Baby Steps

Thanks to a healthy amount of miscommunication on all sides, and a healthy amount of naiveté on my part, my hospital bill from May is still not paid. The frustrating thing is this: I'm a pretty responsible person. I cross my t's and dot my i's. I watch my spending and I pay my bills on time. Really. Sometimes I even balance my checkbook. But somehow, this bill slipped through the cracks. After weeks of calling the hospital, then my insurance, then the hospital, then my insurance, by the end of September, I really thought that all the loose ends were tied up. I noted the date and time I'd placed the call and, confident that the case was closed, I filed the bill away. In a file labeled "MFB: Health" in our filing cabinet. Like a real, organized human being. So that was September 30. And since then, I've been on my merry way, assuming that the fairies at the hospital and the insurance company were dealing with my bill in an appropriate and timely fashion.

And then this week, completely out of the blue, I got a letter from a debt collection agency. A DEBT COLLECTION AGENCY. Honestly, having always been completely responsible about paying my bills, I'm pretty sure that, before this week, I thought that debt collection agencies were just some big fancy financial scare tactic. And that they didn't actually exist in real life. But GUESS WHAT it turns out they DO. So upon opening this letter I immediately cried because hello I'm Mary Frances and I can't accept criticism. I spent half an hour this morning on the phone with the debt collection agency, my insurance company, and the hospital trying to wrestle out what had gone wrong with this bill. I'm still not entirely sure what happened; I just know that there was misinformation flying around everywhere, and that I should have been 1,000% more vigilant about making sure that this bill was being dealt with on all sides.

I'm now waiting to hear back from the lovely woman at the insurance company who helped me; she says she'll call me by Tuesday. I'm still terrified that my credit will be destroyed forever by this one mistake, and that when Preston and I go to get a loan to buy a house they will say NO THANK YOU your wife didn't pay her hospital bill in 2008 please go live in a box. Sigh. However, even though I obviously screwed up, I've done everything that I can for now. For real this time. All I can do is wait and call back on Tuesday.

After I got off the phone, I went into the kitchen to make a mug of tea, when I realized that I had dealt with this crisis all on my own. Usually, when confronted with a crisis, I turn into a codependent leech. A wave of panic washes over me and I immediately call someone (usually Preston or my Mom) whom I know will comfort me and reassure me that I'm not a bad person. However, this time, I didn't call my Mom in a panic. I didn't cry into Preston's shoulder. Instead, after my initial horror at the whole debt collection awfulness, I simply acted. I looked back at my files, I called, I took names and notes. All by MYSELF.

It's funny how adulthood has kind of crept up on me. Most often I still feel like a child living in an adult situation--an imposter in an adult body and an adult apartment. But sometimes, more and more frequently, I've found myself settling into my adult skin. I can feel myself becoming the adult that I will be. And I'm sure when I'm sixty years old, I'll look back on this year (and probably won't even remember this hospital bill brouhaha) and think "PSHAW. Twenty-three years old? You might as well have been a fetus." But for right now, at twenty-three years old, at least I know that I'm on my way.