It’s going to be okay, that’s what’s going to happen.
It will. My friends promise.
Dad’s home.
Meds are expensive, but insurance has loopholes we can exploit.
Give me a quiet mind, and I, I love you.
Forgive me- I’m a little scattered right now. Alongside work, I’m reading Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (translated to English, I’m not awesome enough to read Russian), and I’m loving it. This is so beautiful. One of my favorite characters from a childhood book kept her diary in the margins of a Pushkin book, and that is what I am reminded of.
Life’s good right now, sickness, work, bureaucracy, and all. It’s the plowing on that matters.
I don’t know, I think that if I stop again, the world will collapse. I need the forward motion right now. I am happy, god damn it, I am relaxed and contented and uncurled and that hasn’t happened to me in weeks. I’ve been okay, but this is a level of letting-go-ness, of letting-guard-down that I haven’t had in a while. We found out today about a city-employee benefit where my dad can get his meds for ~$150 a month, instead of ~$4000 (no typo, folks) a month. I am made of sighs of relief. Let’s just hope that the paperwork goes through, that we can fight the bureaucracy, that everything goes according to plan.
That hasn’t happened in ages.
It would be great if it could happen now.
Everyone who has reminded me that everything was going to be all right, I owe you. I have been sustained by the constant nudging forward of the people who see me every day.
And my cello, that too.
I’m sorry it’s been so long
It’s been crazy at home.
So, about that collapsed lung? They fixed that, but.
He has deep vein thrombosis from being stuck in a hospital bed for almost two weeks
AND
he has a staph fucking infection. (they think it will respond to meds, though, which is good.) The infectious disease guy thinks that it came in through his IV line. WHY that wasn’t STERILE, I have no clue.
I mean, WHAT THE HELL.
The insurance companies refuse to pay for the subsequently hugely important blood thinners and antibiotics if not taken physically inside the hospital. He needs to be hooked up to these for six months. Now we have to call the drug companies and beg for compassionate care (where Big Pharma pays for at least a part of it.)
Let me clarify. We can’t afford this. We have been reduced to begging the drug company and hoping for pity.
I fucking hate this. Whatever capitalist asshole came up with the “we’ll pay if he stays in the hospital” idea… deserves a constant barrage of hazelnut shells to the face, as fired from a cannon.
I am… I don’t even know what I am. Sad and angry and scared and frustrated and irked and sore and exhausted. Damn, damn, damn, damn.
EDIT: his blood thinner is $52,000 a year. THERE is NO WAY in HELL that we can pay for that, let alone the antibiotics. the drug company refuses to cover it, and you can’t get compassionate care unless your household takes in less than $40,000 a year. My family lives in the $40,000 – $120,000 bracket, the bracket where you can’t pay and can’t get help. what are we going to do? We could try to pay for it, but my mom has children to send to college and a table to put bread on and a home to try to keep heated.
I hate the american healthcare system; I hate how stupid this is. Fuckwit Medco assholes. There’s no generic of the blood thinner, either- there’s no way to pay less for it.
I guess I should just be happy that the drug plan covers his chemo. That’s $22000 a week all on its own, if we weren’t covered. (Thankfully, we are, and we’re not paying for that.)
NORMAL PEOPLE CANNOT PAY FOR THIS. If you’re not a titan of business, you can’t afford to be ill. THIS IS A HOSPITAL-ACQUIRED STAPH INFECTION. This is the HOSPITAL’s fault. We can’t afford the drugs, and no one can help. Maybe my grandfather will pitch in.
Let me clarify: Fuck. This. Shit.
warning, this is my venting, and it’s depressing.
Me: Helloooooo.
Her, drowsily: You are the worst friend ever.
Damn it. This is, indeed, mostly my fault, but.
It’s when she does things like this that I get irritated. Please, eat and sleep.
Eating and sleeping are important. The Jewish mother in me is screeching, “Eat a bissaleh something already! How about a nice piece of fruit?” If you go for too long without eating and sleeping, you die. We’ve realized this. Now please. A bazillion years of primal urges to find food can’t all be wrong. Don’t be all ego and no id. Balance.
I just hate it when she does stuff like this. I love her dearly; she shouldn’t be hurting herself. That is entirely not okay. She was the first person to talk to me when I came to the school- we had roomed together for three weeks at CTY. She is a smart girl with a good head on her shoulders… generally.
She hasn’t been eating. She melted, literally falling down, on the way into school. People helped her get inside and told her to go eat. So she collapsed on a couch and yelled my name to get me to come to the cafeteria with her, and I didn’t hear her, so she called me. Because I’m a dunderhead, my phone was set to not do anything to remind me I’m being called (so usually, it’s off) so she sat, and I didn’t pick up my phone. I feel really bad, even though there was no way I could have known my phone was ringing.
Well, there’s nothing I can do at this point.
I hope I’m not this much of a downer all the time.
Also, unrelatedly, remember when it was raining on Tuesday? The first think I thought when I woke up was “the rain this morning is like reading your own epitaph.” 1) I’m surprised it wasn’t my normal “damn, alarm clock, damn, go away, stop with the beeping already, just go away” or “it’s really dark” or “nnnnnngh” or what have you, and 2) What? What was I even trying to say? Just… geh?
Maybe I can make something of it. So far, this year, I’ve only been able to write one poem I don’t really hate. (That’s still better than usual. I don’t often like my own work.)
Bah, I’m being all grey and dreary. I need to stop listening to so much James Taylor, I always get intensely nostalgic and introspective and whatnot. It’s weird, he has a very young-sounding voice (if that makes any sense) and, he’s older than my dad (who, thanks to almost two years of chemotherapy, radiation, brachytherapy, and surgery, has little voice at all). When I first heard a James Taylor recording, I thought he was in his twenties, maybe thirties… he’s 59.
The source of the nostalgia actually, mostly spawns from that thought path. When I was little, my dad would sing to me and my sister at night. Now, the last remnant of his old voice, his voice from before the treatments, exists on our answering machine. “You’ve reached our household, leave a message after the beep, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we do.”
I’m going to stop now.
EDIT: In case today couldn’t become any worse, my dad’s lung collapsed. Again. It’ll mean a night in the hospital. He’ll be okay eventually, but I mean GOD DAMN IT WHY DOES THIS HAPPEN? *hits something, drowns self in Tchaikovsky, music always helps.*
blogging with leopard
This, my friends, is snazzy.
More to come later (I have so much work to do), but I assure you, this is a wonderful addition to Apple’s OS.
