Medical Madness

Little Difster cut her head open this evening and it required a trip to the emergency room. She's doing just fine, she was very brave through the whole thing. It was borderline whether or not she really needed to get stitch but I decided in this case that it was better safe than sorry.

On checking out, the clerk told me that would need to leave a $400 deposit with her until the full amount of the bill can be determined. I nearly laughed out loud. I said, "You must be joking, why would I leave you $400 when you can't even tell me how much it's going to cost? I don't have $400 anyway." She said, "You have to leave some kind of deposit." I nearly said (should have said) "What are you going to do, repossess my daughter or the lone suture if I don't?"

The only thing that kept me from doing that is that I am going to attempt to negotiate the bill down later (whatever it may be) and I didn't want some note on the file saying I was being uncooperative with the clerk. So I just sucked it up in hopes that I can get out of paying some of the money to them later.

I'm also thinking I should charge them. I was in that emergency room for about 4 hours. My standard consulting rate is $95 and I figure I'll give them the first hour. The emergency room wasn't that busy, there's no reason it should have taken that long.

It's late, I'm tired, we'll see what happened.

On the plus side, tonight is the most time I've spent with Mrs. Difster since she left last December and we didn't get in to any fights. We didn't talk too much but we got along.