My day of phone calls

Phew, what a compulsory phone call headache today has been.

You see, I need to buy some travel insurance for my Christmas holidays, and until last year, this was as easy as 1-2-3 on Boots.com and hello Advantage Cards points.

Throw Crohn’s into the mix as well as (gasp) surgery and suddenly I’m more expensive to insure than a prize racehorse travelling by land from England to Australia, unrestrained in the back of a pick-up truck, via every war-torn country possible.

I kid you not – it costs more to insure me for my holiday than it does to insure my house for the whole year. And my house is over 200 years old!

This does not seem fair.

So anyway, I tried doing it online, but in the end, I had to bite the bullet and lift the phone. This was alright, until the complicated questions, when the poor lady at the other end literally had to say each word in her sentence 20 times until I got the gist of what she was saying.

And then, I made the mistake of declaring that I had not had the results of my capsule endoscopy.

*Ping

That’ll be another £40 please.

So, to try and get rid of this, I had to lift the phone and ring my hospital. This involved lots of options and a recorded voice so high it left my frequency frequently. But honestly, I think only dogs could hear her at the point anyway.

Eventually I got through to the probably very busy endoscopy department and had to sheepishly ask them to find the results of my capsule endoscopy so I could go skiing. Honestly, I felt like such a princess, but they were absolutely lovely about it, had no clue what the results are, and are calling me back… I hope.

I honestly do not know how people make phone calls all the time – it is so stressful and half the time I come off the phone with little or no idea about what just happened, which when it comes to insurance, is never a good thing.

In an ideal world, one day, all these companies would have an instant messenger service for people like me, so that we could chat easily about what I wanted and it would all be there as instantly as a phone call would be for hearing peeps. But then you have fraud issues and what not, so I can understand why this doesn’t exist yet.

It seems however, that the obvious thing is to simply not get anything else wrong with me – especially not something that causes those online health questionnaires to crash the moment I type my condition into them. So, Body, if you’re listening, ‘Crohn’s and deafness are quite enough for the moment, thank you. That will be all.’

DG