Back in January, I suffered headaches for a month.
I’m used to headaches. I had migraines as a kid. Headaches come to me regularly enough I seldom even bother with aspirin. They last a day and are gone.
But January’s headaches were different, located at the very top of my head with a sharp pain like someone using a chisel, trying to get in there. They were accompanied by a bizarre, hot throbbing at points in my limbs, feeling like I can only imagine blood clots do.
For a month, folks at the Haines clinic tried helping me, taking my blood and vitals, at one point suspecting an ear infection and prescribing ear drops. (Plausible, owing to an old eardrum injury and days I’d spent in the swimming pool during a lifeguarding class.) They tested my vision and balance, which go awry with head problems.
When the headaches became more severe, a clinic doctor told me to immediately board the ferry to the emergency room at Bartlett Hospital in Juneau.
Body aches, colds and flus can wait. Severe chest and head pains can’t.
The emergency doctor I saw on a Friday night was disdainful I was taking up her time. “What’s the emergency?” she asked. I wasn’t suffering trauma, she said. I told her I had sharp pains in my head and would rather not wait on an appointment for a blood vessel to burst up there.
She tested my vision and balance and dismissed a theory by a Haines doctor about an adrenal gland disorder. She ordered me a CAT scan, which showed nothing unusual. Finally, as she was about to walk away, I asked her, “What would you do if you were suffering my conditions?”
“I’d see a neurologist,” she said.
The closest neurologists to Juneau are more than 800 miles away in Anchorage or Seattle, and the offices of ones I contacted said I’d need an MRI image for starters. As the Juneau hospital offers MRIs, I stuck around four days in Juneau to get one done, then forwarded it to a neurologist in Seattle.
She reported that it showed nothing unusual.
Less than a week after the most painful recurrence, I returned to Haines, hoping the headaches would stop. They did.
Last week, we got around to gathering up and paying my headache bills: $3,500, including Obamacare coverage and a very generous sliding scale offered by our local clinic, which is heavily subsidized by the Indian Health Service due to our high indigenous population. The amount doesn’t include my transportation, food or lodging in Juneau.
Without Obamacare, the bills would have come to more than $7,000.
In my world, $3,500 is a lot of money. Due to a recent inheritance, I could afford it. At most times in my life, I’d be making payments and cutting expenses somewhere else in my budget.
If I had to do it all over again, or if the headaches resume, I’m not sure I would seek medical attention. Thirty-five hundred is a lot to pay to find out you’re apparently okay. My inclination is to assume I’m okay until something a lot more severe happens.
This is one of the ways that health care is still very broken in this country. Patients and doctors and insurance companies and everyone else agree that too often too many patients are waiting too long to come in for care.
As a result, they need expensive, emergency care, which drives up the costs for everyone.
Check-ups and early treatments are cheaper and easier on patients, hospitals and providers, we’re told.
But at $3,500 for a headache, what choice do working people have other than to stay home and play medical roulette?