i ran out of my crohn's disease medication a couple weeks back. coincidentally, i now know what the symptoms of crohn's disease feel like. also, i am experiencing an outbreak of shingles. i spent all day on the phone today, and learned i can't get health insurance until 2021.

when i quit my job--making my official last day the beginning of february so that i'd get an extra month of health insurance--i planned to apply for COBRA (to keep my insurance at an increased cost). in that last month, my doctor wrote me a three-month prescription for my pills

when i applied to COBRA, i didn't realize that they could, in fact, turn me down!! they sure did turn me down, and they waited until the tail end of the 60-day period to do so. i literally received the "nope; sorry" letter on the last possible day lol

so i now had to apply for affordable care act coverage on The Marketplace, which i did as hastily as i could. this entailed submitting my information to a vast faceless machine, and then waiting for "someone" to contact me about insurance

what happened was endless robocalls. fifty an hour for a month. i had to leave my phone on silent. my voicemail box filled up every other hour. and look at these voice mails. as you can see from the transcription, they're the same template, only with different numbers at the end!

if i called any of these numbers, i got robots, who begat more robots. bear in mind i was doing all this while suffering from The Actual Coronavirus! just huddled in a bed with a screaming fever vocalizing my phone number again and again to robots who begat more robots

until last weekend i thought shingles and rickets were the same thing. then, when the doctor at the urgent care told me i had shingles, i realized i didn't know what rickets was, either. lmao

the doctor at the urgent care prescribed me some pills and asked me why i didn't have insurance, and i gave her a brief self-deprecating play-by-play. this being Virus Times we couldn't see each other's mouths so i don't know if she took me seriously or comically

she then very kindly and sincerely walked me through some of my options. i should note the clinic (in times square) was dead empty, providing free coronavirus tests as they were (yes, i got all the coronavirus tests--why not?). so i guess she had time to sit and talk to an idiot

the doctor was incredible, like a doctor in a piece of literature. she wrote "FINANCIAL HARDSHIP" on my paperwork and said the clinic would waive my fee. i said, "no, seriously, i can pay." she looked me in the eye (mouth invisible) and said "no one should have to pay for this"

anyway, today, i took her advice and explored my options. it turns out i missed the window for affordable care act coverage. i'm exploring whatever options i can (including paying, uhh, $1,600 a month for those pills (lord)), though man, i got some problems here . . .

it turns out shingles is incredibly painful! i have barely been able to sit up straight for a week. in case you don't know: it's a decades-later resurgence of the chicken pox virus, emerging from deep within your nerves and causing a monster-painful rash along the nerve-lines

furthermore, perhaps you remember me--fond of the words--mentioning a "nerve surgery" back in february: i had a cyst pressing on a nerve in my right wrist. that surgery did NOT take, so now i need another one, though wow, without insurance that is flat-out Mercedes Benz Money.

in other news, i have just about finished writing the script for my review of DOOM (1993) and wow . . . this thing is wild. i tried to put a little more, uhh, "emotion" into it than usual. so please anticipate that!! hopefully i won't still have Shingles Pain when i record