My husband brought me a heating pad, thinking it was sore muscles. But I couldn't lie more than a minute on it before the pain became too much. I got up again, took some Advil and sat reading for an hour, sitting up very straight because it felt harder to breathe if I slumped.

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When I was sure the Advil had kicked in, I tried again to lie down. More pain.

"I think I need to go to the ER," I said. It was getting late now, close to midnight.

My husband said, "Are you sure? Isn't it just muscle aches?"

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I'd never felt such pain over muscle aches. Still, maybe he was right. I started Googling "back pain" just to see if there was anything else it might be.

I came up with a list of five things: heart attack, pulmonary embolism, and a few other ailments. My husband rolled his eyes. I knew he was thinking what I was thinking — what if we go to the ER, spend a lot of money, and it turns out to be nothing?

We were on Cigna health insurance through my employer, but I hadn't chosen the "relatively spectacular coverage" option — I had chosen the "we're never sick, we don't need a lot of coverage, we don't have a lot of money" option.

But we went. The ER wasn't crowded. Still, the doctor we met was impatient. He'd probably seen his share of middle-aged women with back pain. I mentioned my list of five things. I think he rolled his eyes.

He examined me, and ruled out heart attack, and most of my list. "And I doubt it's a pulmonary embolism either. But we'll run a test just to be sure."

It was a D-dimer blood test, which indicates the level of a chemical that's usually high in people with a pulmonary embolism. He came back, looking surprised and a little less impatient. "Your D-dimer is a little high. We'll do a CT scan."

They put me in a tube and injected some dye into my IV. I felt the freezing sensation crawl through my veins. It hurt lying on my back again. When the scan was done, they wheeled me back to the ER. The doc returned. "Huh. You do have a pulmonary embolism. We're admitting you to the hospital now."

He left. "I was right," I whispered to my husband and pumped my fist. Admittedly, I was a bit loopy from stress and fatigue, but I had trusted my feelings about the pain.

My husband said, "It's a weird thing to be happy about being right." Then reality hit me: Our bank account was about to be devoured.

I spent three days in the hospital as my body was monitored, my blood was thinned, and they made sure no additional errant clots were spawning. I learned to give myself daily injections of the blood thinner Lovenox in my stomach, and was sent home with a box of needles, a prescription for Warfarin, and an appointment with a hematologist.

I'd been a healthy person until that day, had only visited the hospital to deliver our three sons. Even then, the stays had been short (the last one was 12 hours: birth at 7:56 a.m., release at 8:00 p.m. with infant in hand — because of the particular insurance coverage, which my husband's small business employer had been barely able to scrape together for us months before).

The bills from this hospital stay transformed our financial situation, shifting it from okay to precarious, in spite of having health insurance through my employer. And I didn't have a bouncing baby boy to show for it either.

The event transformed how I viewed my body, from an orderly system whose healthiness and sturdiness I could take for granted, to a collection of oddly functioning and malfunctioning parts that was unreliable and unpredictable.

Even now, six years later, I don't take my physical health for granted. And I don't take my financial health for granted either.

As for insurance, I am grateful for it, and it's something I can't take for granted. Once an easy decision, I now agonize at open enrollment as I try to select the best option for my husband and me.

If you Google "communicating with employees about open enrollment" you'll see hundreds of helpful articles about addressing employee anxiety and confusion around employee benefits, and specifically, health insurance. But in spite of many employers' well-intentioned attempts at communication, many employees dread the selection period.

Sometimes we don't even know what we need to know to even ask a simple question. Because the questions are unanswerable: "Will this be sufficient? Will something happen this year or not? Am I making the right choice?"

A MetLife study says that when employees know someone who has had cancer or a critical illness or an accident, this can affect their decision making at open enrollment: "33% of employees across all company sizes say that a family member having cancer is an important consideration when deciding on benefits…34% of employees' benefits decisions are affected by someone in their immediate circle who has suffered an accident."

This being affected by someone else's misfortune could be a good thing, I guess. Maybe some of these employees are more careful or more conscientious during open enrollment than they used to be.

But the study also notes that most employees surveyed, no matter what company size, said they did not review their enrollment selections before finalizing them – and yet they are still not confident in their benefits decisions. This tells me not that employees are careless about making the right choice, but that they've done all they think they can. Reconsidering their choice before clicking "Done" is not going to change anything.

Employees are trying their best to make the best decision, the MetLife study kindly says.

We can talk about clarity of communications materials, about platforms and tools, webinars and meetings adjusted by age and gender of employee.

But sometimes you have to talk it out. I dream of having a personal benefits counselor in my office or a phone call away during open enrollment. I would tell him or her my ER story, talk benefits options, and come up with a choice that would cause me the least amount of worry and buyer's remorse.

In real life, selected family and friends fill that role. We do the best we can.

 "Overall," the MetLife survey says, "employees are still in need of confidence-building at enrollment time."

Because we're not really just talking about Option A or Option B, are we.