Wednesday the 18th
Time to start over. I haven’t written for weeks because it was just too difficult to live through once without reliving it again in writing, but I’ve committed myself to keeping this diary and I will.
Right, so let’s take inventory.
Jet’s General Store ”
I think the damned store’s changed names five times in the last two weeks and I still have had only one customer, God bless her, she’s bought about $700 worth of merchandise, earning me a whopping $19.94. I’m still working on “stocking the shelves” and wording things. It’s hell having to type out every single word on every page, organize products that my specific store carries and deciding what goes where.
Though it’s still not officially open, the Book Department is pretty well solidified (or at least I thought it was) along with the computer, electronics and jewelry department. The idea is to comb through literally thousands of Amazon’s pages looking for products and making them easier to find. It’s like looking for a desk. If you put desk into their search engine you’ll get anything that has the word “desk” in the description and it displays 23-25 thousand items of which only 600 are actual desks and the rest are chairs, tables, lamps, pens etc, or worse, items that they don’t carry anymore but still display because the search engine found them. I took it upon myself to find them, root through only the cheapest, midrange, and the absolute best at the best prices for each to display in my store.
It’s great, but entails a lot of frustration and it’s very time consuming.
~ I wrote the last couple of paragraphs last week, since then I’ve discovered that a technical glitch is preventing the “A-stores” from connecting to Amazon’s main page, keeping my custom store from being able to display not only book prices, but a shopping cart for customers to put them in. In the last four weeks, I called tech support 6 times and got the same results… nothing.
I put up a page of Hugo Boss suits in my Men’s department and let Amazon “auto-pick” what was displayed… of the over 400 suits, all but five showed a “currently unavailable” in the description. When I called tech support, they said that the suits were available, but for some reason weren’t displaying correctly on the A-stores… not just mine, but everyone’s. Then to top everything off, the product description page displays differently on our store’s than Amazon’s. What that means is that the description line isn’t as long and cuts off ¾ of the way through it. Since the manufacturers place the size and color at the end of it, I have to go in and put the needed information of every single item I display on a separate lines so the customer can see it. These are the reasons I still haven’t opened the store yet and Amazon doesn’t seem to think they’re a priority. Their damned tech support sounds like it’s in India and they probably don’t understand half of what I’m trying to explain to them anyway… sigh
I’ve been trying to talk them into including a sidebar price range scale, and size search, but so far nothing.
Mischief”
My cat Mischief is still walking around with her tongue about a quarter inch out of her mouth. I’ve checked her water dispenser, scrubbed it inside and out several times, and I don’t think she’s thirsty. God I wish I could afford to take her to a vet. Since she was a rescued kitten, she’s never warmed up to me, and I firmly believe that she was taken from or abandoned by her mother at a very young age. She barely trusted people when I got her at six months, and she’s just barely improved since. She still shies away from me when I approach her, but can’t stand to be more than four feet away. I’ll be sitting at my desk and she’ll jump up and eventually put her paw on my wrist when I’m typing something. After a while she’ll even rest her chin on my arm and begin dozing off, or licking my forearm… but if I raise my hand very slowly to pet her, she lets me stroke her fur only a minute or less before she jumps down. I’ve tried rubbing my hands in catnip and purring at her, but nothing works. I fall asleep alone and wake up with her sleeping next to my pillow. It’s heartbreaking sometimes.
Finances”
I’ve now built the 6th version of my spreadsheet this year and included what I thought was a foolproof budget page. I factor in my anticipated bills, then deduct them from my income every ten days, so I can see how what I spend effects my cash-on-hand a month in advance, allowing the overages to carryover to the next period. Though things are really tight I figured I’d have around $225 saved up for emergencies by the end of this month. Then, I made a mistake only an idiot would make… I forgot to factor in food and the gas tank. As of last Monday I’ve got about $1.85 in my checking and it only gets worse through the end of the month. I can’t even see my finances past the next check because I no longer can count on one, having GB use any excuse in order to not send me one on any sort of technicality.
