SH: It was so hard for me to even understand what was going on. Because they showed up at my house not immediately [after the video], and they were like, “Do you know why we’re here?” I was like, “I mean, I can imagine, but I don’t really know what I did wrong.” I thought maybe it was a trespassing thing, but I paid for a parking ticket to be in that lot. So I was like, I don’t really know what I did wrong. But someone had called in a wellness check because they thought that I was a danger to myself.
But you know, it was very interesting. I was playing with putting this in the video, but it’s actually way too complicated, I don’t have a concise way of explaining it. But what the cop was telling me was that if, if I were to harm myself, [the insurance company] could be liable because they had evidence that I was, you know, acting erratically. They were basically covering their own ass by calling the cops on me. It was just insane.
TV: So rather than covering your actual illness, which would help your overall “wellness”…
SH: Exactly, exactly. You’re not going to cover the procedure that’s making me feel this way, but you’ll call the cops on me, just to make sure you can’t get in trouble. Basically the cops were like, We might place you under an involuntary 72 hour psychiatric hold. And I was just like, Are you kidding me? I’m frantically explaining to them, “Ah sorry, have you heard of the Eric Andre Show? I’ve worked on the Eric Andre Show.” I’m trying so hard to be like, I actually have credentials to act erratic in public. I was on Zoom at work at the time and I was like, “There’s my boss. He can explain to you that I’m a comedian.”
But I had to wait for an hour and a half for them to send a social worker to come evaluate me. Which like, just send her first, not the men with guns. And then she came and she immediately was like, she’s fine. But it was just wild.
TV: It sounds like you’ve been dealing with insurance companies for a long time.
SH: I’ve had health issues since I was a kid, and my parents were the ones that really took care of it when I was younger. I have an autoimmune disease that I’ve had since I was a kid. The gastroparesis is more recent, in the last three years, but with the autoimmune thing it took years and years and years to diagnose, which required years and years of testing and MRIs and things like that. And I remember receiving denial letters when I was younger, and my dad getting really mad and being on the phone with the insurance companies. But it wasn’t something that I personally had to deal with.
But I remember I had to get a lot of MRIs, and they kept denying them. And I just was very confused because I was like, why would I be doing this for fun? And he said, Yeah, basically they just don’t want to pay for it. They thought that you’ve had enough. Which is just ridiculous.