This Spring I broke my wrist in a snowboarding accident. When I heard and felt my wrist crunch like a dry tree branch, my first thought was, "Shit it's definitely broken." My next immediate thought was, "Shit I should have switched from CIGNA." After those two thoughts the pain came rolling in, and thinking became harder to do.

My fiancé was skiing behind me and found me writhing and moaning on the side of the trail. Somehow, instinctively, I had crawled to the edge of the crowded icy trail using my good wrist only. Another person in our group, who is actually a doctor, climbed down the wooded ravine atop which I was perched. I saw him disappear and emerge with a handful of twigs, which he fashioned into a splint. I wound up walking down the last 500 yards of the trail.

It turned out the wrist was pretty bad. Both bones were broken, and it was dislocated, which would explain why it looked like there was an invisible boot standing on my arm, completely mangling its appearance. Throughout the hospital process I kept asking the doctors how much each part of the surgery and recovery would cost. The doctors wanted me to stay two nights at the hospital but I insisted on staying only one night. Every bit of food or medicine they offered me, I asked how much it would cost. I refused morphine until I couldn't sleep because of the pain.

The accident happened in Switzerland so the doctors found my obsession with cost rather amusing. I knew it wouldn't be amusing because I am an American. I come from the land of squeezing the little people for all they're worth. I had a $4000 out of network deductible. That would be my entire yearly raise right there. The raise that I worked my ass for and sacrificed so many hours of my one life for. After the deductible would come a 60/40 split until I hit $8000. That would be the after tax raise that I got upon changing jobs. I took an 18% raise to leave a pretty damn good job only to discover I'd be working 20% more in the new job with less vacation and fewer benefits. There was also the fact that I would be spending most of my vacation as a cripple, out of my paltry 3-week allotment, half the vacation time that even entry-level Swiss get.

After all of that, I had to quit my job anyway because it was aggravating my soul cancer. In other words, they put so much pressure on us to work long hours and I'm in my thirties now and can't compete on sleep deprivation with twenty-something babies, which my firm routinely hired to do regulatory work, even though those same regulations required 'adequate experience'. My options were to stay there and let them drain me before discarding me, or leave with some part of my soul still alive. I couldn't start physical therapy because CIGNA took forever to process my claim, and now that the claim is processed and I hit my deductible, my last day at the office is a week away. I can't go to physical therapy because I'll lose my insurance once I leave my job and I will have zero income.

I'm going to have permanent damage to my wrist and loss of mobility because I can't afford physical therapy, even though I was making six figures (albeit barely) and I had health insurance. I'm not sure what that means for people who have it tougher than I do. I understand that poor people qualify for free or heavily subsidized Obamacare now. But I won't qualify even with zero income because my spouse makes money and I am technically in his household. Nevermind the fact that we live in a very very expensive city and I am pregnant now. I think about somebody with just slightly less of a cushion than I built for myself but isn't poor poor, and shudder to think what path they would have been forced to take. 80 hour weeks of soul cancer, while pregnant?

It really is the middle class, i.e. those not poor enough to be poor but not wealthy enough to be comfortable, that is finding itself in a mess right now. I don't know how I wound up sympathizing with people who hate Obamacare, and how I became someone who calls CIGNA to scream at their hapless peons, just so that someone will listen. I guess I just grew up thinking I would be free one day, because I was smart and did well in school. I didn't realize that success meant giving your whole life to a soulless corporation, which you sort of hate, and still failing to get ahead.

I have no college debt, I have at least 60% equity in my apartment. My now-husband makes decent though not outrageous money. But here I am, hating Obamacare. Wondering why I should work 80 hour weeks while pregnant so that Big Corn can sell hepatotoxic drugs disguised as food. Medicare covers bariatric surgery for people so addicted to drug food that they need to cut out their stomachs. Why doesn't Big Corn cover that bill? It's their mess. It's their drugs that are killing those miserable people.

I am not sure if the elites in government and the whole bourgeois class get it. They probably would have thought I was OK, that I loved grabbing my ankles all day for my fancy-branded workplace, or whatever it is they tell themselves about working hard at utterly bullshit work. But I really think Donald Trump might be elected, in which case if I break my wrist again, I'll probably need to just cut it off. Back when America was his kind of great, all you got for major surgery was rum and a bite plate.