Rejected!

Reject:  To refuse to take, agree to, accede to, use, believe, etc.


I think I've mentioned my disappointment the first several hundred times I heard the famous Promises of recovery lore.  For someone still aspiring to be a rock star or the next Ernest Hemingway, or at least a guy who could afford to move out of his parent's house, all of the talk about an absence of fear and calm insight and enjoying honest, healthy relationships was deflating.  I was hoping for Ferraris and super-models and sleeping on piles of money.


"What am I trying to be, a mystic living in the desert, eating locusts?" I groused.  While I admit to never eating locusts they don't sound that appetizing.  They're insects, for god's sake.


Yet here I am, still sober, and of all the things I'm grateful for, the relative lack of anxiety and fear and angst is at the top of the list.


To wit:  when KK and I moved to the New City we were dismayed to find out that our health insurance didn't transfer smoothly.  While we were still covered -- no small feat these days -- our premiums tripled because we were "out of network," which is insurance company code for "we want to triple your premiums."  I'm sure their legal permission to do this is buried somewhere in the 878 page contract we signed.


We applied for insurance with another company.  I was approved but SuperK was not, due to a minor, normal condition that has never caused her any problems and almost certainly never will.  But this is a right of the insurance company, a private entity that is trying to make money, not reduce the angst of a couple of middle aged hipsters.  We requested some additional documentation from her physician and reapplied, and were rejected again.  As one might imagine, this was quite upsetting, on multiple fronts.  We didn't like to have to pay so much more money to keep our current coverage, and we didn't like someone suggesting that SuperK might be afflicted with something serious.


So we applied with another company.  After an interminable wait, a thin, thin letter comes in the mail.


"Oh, for god's sake," SuperK says after reading the letter.


She got accepted and I got rejected, for a minor, normal condition that has never caused me any problems and likely never will.  Apparently one company's disaster is another company's ho-hum.


SuperK looked at me with some trepidation until I burst into laughter.


What had happened over the last few months -- not quickly, but slowly, because health insurance is an important issue -- was that both of us had just kind of forgotten about the whole thing.  If not forgotten, at least placed it in the What the Hell Can You Do About It, Anyway? category.  We had insurance, fortunately, that we could afford to pay for, fortunately.  We were applying for different coverage.  Those were the facts, as distasteful as they were to us.


So I guess she's making one insurance company happy and I'm making another one happy.  We're happy, that's for sure.