Deck the halls (with used-up Kleenex)

If you were wondering where all the snot in the world has gone, it's here. In Aisling's poor head.

She recovered from her stomach complaint last week without ever actually throwing up, which was a bonus, because everybody else who had it apparently threw up everything they'd eaten since birth. So her resistance was strong enough to kick that right in the teeth, but it wasn't subsequently strong enough to fight off the head cold that was waiting to pounce on her.

I, too, am not at my peak, having had to undergo a minor in-office surgical procedure yesterday that luckily came with a bottle of Vicodin. So I am wafting around the house in an airy-fairy haze, singing little snatches of songs and picking up all the knick-knacks that decorate the house, giving them little kisses and telling them I love them. Some of them may have even answered back, but that might just be the Vicodin talking.

Meelyn, harassed, is serving as our nurse, bringing Aisling Cold-Eez, glasses of orange juice and boxes of tissue and occasionally stopping by to pull me down from the chandelier in the foyer, where she's found me cooing to the flame-shaped light bulbs and singing songs from the Mulan soundtrack.

This is a marked difference from the person she saw yesterday in our van at the Kroger pharmacy's drive-up window. The pharmacist's assistant tried to tell me that our insurance wasn't valid and told me that the three prescriptions the doctor's office had called in for me would come to $143.75. I knew she was wrong, because I'd just shown that very same insurance card to the clerk in the financial office at the doctor's, but I was so freaked out at the thought of being denied my precious bottle of Vicodin that I got a little yelpy and leaned across Meelyn (who was driving) and said to the assistant, my eyes like dinner plates, "PLEASE RUN IT THROUGH AGAIN. I DON'T HAVE $143.75!!!"

She went back to run it again, and came back, sullenly dragging her feet to say that it was once again denied. This threw me into an utter panic, and it wasn't even one of those panics induced by the thought that maybe we forgot to pay the bill, because this is my husband's group policy from work and they wring EVERY PENNY from his paycheck every week before he even sees it, all $125 of it...and that's just insurance for the two of us. And it doesn't include dental and optical.
This time, I leaned so far across Meelyn that her eyes began to bulge. I probably looked a little bit crazed; I WAS a little bit crazed. I wanted. That. Pain medicine. Feverishly, I explained to the pharm assist that I had just used that card, blablabla and she took it back and ran it through again and came back with a much more respectful attitude.

"You insurance carrier is the same, but your group number is different," she explained apologetically.

I don't think I'll be able to forgive her for giving me such a fright. The insurance brought the cost of my prescriptions down to a much more do-able $39.00 and Meelyn handed over my debit card while saying to me, in the tone of a jockey soothing a nervous thoroughbred, "Now see? Ehhhhhhhhhhhverything's going to be juuuuuuuust fiiiiiiine."

Then she drove us home and Aisling collapsed on the sofa in a coughing fit, and I (with local anesthesia rapidly leaving my body), gulped down a Vicodin and tried not to look too much like a crack addict getting her next fix.