I’d hit my $100 target with Adsense last month and hoped I’d get it this month, but they’re playing some fine-print game where anything I earn doesn’t get paid for 4-6 weeks or more, so the money I was hoping to save me this month isn’t coming until God knows when… par for the course.
The same thing with Amazon.com. I’d hoped I was going to get around $20 from them too, but no… more fine print.
Last Friday’s GB check was gone within 12 hours of it being deposited. After the car payment and the phone I had around $60-65 to buy 14 days of groceries and supplies and I’m low on just about everything from toilet paper, paper towels to cat food. I bought $15 in gas to make sure I could get to all of my doctor appointments and then went over to Wal-Mart and picked up about a 6-day supply and held off buying any more in case something comes up. I kept telling myself to factor in the money for gas so I wouldn’t go overdrawn on my checking and not to spend more than $25-30. My 15-year-old hand calculator that cost me $25 died on me. I bought a new one with more features for a dollar. I hate buying garbage food and if I had my way would eat only salads, but that’s out of my reach right now.
Physical health”:
The aftereffects of the attack are still plaguing me psychologically to the point where I feel old and worn out and tired of “fighting the good fight” instead of muscular and ready to take on the world. There isn’t a part of me that doesn’t hurt.
I had hepatitis in 1980 and I’m worried I might be suffering a relapse. The symptoms are yellowish skin, urine the color of iced tea and very whitish-tan stool. I’ve got the latter of the three, but not the yellow tint or the iced tea. I tell myself it’s all the chicken patties and noodles & sauce I’ve been eating, but I’m beginning to worry.
My fiasco involving the phone being off the hook for three days last week really screwed me. One of the calls I missed was an automated reminder for Dr. P/knee last week. We rescheduled it for last Monday, but it fell a week after I saw Dr. T/WorkHealth to reauthorize my checks for the coming months. The appointment with Dr. P was to schedule my knee surgery in September, and I’m really pissed at myself for forgetting it.
I also hadn’t checked the mail for a while and missed a postcard saying that Dr. S/clinic had canceled my appointment asking me to reschedule. Not that it mattered, because I got an automated call reminding me to be there on the date they canceled it/ Of course when I went I had to come back again and that’s when I realized that I had so little gas left, that I was forced to decide whether to see Dr. Mind or attend an eye appointment. I reluctantly chose the eye appointment.
I ended up paying for $5 of gas in dimes and nickels and then realized it’d paid for less than two gallons of gas for the humiliation of holding up the line while I counted it out.
I got to the OSU eye clinic and was presented with a bill of almost $200 and she made it sound like I couldn’t complete my eye surgeries unless I paid it. It turns out that Anthem only covers my prescriptions??? What the hell have they been billing me for? It turns out Medicare is only covering about 80% of my surgeries. She asked me if I had another Anthem card and I didn’t think I did, but I searched my wallet and with a sense of relief I found one and she said that was the problem all along, that she’d re-submit it and everything would be alright.
Halfway through my exam, she came into the examining room and told me the second card was a prescription card too even though it looked completely different. Now what do I do? I just can’t win.
I guess every doctor in the city decided to go on vacation that week.
I attended the appointment at Dr. T’s only to discover she wasn’t there and a substitute was filling in for her. He was nice, but clueless. He refilled my Cymbalta and sent me on my way. After I filled out the C84 paperwork to reauthorize my GB checks I was hit with a stroke of genius and asked the receptionist for a copy of the “fax received” receipt showing that GB got it. No more of them claiming they didn’t get the paperwork in time. Since I couldn’t tell them when the surgery was, I have to go back again in three weeks…. Presumably when Dr. T will be back from vacation. Because I didn’t know when surgery was… groan.
I’ve developed sores on the top and back of my head where they hit me with the gun in 2004. They appear and disappear seemingly at random and I wonder if they’re psychosomatic. They feel like a cross between little pimples and warts and vanish after a few days, seemingly during hard times of stress.
