What Would You Do With An Extra $500,000?
This story was originally posted on Facebook. We’re posting here with Andrew’s permission.
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This is for my my friends that still use tobacco. What would you do with an extra $500,000.
They can’t say with any certainty I still wouldn’t have got cancer if I had never chewed a day in my life especially given I was not a heavy user, but I will always wonder. I may never be able to quantify or explain the mental and physical cost of the last roughly 20 months of my life on myself and family. Financial losses are near impossible also but just for the heck of it I tried to come up with a number that is still probably low.
For the short term costs I added lost hourly wages, medical bills, transportation and things I never would have needed had I not got sick and subtracted any amounts of generosity from people/ groups, disability/ special wage payments, as well as any money saved from not driving etc.
In the last 20 months the best I can figure is I lost around $75,000 that had a relatively immediate impact. I did not figure in “luxury”expenses we would have spent had I not been sick such as vacations or even dining out. Obviously we had to cut down to bare bones to survive. If I figure in lost pension benefits, investment income, HSA/banked health insurance for retirement I had to use now, extra mortgage interest I will now pay and lost savings interest. And providing we continued saving at the rate we were at diagnosis all the way through for the next 20 years , I come up in the neighborhood of another $400,000 more.
For ease of numbers I’ll say $500,000. Cancer cost me – half a million dollars. Is that slight enjoyment you receive from a dip or a cigarette worth $500,000 in addition to the rest of the crap. Read my posts since September of 2020. I’ve said this before if anybody has kids they want me to show all the cool stuff tobacco potentially caused I would be happy to talk to them, especially now when I sit with a Titanium plate over my jaw, picc line in my arm a JP drain around my neck and stitches around the front 40% of my neck for the 4th time and this is one of the easier recoveries. I’ll add the pic from last May after my second surgery just to show how cool and tough tobacco made me look.
Posted to Facebook by Andrew Steven Heilman
