I Beat Cancer but Not the Debt

When I was newly diagnosed, I read in some book, somewhere, that one surprising “side effect” to beating breast cancer was huge credit card bills.  Six years ago, before getting married, I’d decided to cut up my credit cards and pay off the debt.  It didn’t take long, I was working, my (then-future) husband was supporting our household with his paycheck and so my paycheck could go entirely towards paying off debt.  Plus we didn’t have children and I didn’t have student loans.  I was proud of myself for paying off so much debt in such a short time and resolved, to myself and my husband, that I wouldn’t be in that situation again.

Well, just over three years after our wedding (and the debt being paid off), I got my breast cancer diagnosis.  And unfortunately, I started busting out the credit cards again.  I wasn’t working, we had two very young children, and this was a very difficult, emotionally, time in our lives.  I’m a giver, I tend to want to make people happy (including myself) by giving gifts and all too often in the two plus years since going through surgeries and chemo, I found myself thinking, “oh, I deserve this, I’m going through chemo/surgeries!” or “I think I want this and, besides, I beat cancer and doesn’t that mean I should get it?”

So when I had to face the music and sit down to add up all the debt, it was horrifying…but not surprising.  I’ve played the cancer card more than I ought to, I know, and clearly I used the credit card too much, as well.

We’re in a different position now than we were six years ago.  Because we now have small children, I can’t just go back to work or to school without incurring a new expense (child care), so our debt repayment plan will take longer than it did before our wedding.  But it will get paid.

The final irony is that, while I fully admit to being the one to run up the credit cards on “a treat here, and a treat there,” the bills became impossible to pay because of cancer.  Specifically, because of a hospital bill that our health insurance company never paid…the hospital ended up sending it to a collections agency who reported it to the credit agencies and the second the credit card companies learned about that “bad debt”*, they tripled the interest rates on my credit cards and that’s how I couldn’t keep up with paying anything off.  Stupid cancer, gettin’ me again!

Happily, just yesterday, we received the revised EOB from the insurance company stating that they finally FINALLY paid off that unpaid hospital debt from 2006, and so now I can get to work having that debt removed from my credit report and hopefully the interest rates on my (now cut-up) credit cards can be lowered again.  And then our debt repayment shouldn’t take quite as long.

* never mind that the bad debt truly belonged to the health insurance company…   who, me? bitter?