Hey, readers... I've got, uh, a favor to ask. This is me being serious for once. I've been freelancing since I lost my job as a website editor in February 2001. Now, the freelancing is dull, but it pays the rent and keeps me in fresh clothes. But a few months ago I developed a localized infection in my right hand that ended up requiring a three-night hospital stay. (The doctors were never able to narrow down the infection to a specific pathogen, but the immobility and swelling in my right forearm did respond to antibiotics, so an unspecified infection remains the diagnosis.) I'm all better now -- it took almost a month of stretching exercises to restore the tendons in that hand to normal flexibility, though.

Sigh. Anyway, as I did not have medical insurance, I am now faced with a bill for $7,800 for those three enchanting nights in Brooklyn's Kings County Hospital. (It's a very nice facility, incidentally, and the experience took me to a part of Brooklyn I'd never seen before. Just on the other side of Prospect Park, there's a huge concentration of folks from the West Indies -- from Trinidad and Jamaica and such, and dey be talkin', mon, in all the wonderful different strains of Caribbean English. I think I may have been the only white person in the hospital who wasn't a doctor of some sort. Speaking of, Kings County Hospital turned out to be a goldmine of really hot young male doctors in any shade, ethnicity, or religious persuasion you could ask for, ladies. But especially if you go for swarthy gentlemen.)

Where was I? Oh, yeah. So I've got a $7800 bill to settle. The freelance work I get brings in $2000 a month, maybe. I live in New York in a modest, somewhat cramped fourth-floor walkup, but... this is New York. So $7800 pinches, a bit. They're willing to let me pay it off in installments, and my roommate's nice Jewish boyfriend, who works as an ER doc at that very hospital, says that nothing bad would happen to me if I didn't pay -- county hospitals are used to deadbeat patients. Still, I would much rather settle my debt ASAP, and not allow myself to be a burden on the system.

So, if you could spare a little to help me defray the total sum, I would be immensely, immensely grateful.

Shucks, I'm embarrassed now.

posted by Throbert | 10/08/2002 11:31:00 PM |

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