So I got home from work yesterday to find a small pile of mail waiting for me on my desk. Three letters. I opened the first, a credit card offer from Bank of America. Shredder. I opened the second, more credit card checks from Chase Manhattan (or are they just "Chase" now?). Shredder. I looked at the third. Hm. Something from a PO Box in Marshfield. Something from the local hospital?

No, but close. It was a letter from a fucking collection agent. Ain't that a bitch?

Probably at our wedding, and probably from my niece Typhoid Melissa, I contracted strep throat at the end of May. Strep doesn't just go away on its own, so off to the doctor I went. Apparently what I was suffering may not have been strep throat. The culture came back negative, but the doctor said that the quick, cheap test they do is only around 90% accurate. She treated me as if it was strep and the problem went away, so… probably strep. It sure felt like strep anyway.

I certainly wasn't expecting to get sick, so I didn't have any money available to pay that hospital bill immediately. My clinic visit was in early June and the bill arrived in my mail box in late June. I didn't have any money to start paying them until late July.

My total bill? $173.18. I sent them $50 at the end of July, then again at the end of August, then again at the end of September. I mailed my final payment of $23.18 on October 31st.

The hospital turned me over to a collection agent on November 2nd. Bastards!

Ok, here are the problems I have with this:

1. I was paying them regularly. $50 a month on a less-than-$200 bill is pretty good, I think.

2. They never warned me they were going to place the bill with a collection agent. I know they're not required to do that, but doesn't everybody do that anyway?

3. It's $23.18. Twenty-fucking-three dollars and eighteen fucking cents. Isn't it going to cost them more in processing fees than they'll recover from the agent?

4. I fucking paid it! I don't owe them shit!

Cum-guzzling whores! Now I have to write a letter to the collection agent disputing the validity of the debt. Of course it must be in writing because phone calls just don't count.

The Bunny tells me none of this would have happened if I'd called the hospital and established a formal payment plan. But I never figured that really necessary. All one would need to do is look at the account history to see I'm paying more than 25% of the debt every month. Apparently, this is not good enough. One needs to specifically tell them "You see what I'm doing there? Yeah, that's what I'm doing."

Assholes. As if I needed one more reason to bitch about health care.

It sucks to be sick. I mean it really, outstandingly, phenomenally sucks to be sick. Streptococcus is not my friend. In fact, it is my enemy. Strep (we're on a first name basis now) is an evil, vile thing. Strep tried to kill me this weekend. I think it might have succeeded. I'm pretty sure I died sometime on Friday and was revived by the wondrous voodoo that is medicine.

Apparently Strep first came into our house hidden in the pocket of our niece, who will henceforth be referred to as "Typhoid Melissa." Typhoid Melissa was not symptomatic when she spent long amounts of time at our house last weekend. No… of course not. That sneaky little minx waited until days later to get sick.

On Thursday Bunny and I compared our then mild symptoms (headache, body aches, chills, fatigue, scratchy throat, swollen glands) and concluded we'd caught the plague. Bunny made it to the clinic that afternoon and was quickly diagnosed and medicated. I was working while the clinic was open, so I waited until the next morning.

Strep seemed to beat the shit out of me so much more than Bunny. So either a), that 15 hour window made a huge difference or b), I am a complete pussy. Or, you know… both. Either way, there are 36 hours between 10 p.m. Thursday and 10 a.m. Saturday and I probably slept 30 of them. Bunny, on the other hand, was almost completely functional. And it's a good thing too, because I died sometime on Friday.

I'm now absolutely convinced that zombies are real, because surely some supernatural force kept my body moving around after my death, taking hot baths and drinking water and such, while the supreme military might that is Penicillin slowly reclaimed the war-torn battleground that is my throat, thereby reanimating me sometime on Saturday morning.

My mother has what is possibly the weakest immune system known to man. She is a veteran of the Strep Throat wars. If ever anyone in the same zip code as her has Strep, my mother will also get Strep. I'm not exaggerating when I say that my mother has had Strep two or three times a year for as long as I can remember. She's probably had it thirty or forty times by now.

You might think this would increase my respect for my mother, knowing that she's endured this so many times before. If you thought that, you'd be wrong. My mother must be an even bigger pussy than I am. Her body should be expert at defeating Strep. She should be the Captain America of the Strep Throat wars. And I'm talking about the World War II Captain America, where he used to throw the pointy shield at Nazi's heads. None of that pantywaist round shield crap.

My mother should be Strep Kryptonite. Her immune system should be so strong, she should glow in the dark. She should be able to pass by sick people and heal them through her very presence. But she doesn't. She just keeps getting sick, several times a year, year after year. She's taken Penicillin so many times, she developed an allergy to it. And then she developed an allergy to Amoxicillin. And then she developed an allergy to Tetracycline and then to Keflex. My mother's anti-Strep medicine is now a rare concoction of newborn puppies and moon rocks. I'm thinking her immune system just lacks ambition.

However, I am in no way interested in using my own immune system to prove that point.