Beltane Cancer Moon
No scan. AARP Secure Horizons denied payment. When I asked how much it would be as a self pay. Pet scan, $2,600, axium dose somewhere between $1,000 and $3,000. Nope. And, I made the decision for the same reason AARP probably did. The scan’s accuracy is around 60% and that goes down the lower the PSA. My PSA is well above the reemergence marker of .2 at 1.3, but it’s still pretty low for imaging studies.
What makes me angry about this is that I scheduled this scan on April 25th. That’s twenty days ago. If they’d come up with these problems even last week, I’d have had a chance to call the insurance company and Dr. Eigner, Dr. Gilroy, see if something could be done; or, if it was clear no payment option existed, what new imaging studies I could have. Now I still have to do all that, but 20 days after I put this study on my calendar. Meanwhile those little cancer cells don’t care. They just go right on chasing immortality at the expense of my health.
I had an image yesterday of our health care, that is, doctors, nurses, labs, hospitals. The entire province of folks and structures who provide medical services. They’re all there, most of them competent, capable people who got into medicine to help people, to cure illness. Now. Imagine all of those people and their support behind a huge wall, a really huge wall, the best wall possible.
On this side of the wall, where you and I are, is the money used to pay everybody in medicine. If you are a one percenter, there’s a special gate you can walk through anytime you need it. You can access all of the excellent care that is available. If you’re the rest of us, no money passes through the wall unless several corporate, bureaucratic entities and individual people within them, say yes. Those entities include private, for-profit health insurance companies, medicare, medicaid, non-profit health insurance, banks, credit card companies.
According to this CNBC article, $3.4 trillion dollars pass from the money side of the wall to the health care delivery side of the wall each year. That’s $3.4 trillion. In this interesting nyt article, author Matt Bruenig makes a case for treating health insurance premiums that employees pay for company insurance plans as taxes. He makes this claim: “Moving from our system to a European-style system would make our overall system of taxes and health insurance payments much more progressive for the majority of Americans, because the elimination of private health premiums would more than offset the rise in formal taxes for all but the wealthy.”
Such a shift would eliminate all of the corporate gate-keepers who have an interest in profit for their company. Perhaps they could all go work for the TSA and use their previous employment experience to annoy the hell out of travelers.
Would such a change mean I get my scan? Not necessarily. There would still be assessments made about the appropriateness of particular care; but, those decisions would be made by people who have my health and the health of our medical system at heart, not the wallets of investors. In that case I’d trust a decision to withhold the scan as a considered one based on those criteria, not on what’s best for United Health Care’s bottom line.
Here is a cautionary tale about health care. On April 24th or 25th I scheduled my axumin scan for today. That’s twenty days ago. It’s purpose is to tell where my cancer reemergence is located and to help stage it. This after the rise in PSA caused consternation for both me and my urologist, Dr. Eigner. I was glad we could get it on the calendar so quickly.
Should I go in today, sign the waiver, and keep my appointment with the radiation oncologist on Friday? When I told Eigner my PSA rise, he said, “Get another PSA done and get into see me ASAP.” A post-prostatectomy rise in the PSA to .2 is a biochemical recurrence. That’s the clinical definition. Mine was at 1.3. Everyone I spoke with had a sense of urgency about this. That made me have one, too.
Spent yesterday and Saturday reorganizing the loft, continuing work in the Intensive Journal. Oh, and made a meatloaf. Better than my mom’s. I printed a copy of Jennie’s Dead as it is so far, about 50,000 words, found my third draft of Superior Wolf, and pulled out the Phantom Queen which I haven’t seen in years. Today and tomorrow I’m going to file the remaining documents from CBE religious school, mussar, First Sundays. Then, I’m going to take each book that is piled up near my chairs, give the top ten priority for reading, and shelve the rest.
Tomorrow the whole rising PSA matter gets lit up and scanned by the hospital’s p.e.t. machinery. Takes about 30 minutes, slowly moving from pelvis to head. This moves me from an indicator based concern, PSA, to the reality of where the cancer is now, in my body. I’m hopeful there are no metastases, of course, that whatever has returned is confined to the prostate fossa. I’m not ready for my expiration date, but, then, I suppose nobody ever really is. The best result in this case is a localized reemergence treatable with the Cyberknife.
Go now, the workshop has ended. Paraphrasing the end of the Catholic mass. Appropriate in this case having just come Mother Cabrini’s shrine. The experience of being at Mother Cabrini was familiar in its physical surroundings. In college I would always retreat to Catholic sanctuaries to be still, to reflect. I always found them/find them, soothing.
Here are two examples of next steps that have me excited. The first is to do a dialogue with reading. In the dialogue section of the journal, orange tabs, there is a method for developing one to one conversations with people important to you, living or dead, fictional or actual. That seems to makes sense. But the other four tabs in the orange section: Works, Events, Society, and the Body perhaps not so much. It works though. The journal method posits that a dialogue can be had with work you’re doing. I wrote a dialogue with Superior Wolf and in it realized I needed to pull the novel apart and focus one story only on Lycaon. In the Body section I’m in the midst of a dialogue with cancer.
It’s a bit strange to be at May 10 and have the temperature at 24, snow covering the driveway, the roofs, the walkways. In Minnesota the safe time for planting was typically May 15. Don’t think it would work here, at least not every year. We warm back up next week. For now, though. Winter wonderland. Like, I wonder why it’s still winter?
Read yesterday in the group. Iam asked me afterwards if I was a professional writer. Well, I write novels. But, I’ve not sold any so I don’t know if I’m a professional. Drina, who works for a website connected with the founders of 
We wrote spiritual steppingstones, what experiences in our life have led us to our current spirituality. Those of you who know me know that it’s been a long journey. An ongoing one, too. I would characterize my current spirituality as a tablespoon Taoist, two tablespoons existentialist, a teaspoon Christian, a teaspoon and a half Reconstructionist Jew, and a half cup of paganism (of the earth, the sun, the starting of the universe, aware of it and finding it enough). Mix together and bake until dead. Then, we’ll see.
Lots of Catholic kitsch in the Mother Cabrini giftshop. I mean, lots. In fact, that’s almost all they have. St. Expeditius here is my favorite, especially his arms.This is a refrigerator magnet and there are others. Including St. Gregory the Wonder Worker invoked in desperate situations.
