A couple of months ago, the DH and I decided to look into long-term care insurance. A relative of his had had a medical crisis and ended up in an assisted living facility. The costs would have been ruinous had she not had the insurance to pay for it. The insurance agent came to our house. We chose a policy with a well-known company. He told us we’d have to go through a short phone interview, but after that the policies would be issued and we’d be good to go.

A couple of weeks later, I had my twenty-minute phone interview with a very polite lady. Everything seemed to go fine. It was the holiday season, so the agent told us it would probably be a little while before we got the final okay. Then a few weeks ago, the DH got a call from the agent at work. The company had agreed to insure him, although at a higher rate because his blood pressure was two points over their limit. However, they’d rejected me because I was “cognitively impaired.”

To say I was flummoxed would be putting it mildly. I didn’t know what “cognitively impaired” meant exactly, but it sure didn’t sound good. I checked it out on line (of course) and the news was even worse—basically, it meant I was on the way to dementia. I was simultaneously horrified and furious. Clearly, I wasn’t cognitively impaired. I’ve published five novels over the past two years, for God’s sake! How could they say that about me? On the agent’s advice, I requested a copy of the report.

There it was on the front page: “Cognitively impaired.” But there was no indication of what the problem was other than the fact that I couldn’t remember names. I wracked my brain trying to remember my conversation with the interviewer. All I could come up with was an offhand comment about my memory being fine except for forgetting the occasional name. The thing is, though, I’ve never been good with names, even when I was a teenager. And I’m in good company—around fifty percent of the American public claims to have the same problem.

When the agent came over to deliver the policy to the hubs, I let him have it. He wasn’t particularly sympathetic. Supposedly beyond my problem with names, I’d also scored poorly on their memory tests. But I had the results of those tests in the report; I showed them to him. They looked fine to me. Again, he shrugged it off. The tests were proprietary. There was no way to tell how they were scored. Finally, I walked out of the room and turned on the TV; to say I was distraught would be putting it mildly.

And then something amazing happened. My insurance agent went home and began to think about what I’d said. Something about the whole report bothered him. The scores looked okay to him, too. Plus my doctor’s report didn’t indicate any problems, and she’d seen me for a lot longer than twenty minutes. The next day he called the insurance company and asked one of the supervisors to please check my interview again to see if perhaps there’d been an error. A few hours later, the supervisor called back. He said he’d reviewed hundreds of these reports, perhaps thousands, and he very rarely found any error. But this time he had.

It turned out I’d passed everything with flying colors. I should have been given a policy and the company would be doing that ASAP. He apologized. The company apologized. My insurance agent apologized for any part he’d played in the whole thing.

So happy ending, right? Well, yeah, but… For a couple of weeks, I  was fighting the assumption that my brain was on the blink. And I also found myself fighting a tiny, niggling voice at the back of my mind that kept saying “What if they’re right? What if you really are losing it and you just haven’t realized it yet?” I fought that voice whenever I heard it, but I never really got rid of it.

So now I’ve forgiven my insurance agent because he really did go the extra mile. I’ve sort of forgiven the insurance company because they did finally admit their mistake. But I’m not sure I’ll ever entirely forgive the fact that I spent two weeks wondering if my mind was coming unhinged.

Maybe I’ll get over it eventually. Maybe it will just be a matter of time. Maybe, but I doubt it.