My Summer from Hell- Part Two: She's Going To Die

While I was waiting this summer to find out if I had cancer, the night after my cat got the cat equivalent of heat stroke, I got a call from my sister letting me know that she was in the ER with our mother who was about to be flown in a helicopter across Montana to a hospital in my city because she was having a cardiac event that was giving her trouble breathing. The next morning at 5:30 am, I got a call from the ICU doctor telling me to get my ass to the hospital to say goodbye because my mom was about to die.

Thankfully, the hospital is about 8 minutes from my house so I threw on clothes and booked it to the ICU where my mom was absolutely dying. Her lungs had filled with fluid and she was drowning, but she had refused intubation so they couldn't do much to help her.

I entered the room with a crowd of people around her, she was fighting them and was almost unrecognizable with a CPAP mask over her face, out of her mind from the lack of oxygen that was making its way into her blood.

They sort of pushed me forward and told me to talk to her. My mother and her mother didn't get along at all and it just so happened that it was my grandmother's yahrtzeit (that's Jewish for deathaversary, which I always thought was "yard side" as that's how it's pronounced). I grabbed my mom's hand and made her look at me, "It's 7-11, you're not allowed to die today! I'm sorry, but if you insist on dying, you're going to have to put it off so you don't share your death day with grandma."

And my mother is so spiteful that she immediately stopped dying. She did have to go have heart surgery immediately afterward to sustain the whole living deal, but as soon as I got there and reminded her to breathe and fight, she cleared her lungs and was able to be transported across Montana yet again to go to another hospital for her surgery.

It was that night when I got home from the hospital, that my computer died.

And then my husband's computer died, having just died and been replaced two months earlier.

And then I had a hysterectomy.

And then I had weird side effects from my hysterectomy like white-hot leg pain, and 96 hours of full body itching, and phantom uterine cramping that felt like it was tearing me in half.

And then my car died. Twice. (It was the alternator, and then the starter, in a week's time).

And then I found out my neutered cat was an attempted rapist when we let in a cute little neighborhood cat who'd been meowing at our door, then immediately put her out because my cat is horrible and gross, but then she stalked us for five whole nights, howling like she was using a bullhorn outside our windows which, of course, made Stevie howl inside at the top of his lungs for 5 whole nights.

And my state elected a reporter-slamming jerk.

And then I was diagnosed with a breast tumor which probably isn't cancer but might still be cancer.

And then my camera died.

And I was turned down for disability because I have a good attitude which, of course, precludes actually being sick.

And the jerks in our government spent the summer trying like hell to take away my health insurance, which would have meant that I wouldn't be able to be treated for all the Schrodinger cancer I had (or didn't have as the case may be), which I was constantly worried about, which of course made my illness all that much worse (and of course, they're still doing it).

So yeah, my summer had a lot of suckage that just kept on pooping down on me, like a way less appetizing fondue fountain at Golden Corral.

But now that I have a computer again, and  the use of a working camera and I feel slightly less like spending every waking moment binge-watching Netflix (almost done with all eight seasons of Dexter) and playing Candy Crush on my tablet to drown my woes, it is my plan to make up for lost time with content galore, which I hope you will come back for and share.

I also have an actual smartphone now (for the time being, seeing how things go for me) so I'm all over social media as "cheeseblarg" and I'm actually posting stuff, so go ahead and follow me!

So what days of the week are you most looking forward to something to laugh at? Let me know so I can get on setting some kind of schedule, please.

Safety Net, More Like Safety NOT.

I have been contacted by at least 4 of my 5 current medical providers in the past week chastising me for being an irresponsible jerk. The problem is, I am totally responsible and also, that kind of judgment is super bad for my health, guys, stop it.

As I've said before, I'm poor. Yes, we have the sweet sweet financial aid currently, that makes life so much more enjoyable, but since that is a gift from the government (that they expect to get back someday), and it only goes for basic living stuff, we still receive bare minimum safety net services, like Medicaid (Thanks, Obama), and when you have social services, there is a whole lot of hoop jumping that comes along with it.

And I'm not even complaining. I'm getting something incredibly valuable for free, basically. I mean, I paid into the system for a decade before coming to need these services, but I am almost entirely fine with having to fill out endless paperwork and report my every change to these agencies, because basically they are keeping me alive, and for that, I would do an assload of paperwork, man.

The problem is, I did my paperwork. A week after I moved. I went onto their website like their paperwork instructed me to, and I changed my Primary Care Provider, like they told me to, and I waited a month until my new coverage kicked in to make any doctor's appointments, like a super responsible girl, even though I desperately needed to see those doctors then, only to find out that the website we were all told to use, doesn't seem to be attached to anything!

Even worse, after getting the situation squared away by calling their hotline, I asked to make a complaint about the website not working and here's what I was told:

We know that there's a problem. We are working diligently to fix the issue that is making it so that the website collects data, tells you it registered you, but then spits the information out into the ether. It's a particular problem with the medical center that serves your area. Unfortunately, we can't tell those providers that this is an issue we're having so they stop chastising you because we have no way of knowing that you actually tried to sign up, you could be making it up and this whole problem could just be that you people are liars. This problem... that we've been trying to deal with for at least 3 months now... that countless people have complained about. Have you tried not being poor?

I might be paraphrasing slightly. Anyway, it's frustrating enough that I've written this novella about it. There's the whole myth of the Welfare Queen living high on benefits from the government, but being humiliated on a regular basis because technology is hard for the government doesn't feel very royal to me. All I'd really like is for Montana Medicaid's IT department to contact my providers and tell them there's an issue with the website and that their clients aren't just sitting around eating bonbons and laughing in the face of responsibility. Okay, maybe I would like some bonbons too, but I would really like them to take responsibility for their errors, instead of putting it all on the poor people who are trying to do the right thing on a broken system.

buy me bonbons!