Due to several disasters of varying degrees in our lives lately, Brad and I have had the pleasure of dealing with not one, not two or even three, but FOUR types of insurance simultaneously (car, health, homeowner's and hazard insurance).

For someone like me who has such a strong aversion to the phone that it could almost be considered a phobia, this is a real test of my mettle. There was one day a couple of weeks ago when I was so frazzled and so unable to deal with one more stranger on the phone that I made Brad arrange to have our car's bumper fixed. Even though I'm the one that drives the car and I'm the one who got into the accident. I was able to call in and submit the accident claim, and talk to three different insurance adjusters and all sorts of hoopla, but I just couldn't take one more thing and I called Brad almost in tears and made him set up the car repairs.

One of the most frustrating aspects of all this is how slow it is to take care of all these things, and how many variables we have to keep track of. And I seem to have a talent for being able to simultaneously envision all the different possible outcomes of a situation. If I'm having a good day, that's not a bad thing because I can see exactly how everything might work to our favor. But there's always that worse-case scenario lying in the back of my head, whispering unpleasant things into my ear.

Here's a worst-case scenario:

- The other guy's insurance will refuse to accept fault for when he rear-ended my car, and I will be out the $500 deductible. (This shouldn't be likely, in theory, but we're dealing with a sort of shady insurance company here and they've been dragging their feet for the last three weeks.)
- Neither our homeowner's insurance nor the association's hazard insurance will cover repairing the water damage to our house, and we will be out a couple thousand dollars. (I'd say this is fairly unlikely, but we won't know for quite a while because the process is taking FOREVER.)
- Health insurance will not cover all of Brad's clavicle injury costs and we'd be out about three thousand dollars. (We have a "probably" right now on whether that chunk of it will be covered. I wish I could be more comfortable with "probably".)
- Brad will need to have surgery for his non-healing clavicle, a lovely surgery which involves a bone graft taken from his hip. This will no doubt be covered by insurance but will result in pain, suffering, and more missed work - he's already completely used up his personal time. Plus this will probably have to be done next year, which will negatively impact our insurance situation (without going into too much boring detail, it's because we have an HSA, which has a deductible that's reset at the calendar year). We won't know for about another month how likely this is.

I bring all this up because we're finally getting our car fixed today. I was trying to wait until everything was resolved so I wouldn't have to pay $500 out of pocket, but we finally decided to just get the damn car fixed. So I'm driving a Kia Optima for two days while it gets fixed. Last time we rented a Kia, we killed a large dog with it and messed up the front end of the car.

Let's hope we're not living in the land of worst-case scenarios.