Suuuuure. I’ll call my insurance to ask whether I should accrue costly hospital bills for them to pay. Or not.

I’m sure it might depend on whether I had paid my full deductible yet, but I imagine the call to go something like this:

Me: Hi Nurse Line? I’m having some chest pains?
Nurse Line: Chest pains are more common than you think, don’t worry.
Me: But it’s kind of [gasp] stabbing? Oh boy. There it goes.
Nurse Line: Have you considered self-care?
Me: Tingling . . . in my . . . left arm . . . [thump]
Nurse Line: Advil should clear that right up.

The information I can get by calling Nurse Line, the card assures me, is “physician-approved.” How do the physicians know what the phone operator is going to say? Does a physician come in and bless the phone with a wave of his or her stethoscope first?

In other health insurance news, I also found out that I could get $50 from my health insurance comp by filling out an online questionnaire. Woo-hoo! right? The questions were a wee bit personal though. They moved from my diet and exercise regimen, to my mental health and family history, right down to the nitty gritty: height and weight please, marked with the dreaded red asterisk — required.

So I lied my suddenly-smaller-on-paper ass off, of course. Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not raising your premiums . . .

But even after I added a full inch and took off 20-25 pounds, the interwebs still said I was fat! Which almost scared me enough to call Nurse Line to see what I should do.

“There’re two drugs that are good. A cheap one with side effects, and an expensive one with none.”

This sounds to me like the intro to a parable, or a joke. “What are the side effects for the cheap one?” I say.

“Well, some people have gastro-intestinal problems. And some people go batty in the head.”

Ooo-kay . . .That’s the medical term, I’m guessing. From the Latin “batum”.

The expensive one, I find out — the sans-insanity one — is five bucks a pill. And you take one a day for a month. (For the math-addled or lazy, that’s $150). The cheap ones are only $20 for a month’s supply. I guess you can’t expect a prescription drug to keep you safe from malaria and psychosis for the price of a large pizza.

How much am I willing to pay for my peace of mind? You know, literally? Or all the pieces of my mind?

In other medical news, I got a couple of shots-in-the-arm vaccines, but also an oral one for typhoid. “This is a live, weakened strain of typhoid bacterium,” the doc said, holding up four pills. “So you have to take care of it. You have to take it on an empty stomach with lots of cool water, to make sure it lives long enough to get into your small intestines.”

Are you sure, Doc, that we want typhoid flourishing in my intestines? You know, if I took it on a full stomach, and the typhoid died, would that be so bad?

As a person who is already pretty batty, without medications, I tell you — it was hard for me to swallow that prescription typhoid. I wanted to wash my hands after I touched the pill but, you know, that would have been crazy.