Note from Kurt: see my last post for why this is appear­ing some­time after Lisa authored it. She is get­ting around much bet­ter now.

It’s been quite a while since I posted to our house project blog. Suf­fice it to say that things became overly dif­fi­cult for me as I watched my lit­tle house dis­ap­pear before my eyes. I would get very depressed, than regain my equi­lib­rium, only to return to panic.

Three weeks ago I fell through a hole in the floor that hadn’t been prop­erly boarded over and rein­jured my knee. It would not bear any weight and would not bend – at all. I couldn’t even bend it enough to sit on the toi­let in our tiny bath­room with the door closed so I had to take care of that with my leg stick­ing out the door. I thought it was hard cook­ing meals in our tiny kitchen, but try it on crutches!

My knee has got­ten much bet­ter and I can walk again, although I still can’t straighten it and I wouldn’t try to walk very far on it. It’ll do for now. We will prob­a­bly go to Costa Rica to have arthroscopy surgery to cor­rect the torn car­ti­lage that was found by MRI one and-a-half years ago. It will cost approx­i­mately $1,000 there as opposed to $12,000 or so here. It’s hard to get a true pic­ture of the cost here because of the absurd way we are billed for med­ical procedures.

Every­one involved in your surgery gets to send their own bill and they’re indis­putable. Since you can’t know what it’s going to cost until it’s over and you’re star­ing at the bills with your mouth wide open in hor­ror, you can’t shop for your anes­the­si­ol­o­gist, or radi­ol­o­gist, or for any of the numer­ous peo­ple involved. So, I can only guess at the price. When I asked my doc­tor a year-and-a-half ago how much the surgery would cost he looked at me like I was crazy. I know peo­ple who have been billed $70,000 for a two-week stay in the hos­pi­tal for pneu­mo­nia and $20,000 for an appen­dec­tomy that involved only one day in the hos­pi­tal. So, a safe guess would be between $10,000 and $15,000.

The hos­pi­tal I am con­sid­er­ing in Costa Rica, how­ever, actu­ally lists their prices for each pro­ce­dure – a ver­i­ta­ble sur­gi­cal menu. They can con­trol their costs, which we can’t do here. Too many stake­hold­ers in whose inter­est con­trol­ling costs are not favorable.

So, still no roof and no sid­ing, but I’m walk­ing again and have got­ten the hang of liv­ing in a fifth wheel. We had a great gar­den over the sum­mer and I’m really excited about next year – espe­cially as we’ll be back in our house and can spend more time in our garden!

Lisa