My 12-month-old son recovering from a surgery we almost didn't have because we couldn't afford it.

I try not to be too political on this blog. You probably don't believe me given some of my recent posts, but it's true. If you're politicked out and want to skip this one, feel free. I just want to give some public insight into how maternal and child healthcare work — or don't — on a high deductible plan with an HSA, and since that's been my lived experience, I feel an obligation to share.

There are many Republican plans floating around right now suggesting a replacement to the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), which currently covers 20 million people in the United States. Several replacement ideas, including the latest GOP plan, have touted health savings accounts as the best option for those who need private insurance. I'm here to tell you how that works out in practice, and how it might nearly have cost me my fertility and my life and how it could have prevented my baby from having a needed operation.

Scenario 1: The five-month miscarriage

When my husband, Sam, and I were first trying to conceive, we got pregnant right away, but not all was rosy. I started spotting at 6 weeks and then full-on bleeding with cramps at 10 weeks: a miscarriage. I put off going to my gynecologist, whom I hadn't seen in a long time due to budget constraints. I figured what needed to come out had come out and that there was nothing more to be done. I had a hankering to keep this baby's "birth" natural in any case, but this was aided by the fact that if I went in to a gynecologist, it wouldn't be covered as a preventive visit. It would be an urgent-care visit, which meant I'd be on the hook for the full amount, including any tests and procedures. I'd had problems with this before, even when going in for preventive visits, which were supposed to be covered with just a copay. The doctor, without asking me, would tack on some extra lab work, and the next thing I knew, I'd be getting a lab bill I hadn't budgeted for.

So I stayed home, and I kept bleeding. And bleeding. And bleeding. For five months, I continued charting my temperatures to see when I'd ovulate, and I'd note which days I had spotting. It was nearly all the days in that five-month span, interspersed with what seemed like menstrual periods as well. I fretted. I searched message boards. Surely this was not normal? I called the midwives I'd been hoping to see for my pregnancy. They told me to call my gynecologist. I called Planned Parenthood, hoping for a cheaper option. They told me to call my gynecologist. I finally did, and my gynecologist's office scheduled me for three weeks out. I called back to see if they could see me sooner, and they scheduled an urgent-care visit for that week, but I was so wracked with anxiety about going to an appointment I couldn't afford that I ended up being too late for it, and it was canceled on me. Not too long after, I woke up tortured by the most painful cramps I'd ever experienced. I cried and labored in the shower, took some ibuprofen, then fell back asleep. When I woke up, a chestnut-size piece of tissue lay in my underpants. After passing that tissue, the bleeding stopped from that day forward.

I had a dentist appointment the other day, and they went hog wild with the sucker tool. My mouth was as dry as the Serengeti, and soon my tongue was nothing but a pendulous husk in my mouth.

I flashed back to my school days when I would deliberately leave my mouth slightly open for as long as I could stand so that my tongue would dry out. I'd try to wait until it was as dry as possible and then I'd close it and enjoy the strange sensation of cotton-ball tongue — a seemingly foreign object — then let it gradually wick up moisture again and return to its moist, plump self.

You see, I was bored. Really, really bored.

Sometimes I fear I'm not schooly enough for this unschooling thing to work. This is a common worry among homeschooling types — am I doing enough? Are my kids learning the right things? Would school be doing much better for them?

I see myself as a Type B personality, so I'm naturally laissez-faire. While I think Type A unschoolers have to push themselves to relax, I feel I need occasional nudges into scheduling and activities to make sure we do something.

And so it was I finally cracked open Mystery Science.

(This post is not at all sponsored, by the way. I signed up for the free trial but then let it lapse, because I'm awesome like that. I'm just talking about the single lesson's worth of use I've gotten out of it so far, and this isn't meant as a straight-up review.)

In honor of Black History Month, here's a video review of two books about the Underground Railroad.

A story: My old church supported several Karen refugee families from Myanmar. The Karen are a Christian and Buddhist ethnic minority group in Myanmar (Burma) who were forced from their homes, their villages destroyed, and fled from violence and ethnic cleansing in a Burmese civil war into hiding in the surrounding jungles. Not the pretty Jungle Book jungles but mountainous ones that grow cold and inhospitable, with little food to forage.

The fortunate ones were able to cross the border into Thai refugee camps. The very fortunate ones were able to make their way from Thailand to settle in other nations, such as the Karen community in the south Seattle area. This was not their wish, though. They miss their homes desperately and find it hard to adjust to a new life in a new land where they're definite minorities. As one woman said in an interview with CNN: "[I]f the situation in Burma changes, I hope to go back to my country."

Here's the part of this experience that has stuck with me for years now. A group of internally displaced Karen people still running and hiding in the mountain forests wrote our church for assistance. We raised money regularly to try to get supplies to them and sent words of support and encouragement. In this letter back to us, they asked in particular for one thing: a bone saw. They had been performing amputations on horribly injured members of their community with whatever sharp implements they had to hand. They wanted a bone saw to ease the process.

THAT is what a refugee is. It's a person who's thankful for a bone saw. It's a person whose current greatest wish is an appropriate instrument to perform major surgery in the open air of a jungle as they're running for their lives.