with cancer.  Like God gives and takes like that.  And all the while, the blog keeps getting hit by bots. A few weeks ago, they were from a chain of American pancake restaurants in Munich.  Sometimes it’s a random word.  Sometimes it’s porn.  Sometimes it’s a chain of Russian or Mandarin I refuse to run through a translator.  And you kind of wonder if they’re mocking your loss, even if they are just bots.

            It’s been noted once or twice that this is a blog about dealing with Colin’s loss, so it is a bit weird that I’ve shoehorned Christina’s experience in here.  And part of that is pure laziness: I just don’t want to set up another blog.  But then there’s the point that I don’t want to have to set up a five-minus-two blog, because one was enough.

            One truly familiar trend has been the bills.  Oh my god, so many bills.  Some of them are for like 15 euros.  Some of them are for 15,000.  And yes, we live in a social democratic state with lots of safety nets.  We’re not going out of pocket for these bills.  At least not long-term.  But short-term … oy. 

            You see, because of the way Christina is insured, we get the bills sent to us.  We then submit them to insurance for reimbursement.  Sometimes the bills are due in 3-4 weeks.  Sometimes the reimbursement can take up to six weeks to arrive.  It’s like a never-ending shell game of moving money from here to there, deciding which bill not to pay just yet, etc. etc., in hopes of having enough money to get through the end of the month because, honestly, I’m no longer sure how much of the money in my account is mine and how much is spoken for by some pharmacy somewhere.  We’re not broke.  We’re just in perpetual financial upheaval.

            The one pharmacy in question is relentless.  I’m not sure why they’re billing us separately.  When Colin was sick, the bills for the medications came packaged with the hospital bills.  It all works out the same.  But I guess the pharmacy is getting nervous about sitting on about €24,000 that we owe them (even though none of the payments have been late, except for the one where I got a dispensation), so they’ve started doing weird things, like checking with the hospital to see if they might be able to talk us into signing a form giving them the right to automatically pull the money from our accounts.  Like, no.  The only way I know we have enough money for groceries right now is if I keep track of this and move money when I can.  Like, I have an Excel sheet set up for this … and I hate Excel. 

            And the insurance companies try.  There are two that reimburse us.  One is run by the government and is chronically understaffed.  The other is a private company, but they run their reimbursements through a computer.  And if you send them a bill that totals 15K, but is actually made up of two bills for €5,800, three for €250, two for €750 and another two for €600, it assumes there’s been some kind of repeat glitch, and only reimburses you for one of each amount.

            It’s all administrative.  It’s all understandable.  It’s all manageable.  But it’s all so much like the pile of bills we had to go through with Colin, trying to shuffle the mail from the house to the hospice to the payment system (it was all on paper then – at least I can photograph the bills with my phone now) and then running to a post office for a few minutes while someone else was watching Colin.

            Gah.  I hate so much about the fact that we have to go through this again.

            I went to the men’s group on Friday for the first time in an age. We were talking about the nightmare of home health care.  I mentioned that I knew one family who had tried to do it themselves and how I had no idea how they were coping.  Two minutes later, the kid’s father walked in and my heart sank.  I mean, why else would he be there if his kid wasn’t dead?  Turns out his son is alive, but he wanted to talk to people who had suffered through childhood deaths.  It’s not the first time a guy dealing with a fatal childhood situation just joined.  All I can say is that this man is making herculean efforts to keep his kid alive.  A few bills seems like a cake walk compared to that.  His explanation of his routine left me exhausted.  But I wish I was that exhausted, caring for a living child.  It feels like, with all those bills, you should have something for it.