Chapter 10

A couple of weeks later, I was back in Phoenix, trying not to bang my head against a wall as I explained, for the third time in four trips, “No, Katherine, you have to bill the date we sent everything to the patient as the date of service. You can’t just correct it to whatever you want.”

“But who says so? It doesn’t seem right!” Katherine responded petulantly. Katherine was a particular thorn in my side as a trainee. She had graduated from the community college’s medical billing and coding program and appeared convinced that her eleven weeks of classroom training trumped my fifteen years of real-world experience.

I tried not to sigh loudly as I answered, “The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says so. I have sent you that policy information before.”

“Well, yeah, I know what the policy says, but you said they make exceptions. Can’t I just, like, tell them to make an exception in this case?”

This and several other similar conversations caused me to return to the hotel that evening with a moderate migraine headache. I ducked into my hotel room to quickly take an Imitrex for my migraine before going to the lobby for dinner.

Diana, a fellow business traveler who had become a regular dining partner, found me in the hallway and invited me to join her. I explained about the migraine and tried to beg off, saying I was planning to just grab something and go back to my room.

Mostly I didn’t want to deal with Diana herself. Diana had recently begun sharing a bit too much information about her husband, who apparently was giving most of what he had to his side piece when she traveled out of town and had nothing left for her when she came home. She also made some suggestive comments about me picking up the slack, but they usually came after her third glass of wine, so I had just let them pass without comment.

Tonight, however, she insisted that I join her for dinner. She informed me that she had some prior training as a massage therapist and might be able to help with the headache. To prove it, when we got to the dining room, she had me sit down and she gave me a five-minute chair massage, focusing on my neck and shoulders, and I had to admit that it did help some. I ate a little bit of dinner, during which she invited me to come back to her room with her so she could give me a more thorough massage.

Looking back later, had I not been in the state I was in, I might have seen through this particular ploy, but my head was still throbbing as I dazedly replayed conversations in my head with people who understood that government programs have rules but didn’t understand why they couldn’t just arbitrarily make up exceptions to them.

I followed her to her room, where she asked me to take off my shirt and lie face down on the bed. Not seeing any harm in being shirtless, I did, and soon had to admit that the skin-to-skin contact as her massage-oil coated hands glided across my neck, back, and shoulders felt quite nice.

Then she asked me to turn over.

I did ... and froze.

She had changed out of her work clothes when I first laid face-down on the bed earlier. At this moment, she was standing over me on the side of the bed, wearing nothing other than a smile and a light blue babydoll that left very little to the imagination. I paused, unable to help myself as I checked out her older but clearly well-maintained figure, including her medium-sized breasts, the nipples forming two very obvious points trying to burrow through what little material she was wearing, as well as the slightly pouched stomach leading to the hairless mound between her legs and the moisture that was visibly gathering there.

A throaty chuckle escaped her lips. “You like?” she asked.

I paused for a moment to try to properly form words when her hand slid down my chest and landed on my crotch. She squeezed briefly through my khakis and observed, “Hmm. It would seem you do.”

When I still didn’t move, she leaned down – giving me a clear and unobstructed view of her breasts – and unbuckled my belt, followed by unsnapping my pants. I was mostly running on autopilot at that moment as I raised my hips to allow her to slide them down.

She stopped short when she pulled the pants down to my knees and discovered fiberglass where she had expected skin on the right leg.

The look of surprise on her face suddenly transported me to a different hotel room, several hundred miles and, come to that, several years away.

On the rare occasions when the subject of “how I lost my virginity” had come up over the years, those to whom I had chosen to tell the story heard about the night that I impulsively rented a porno to watch with my then-girlfriend and we decided to mimic what we saw on the screen.