It’s Tuesday evening. I had expected to start my clinical trial yesterday and have something of interest to write about today, maybe even something like the trial immediately giving me a superpower.
That is not what happened.
I didn’t start the trial. No superpowers. Not even the mildly inconvenient kind.
Last week I started driving to Houston at 5 a.m. for two different tests that were prerequisites for the clinical trial. Thank God for self driving, because by 7 a.m. I was already in that familiar state where you are technically awake but also absolutely not functioning at full human capacity. Waze was already telling me I was going to be 15 minutes late for my first appointment. I hate being late, so I called ahead and they told me it didn’t matter. An EKG takes five minutes. They can see me whenever I get there.
Which, in hindsight, is about as clear a warning sign as you can get without someone explicitly telling you today is going to be a bad day.
I’m not usually one to believe in foreshadowing, but that was pretty hard to ignore.
I got to the hospital at 8:15 and was done with test number one by 8:30. The first test was in the main building of MD Anderson and the second was in the Mays building. There is a long sky bridge between them and a coffee shop along the way in the Rotary House.
I stopped for coffee.
Hospital coffee has a very specific personality. I don’t think it is intentionally bad. In a hospital everything is either trying to save your life or trying to kill you. Coffee is doing neither, which honestly might be worse.
At the time I was too tired to fully appreciate the symbolism.
By the time I got to my second appointment I found out that insurance had not approved the test yet. My medical team was, as always, great. They were working on it, communicating, and doing everything they could.
I don’t blame them.
I do, however, blame the insurance company for things I probably should not write on the internet without cooling off first.
What followed was seven hours in a waiting room with no food, no coffee, no book, no Steam Deck, and no real answers about whether the test would happen at all. Just sitting there watching the day slowly turn into something I was no longer in control of.
Eventually I had to head home because Tugboat was home alone. I had originally expected to be gone for about six hours. I was on hour ten.
The drive home was mostly self driving again, which was probably for the best. I did make one stop for real coffee and three tacos from a place that looked extremely sketchy and somehow delivered exactly what I needed. So, silver linings.
The test I didn’t get was a cardiac imaging study using nuclear medicine. It is one of the last prerequisites for the clinical trial. Insurance denied it outright regardless of what MD Anderson said. Their reasoning was that an echocardiogram was sufficient given my age and fitness.
The subtext felt pretty clear. This is cheaper, so this is what we are doing.
The problem is that MD Anderson did not have any echocardiogram appointments available before the clinical trial cutoff date. So everything got stuck in that very specific kind of medical bureaucracy limbo where everyone agrees there is a solution but no system can actually produce it in time.
Naturally, I took this well.
There was a brief moment where I started mentally assembling the required ingredients for Molotov cocktails. That bourbon collection that had been quietly going unused for the last year, combined with all the medical supplies the hospital had given me over the last year that I had also not used, suddenly felt like they had a very specific and extremely unhelpful purpose.
I did not act on any of it.
Eventually my medical team was able to get me scheduled at The Woodlands for the test, which means I should still be able to start the clinical trial on Monday.
I am currently putting the metaphorical Molotov cocktail ingredients back where they belong. For now.
I have always disliked insurance. Not the people working in it, but the system itself. I am sure I do not see all of its complexities, but from where I sit it often feels like a system where cost becomes the only variable that really matters, even when it collides directly with time, access, and sometimes urgency.
And I will be honest, that part tends to pull on older memories. Things I don’t usually sit with for long, but that show up anyway when you are alone in a hospital waiting room for hours with nothing to do but think.
At some point the anger shows up. Then it just sits there. Until someone close to me reminds me that I am not really in a position to judge an entire system or every person in it based on the worst version of what that system produces. That is a hard thing to argue with, even when you are still annoyed.
There is a quote from Ted Lasso that kept coming back to me. Ted says something to Coach Beard along the lines of hoping that either all of us, or none of us, are judged by the actions of our weakest moments, but by the strength we show when, and if, we are ever given a second chance.
I don’t know that I have anything fully resolved here. I just know that idea sticks. That people are more than the worst function of the systems they are part of. And that anger, while very real, does not have to be the final version of the story.
Tonight Tugboat is snoring at the end of the bed like none of this happened. Monday starts one hell of a new chapter.
See you then.