The ringing in my ears is just as loud as it ever was; even louder when I clench my jaw or interlace my fingers and rest my hands on the top of my head. Dr. Mind calls it tintinitus. It happened right after the attack and a doctor I saw says there’s no cure for it. It’s so loud that it interferes with my hearing at certain sound frequencies. Imagine a loud high-pitched tone 24/7 and you get the idea. When I’m trying to create my logo for the General Store or something where I have to concentrate, I have to put music on my headphones to drown it out.
I can still predict the weather with my right shoulder where my upper arm was broken in four places. It’s still nearly impossible to take a full breath without pain in my upper chest. The emergency thoracotomy where they tore everything away to get to my heart to save my life after the blood vessel exploded is still muscularly and skeletorily sore. Coughing, sneezing and yawning are an exercise in agony. Thankfully the ulcers haven’t returned even after being cut off from the Nexium.
When I began writing this today I took a blood glucose reading and was shocked that it was 448. Normal is around 90-100 and you start worrying at around 150. I did 25 units of the 100-proof insulin. I just checked it again and it’s fallen to 269 in a little over 45 minutes. I shot up 30 units of the 70/30 stuff before I ate and it’s got to be true what Dr. S said, the 70/30 stuff has lost its potency. I’ve a limited supply of the 100-proof, so I’ll have to be careful. It’s just driving me crazy that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t and I’m in real danger of overdosing on it, thinking I’ve got a bottle that’s withering and it’s actually a full-strength one. I’ve got till the 24th to figure out how to come up with the $10 co-pay to see Dr. S. If I can’t I can’t get the drug rep samples of the medicines I need for my heart and diabetes.
My left leg was nearly destroyed during the attack to the point that there’s still one operation to go on it almost 6 years later. The pain in my knee isn’t as bad as hearing the damned thing crackle when I move it… ughhhhh. They warned me that my inner left calf muscle would vanish, but I guess I wasn’t prepared for it to. That muscle works with your ankle and when they destroyed my ankle, the doctors had no choice but to fuse it into one piece, the leg muscle withered away with it. I still try to flex it every so often, but it doesn’t seem to help. I make it downstairs to the gym every-so-often to ride the bike, but strangers are still a problem.
My right shoulder above where my arm was shattered in four places crackles even louder than my knee. When I’m playing a mouse on a string with Mischief I wind up giving up after about 10 minutes in pain… I hate this
My left foot is fine, but you’d never know it to look at it. After 20 or so operations and being in a cast for so long, the circulation returned, but the iron in my blood pooling in my skin caused it to stay there and it sort-of tattooed the pattern into the skin on my foot. It’s fine, but it looks ghastly. I have to check my feet nightly before I sleep to make sure I haven’t stepped on something and it might get infected. The nerve damage makes it impossible to feel certain areas of the bottom of my feet, either that, or my brain processes it as feeling like my ankle, knee or even hip has been injured instead. In other words my nerves are like a badly rewired stereo.
At my appointment with Dr. P/knee he was really nice. The x-rays say the bone is healing really well and he offered to take the hardware out any time I wanted to. I picked September 21st and he said that fit well into his schedule. I told him how much trouble I’m having with my diabetes because of only eating one meal a day and he said I should be eating at least two and a bedtime snack. He said when I go in for surgery, he wants to keep an eye on it, and made sure I was authorized for about four meals while I was there. I told him they’d all be salads… and they will be.
After seeing him, I drove up to Family Medical to renew my Cymbalta prescription. GB wouldn’t authorize it after about 20 minutes of phone calls citing something about prior authorization with Dr. T’s office. I’m so fucking tired of these games. I nearly went into a rage right there and was terrified that I might hurt someone, so I went and sat down for a minute and collected myself. I got back up and we tried to get ahold of Dr. T’s office for 10 more minutes and only got voicemail over and over again. This has happened so many times before that the Pharmacist Maria just refills it without the authorization, knowing they’re playing their games and it’ll come through in an hour or so, but she wasn’t there that day and her underlings wouldn’t fill it for me.
