I recently took my dog to the vet for her annual checkup, and it ended up costing me $633. She’s a senior dog, so she needs yearly blood work, which is $190 of it, and she has really bad skin allergies and there’s only one treatment that works, which is $210 of it. I love that dog, and of course I’m going to take good care of her, so while I don’t love how much the vet bills are, I pay them anyway.

She also has a growth on her side. It’s been tested and it is benign, but it’s getting bigger and the vet said they could remove it. They wrote me up an estimate, and it will be $1250 or so (not including any post-op visits, which may or may not be included). I was thinking this morning about it, and about how that’s only twice what a yearly vet visit costs. On the whole it’s really not that much money and it’s better to get rid of the growth now, before it possibly becomes malignant in the future. She said there’s hair growing through it, which is concerning. But somehow getting that estimate seemed like a huge amount of money for me to spend. I do have insurance, and I’d probably get at least some of the money back, but I don’t know exactly how much.

Basically what it comes down to is that I’m more sanguine about paying for wellness than I am for health. And that extends to me as well: I go to various doctors for checkups, but when it’s time to do something that will improve my health, I’m less likely to do it. Take my psychiatrist, for example: he wants to make sure I avoid tardive dyskinesia (I’m on medications that can cause it), and to do so he’s recommended TMS, a non-invasive procedure that can possibly help me need fewer antidepressants. Unfortunately, it’s not covered by my insurance, and it also requires four to six weeks of daily visits, each of which takes about an hour (though I’ve read that over time they can be shorter). A friend of mine did TMS and they said they had to go for an hour each time for almost the entire time. Not only can I not afford that (probably), but I don’t really have the time to spend an hour after work each day sitting there doing nothing while someone zaps my brain. And, on top of that, the place that does it that’s nearest to me geographically is over ten miles away. Wanting to drive to and from in rush hour traffic would add at least another hour to the process (although if they opened at 6am I might be willing to go before work, if insurance covered it) as well as a ton of stress from simply making the drive.

Compared to all of that, my wellness is easy to maintain: pay my psychiatrist every three months for a brief visit to re-up my medications, pay for my medications, and end up spending maybe $400 total per year on that, or pay thousands of dollars plus the time cost in hopes that maybe I can improve my overall mental health.

Another example, this one much shorter: I grind my teeth at night, and I always have. My dentist recommended a mouth guard, which will cost about $900 before insurance. Now, I’ll go to the dentist twice a year and get a cleaning and exam, and if I have a cavity it’s usually $150 or less to get it filled, but $900 just seems like so much money. I’m willing to pay for my wellness, but not my health.

If I lived in, oh, any other civilized country besides the US, I would be able to afford both my health and my wellness because they would cost basically nothing, but living in the US means having to make choices like this. I’d rather choose wellness over health; it’s less expensive, as long as nothing goes wrong. Which, of course, is the biggest problem: if something goes wrong, you’re paying for both.