Putting Cancer in the can.

Cancer, as it turns out, is a little more expensive than three brand new BMWs. Since I drive the automobile equivalent of a used tricycle, you can see why this is somewhat out of our price range.

When you go to the hospital to get chemo they charge you 200 dollars before you even get taken to your room. This is your "convenience charge" essentially. And hey, it's not like you're working, so what's 200 bucks? What's 200 bucks when you don't have a job? It's a lifetime. But they require it. They desire it. It is a necessity. So you pay it.......but, in retrospect, I suppose it somehow all evens out since you're not really eating anything....

Hospitals are expensive. Having to visit a hospital is sort of the antithesis of winning the lottery......maybe more like bingo. The hospital is like a bingo hall - filled with shouting old people.

Jade and I began paying on our hospital bills as soon as we could - ten dollars a month - thought we'd really start knocking em down, one at a time, y'know? Blast down the stragglers our insurance wasn't taking care of when they weren't trying to drop us.

The companies call us and they say ten dollars a month just isn't enough. They say they're going to turn us into collections. We say I haven't worked in six months. They say, essentially, that they don't care. We owe them, personally, $67 and they were going to get their money and they weren't going to wait.

And we told them to go ahead, send us to collections. You can't negotiate with these kinds of people. George W. Bush said it of OBLaden and Kevin Spacey said it in The Negotiator and now I'm saying it to these financial terrorists. WE. WILL. NOT. NEGOTIATE.

We didn't HAVE their stupid $67 to be wasting. We needed to pay rent. We needed to pay our water bill. We needed to EAT. And so we told them we truly WANTED to pay them but at this point in time, we really just couldn't, just please wait until I'm working and getting paid and they JUST COULDN'T.

So what did we do? We wrote them a letter. We wrote them a letter (addressed to someone higher up than a grunt on The Telephone Terrorist Squad) and it said, "We don't have money. We are poor. We are young. Please write off this silly charge".

And they did.

A small victory. Sixty-seven dollars in cold hard cash put back into our pockets.

We owe the hospital some 13 thousand dollars.

Paying it off in ten dollars sums is going to take a while.

We write them a letter.

We received the response yesterday.

They're writing it off.

We're in the clear.