I left there infuriated. Every time I think I’m safe from them, they pull some shit on me that I’m not expecting.
Psychological health… or the lack of it ”
I got halfway home and realized I’d seen a tall radio antenna to the right of the expressway I’d never seen before. Soon after I crossed a bridge over a river that was wider than any in Columbus and I started getting really puzzled. I guess I drifted over in my lane and a big tanker truck blared its horn at me and I overcorrected and hit a “rumble” strip on the right side of the lane. I recovered in time to see a “Hospital Next Exit” sign and overhead signage for State Street and some numbered street. I was near downtown. I live three blocks from State Street so I figured I was near home, and while I was still puzzling over the river I’d just crossed that shouldn’t have been there, It dawned on me that ’71 doesn’t have a State Street exit!
Just then I passed under a sign that said Downtown Zanesville next two exits - ZANESVILLE???
I was halfway to Pennsylvania and nearly out of gas!
I’d been driving in a coma for more than an hour and a half or more. This happened once before in 2005 a few months after I was attacked. I didn’t get a job at Safelite and nearly wound up in Indiana before I “woke up”. I wandered around Zanesville trying to find a gas station and kept getting lost out of panic and confusion, just trying to convince myself that I was really there. I put $20 in the tank and prayed it was enough to get home on. I sat in the parking lot of a Denny’s that looked like it was being converted to a Big Boy’s or something and was hungry as hell. I’d probably just emptied my checking of what little I had left in it and got back on the road before I stopped somewhere to eat with money I didn’t have.
That’s when I noticed my watch was broken. This was getting too fucked up to be real. It’d stopped on 4PM. I figured the batteries were dead, but the LCD display still worked and I puzzled that the display was stuck on January 1st and as I watched it just by coincidence flipped to January 2nd. I felt like I was in the twilight zone.
About halfway home the upper right side of my head started hurting really bad to the point of distracting my driving. I kept reaching up to feel if it was swollen and sometimes it felt like I’d been hit with a two by four or a baseball bat. I spent about five minutes in the carport checking the car for evidence that I might have hit someone’s car in my “sleep” and called Dr. Mind but couldn’t reach her and knew better than to call her cell, so I gave up. I’d lost about 4 ½ hours somewhere.
I kept thinking maybe I have some sort of split personality that takes over my body and maybe I wanted to drive home to Pittsburgh. The more I thought about it the more my head hurt.
Dr. Mind called me that evening and assured me I wasn’t losing my mind. I don’t really remember a lot of what she said, but I felt better after talking to her.
Now I don’t have any money for food and I have one meal left. I remembered that I’ve accumulated a bunch of “points” on my checking account and one of the “prizes” is $15 for something like 12,000 points, so I called them to redeem them for groceries. They confirmed that the money would be direct-deposited into my checking and I was glad and nearly hung up and headed straight to Wal-Mart when she told me it’d take 4-6 weeks. I got pissed and asked why, if it’s coming from the bank and it’s directly deposited, why the wait. When she started spouting doubletalk at me I hung up on her.
It also turns out that to get discounts on air travel, it not only takes the same amount of time, but you have to buy a ticket full price to get another ticket “sometime in the future.” More about that later.
I keep looking at a huge framed collection of pictures I’ve taken of my travels across the country and it hurts that all that’s been torn away from me. I’ve been tempted to pull out my viewcam movies of it all, but it’d hurt even more, so I haven’t.
Though I’ve wanted to, I haven’t written a single article for BC in I don’t know how long. I get ideas for them, but they die almost as fast as they come to me. Another creative outlet that I miss.
The damned loneliness, not having a lover or sex for 6 years because of the physical and psychological damage done that night is devastating. I came close to offing myself last month. I’m still close because I’m beginning to feel like a trapped animal with only one way out.
