Graceful Parenting in Austin

(Read part 1 if you haven’t already.)

Oh, my, I must say that my greatest challenge in showing kindness to people I don’t know is when I’m on the phone with a customer representative from my insurance company. I just can’t say exactly why and maybe it is worth a series of sessions in therapy, but they make me cry and raise my voice and otherwise act like an idiot and it’s definitely not a time when I find it easy to show lovingkindness…

Today, I’m trying to figure out how, when I went to the acupuncturist last year, the one who didn’t take my insurance, I paid $60 a session and now that I go to an acupuncturist that takes my insurance, I’m paying $84 a session. Oh, you know how the game works. The told me up front my co-pay would be small and I paid my co-pay each time, but when all was said and done, I owed a lot more because my insurance didn’t pay their part of the contracted rate, according to my acupuncturist.

According to my insurance, my acupuncturist charged $77 for an office visit and $170 for a separate acupuncture session each time I saw her. I guess the “Hello, how are you” was the office visit part, separate from me being on the table with the needles, which was the acupuncture part. And, you know that little heat lamp they put on your feet so they don’t get cold? That is called “heat therapy” and it costs $40 extra and insurance doesn’t cover that, but the acupuncturist didn’t let me know that, all the times I was paying my little co-pay.

So, really, I’m not so mad at the insurance, I’m more mad at the acupuncturist, who I’ll talk to next, but as I’m wrapping up the call, the customer service representative says in a serious voice, “Can I ask you a question?”

I’m thinking maybe she wants to get my testimony for a case against my over-charging acupuncturist, but that wasn’t it.

“Did it work?,” she asks.

“Huh?” I say.

“Did it work? The acupuncture?”

I’m still not following her.

She continues, “I see that you are my age and that your diagnosis code was infertility and you tried this last year too. Did it work last year?”

I pause before I say anything. I’m not sure what to say. It is a boldly personal question and inappropriate in a customer service setting for so many reasons. I knew I could say I would rather not answer, but I heard something in her voice, just an honest yearning of someone who wants to be pregnant herself and so I forget what is appropriate or not and I answer her question.

“Yes, it worked last year.”

She asks me all about it and then she tells me her story. She has boys from a previous marriage and her husband has boys from a previous marriage and they want to have a baby together, hopefully a girl. She had a miscarriage and is seeing a fertility specialist now.

I tell her that I don’t know how I got pregnant, but I saw the my uterine blood flow in an ultrasound before the treatments and after and it looked very different. Good uterine blood flow is a key factor in older women getting pregnant, according to the acupuncturists and western doctors.

She asked if it hurt. I said not really. She says she has tattoos, several of them, in discreet places (but no dirty) and the tattoos didn’t hurt too much. I told her it would hurt less than tattoos. (I think, since I don’t have one).

I try to think of everything I could say in a conversation that is probably being recorded, but I didn’t have the answers for her. There isn’t one set of answers for all women and she would have to find her own way. Mostly, I tell her I’m sorry about her miscarriage and I wish her the best in trying to get pregnant. She says thanks.

Maybe a while back, I wouldn’t have taken the time to talk to her. Maybe I would have been mad at her for asking. I wasn’t so efficient or busy keeping score today, I just listened and tried to be kind and it felt good. Maybe I’ll get the hang of loving kindness, a little bit at a time, after all.