I’m a lawyer. I know a fair amount about how you apply rules to facts and how you make an effective argument. But it’s very difficult to do that when the person on whose behalf you’re performing this work is… you. There’s a saying that a lawyer who represents herself has a fool for a client.

Perhaps this is why it’s taken me months and months to deal with transferring my care from my medical group in San Francisco to a hospital right here in Berkeley. This transfer would let me drive fifteen minutes, do radiation for fifteen minutes, and be home in fifteen minutes. (It’s a hospital that actually valet parks the cars of cancer patients who’re doing radiation and chemo. I wonder if they bring you a cup of tea?) If I stay in San Francsico, I’d be driving, or taking public transportation for about two and half hours a day.

The trick is that, in order to transfer from my medical group in San Francisco to the out of plan group in Berkeley, someone I don’t know has to be convinced the transfer is “medically necessary.” What’s funny is that when I asked how transfer requests are evaluated, so I’d know how to talk about my need to be seen in Berkeley, the woman I spoke to in the medical group acted like I’d asked her to open the envelope of the Best Picture Academy Award winner two days before Harrison Ford did. It was that bad. This information naturally belongs to me — but it didn’t stop her from trying to intimidate me into backing off and not asking. Apparently, you don’t actually get to talk to your insurance company. They just want you to go away.

How many people, I wonder, stop trying when they get that kind of response? I didn’t, but it took me about two months to give it another go. I wrote an email yesterday to my surgeon, with the text of an argument about why my transfer is “medically necessary.” She told me why it is, but when I offered to write it up she seemed very grateful. She’s too busy to do more than scrawl a few words on a form. This way, she’ll have a few paragraphs and I’ll have a better chance of getting better treatment… medically necessary treatment.

Again and again I wonder how people who don’t have the many privileges I do negotiate this system that really has almost nothing to do with securing their health and everything to do with making a profit. It makes me sad. And angry. But yesterday I talked to the insurance company in the voice of my surgeon: someone who cares about my health and knows how to safeguard it. And that felt awfully good.