The damned collection agency calls are coming as fast and furious as ever; sometimes 6 or 7 a day. I don’t know what to do. I’ll go into the hospital for a Workman’s comp operation and GB won’t pay for my heart, insulin or chest pain meds. I suffered a heart problem after my last knee operation and had to be transferred to the heart ward from the joint facility. GB decided they weren’t going to pay for that part of it, Medicare won’t pay for it because it should be included in the WC claim. The bills are so hopelessly intertwined that I can’t make heads or tails of it anymore and frankly have given up. It’s like the time GB paid to transport me home from my last operation, but refused to pay for them taking the wheelchair I was brought home in back to the aftercare facility… so I got stuck with the bill.
Why I haven’t developed another ulcer is beyond me.
The depression, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and hopelessness are almost too much to bear. The stress is building again. Though they promised me they’d fix it, I’m still getting two different electric bills a month, but with different totals, and they’re usually followed a week later with a red shut-off notice for a payment that’s only 10-14 days overdue. We’ve been over 100 degrees so many times this month that I fear what the next bill will look like.
We had two huge electrical storms last week. All the buildings downtown have lightning rods on them for safety and if a storm passes directly over like these did, strikes are common, and very very close. So close that they sound like horrendously loud whip cracks instead of flash and thunder. Both came around 4-5 in the morning and lasted half an hour, waking me up to what I perceived as gunfire, leaving me cowering on my side of a barricaded door to my apartment, trying to assuring myself it was only a dream and that it’s only thunder.
With them discontinuing my physical therapy, I only leave my apartment once a week to see Dr. Mind; and lately I have to make a serious effort just to force myself out the front door for that. It doesn’t help that some Ohio State University newbie cop gave me a parking ticket last month for parking in a slot that two other officers over the last year or more have said it was okay to park in. I gave the ticket to Dr. Mind’s boss and he failed to reason with them and I can’t afford to pay it, leaving me in fear that my car will be towed for an unpaid ticket or a warrant will be issued for me… sigh.
For the last month or so I haven’t been able to sleep for more than 2-3 hours at a time.
Miscellaneous news ”
My sister Betsy’s fiancé Norm has kinda-sorta set a wedding date for early October. He asked her if she could have anyone at the wedding, who would it be and she said me without even thinking. She says there’s an argument going on between my younger brother Jim and her son Brian as to who’s going to walk her down the aisle and give her away. They don’t know it, but she’s determined for that it be me. Now all I have to do is figure out a way to get there.
I feel bad because they’ve begun scrimping for an airline ticket for me.
Betsy went through a rough time last weekend up at Crystal Lake. A ramp collapsed from the restaurant to the boat docks and several people and a baby fell into 36-degree mountain water. Fortunately no one was hurt seriously but there were a lot of cases of hypothermia and she was pretty shaken by it.
Same shit different day…
Sunday the 22nd
Wednesday’s talk with Dr. Mind was reassuring. She pointed out that everyone has an experience where they have a lot on their mind on a long driving trip and they suddenly become conscious that they’ve gone farther than they realized and were puzzled about it. The act of driving is such an automatic thing that our brains sort of go on “autopilot.” She called it “disassociation,” and said that it’s possible for that part of the brain to just take over the chore while we do other stuff, and that it’s different from falling asleep at the wheel because that particular part of the consciousness stays awake, while the other part shuts down.
She warned me not to drive if I’m really upset about something. While it was helpful advice’ I’ll still worry every time I get behind the wheel, or see the gas gauge lower than I expected. That’s another thing; a quarter of a tank doesn’t go as far as it used to… damn it! As cars got smaller, so did their gas tanks to save weight, and I’m still in the mindset that a half of a tank could get me to Pittsburgh… back when gas tanks held 25 gallons. Now, $5 gives you a quarter of a tank, but that’s only a little over two gallons!
One of the other things I thought of was that it makes me feel like the “old Jet” when I’m driving. A Chrysler Sebring convertible get’s a lot of envious stares, especially the red one that I have that looks like a full-sized luxury convertible instead of the down-sized Japanese thing Chrysler’s selling nowadays. They give me looks like they’re saying, “God, I wish I could afford one of those!” Little knowing that when I bought it, I could, but now I can’t and the only reason I don’t sell it is because I owe more on it than it’s worth. That and if push comes to shove and I get desperate, I can always sell it for 7 grand and disappear.
6 years ago I’d never be thinking like that.
All the way home I thought of following Dr. Mind’s encouragement and stopping down at a charity organization that could hook me up with a food bank. At first I thought my reluctance was ego, or lowering myself to beg for help, but now I’m fairly certain it’s a strong fear of rejection. Every time I go somewhere for help I get turned down to the point of I just ask myself “What’s the use?”
Out of food I started putting small amounts of dehydrated chopped onions in my mouth and waiting for them to plump up, which is all I have left with some garlic salt. That’s when I got hit with another disaster, or blessing or both. I decided to check my financial spreadsheet and when I do that I check my on-line checking balance. That’s when I discovered I was one day from catastrophe. I’ve got an option on my account that let’s me know if I’m overdrawn, so I was relieved that I didn’t get an e-mail after buying gas in Zanesville. The trouble is that on my spreadsheet, I’d already deducted a timed payment on a $77 phone bill due to go out electronically Thursday… but I only had $71 in the bank. If I hadn’t checked it when I did, the phone payment would’ve bounced causing me $35-40 in bank fees. I immediately canceled the payment, and now I’ll have a double phone bill next month + a $15 late payment fee from them… but I’ve got money for groceries.
I slammed my fist on the desk and hurt it. Will this ordeal end? Will it ever FUCKING end? Hunger was getting the best of me, but I knew not to go out upset, so I opened the mail… a bad idea.
#1 was the electric bill. $114; I know better than to be hopeful because a 2nd will be along any day now for about $75. Both amounts due will be wrong and in a week there’ll be another that’s a red shutoff notice for around $225.
#2. GB sent me a letter saying they don’t think they have to pay Dr. Mind because they don’t have some kind of medical records. It’s all bullshit. I’d be dead by my own hand by now without her.
#3: Google Adsense has owed me $100 for a few months now for earning a couple of pennies or so for each ad click on my websites, and I’ve been depending on that to get ahead of this disaster. It took me 5 years to hit that threshold before they’d direct deposit that check. They sent a letter with a $100 gift card toward advertising my websites on their website. 5 years - five fucking years. I know I selected cash not a damned gift certificate, and when I went into my account there was no way to get ahold of them and no “Contact us” information. I sent out an e-mail to them on the only address they gave for some “phone verification and hoped for the best. I feel like a damned rape victim and I’m pulling all of their ads off of my sites if I don’t hear from them in three days. I also plan a system-wide e-mail to all the BC writers and Blogspot writers warning them that earning pennies a month on their ads isn’t worth it and is a scam.
I emotionally shut down after that and tossed the rest of the mail in a pigeon hole in my desk’s hutch.
Thursday I checked my account to make sure the phone payment didn’t go through and discovered that even though PNC said it’d be 4-6 weeks, they deposited… are you ready for this? $5 points bonus in my account this morning. I asked for $15. This means going through the whole process all over again and blowing 20,000 “points” to get a lousy $20.
I went to the OSU eye clinic to see Dr. K. I spent the whole trip wondering if I’d actually arrive there or “wake up” in Cleveland somewhere. Of course on arrival the receptionist handed me a demand note for nearly $200 again and I felt like some skid-row bum looking for a handout when I had to tell her I couldn’t come up with it. She seemed reluctant to let me have a seat, but I guess by law they have to treat me… but they don’t have to act like they like it. I felt like shit standing there and could feel myself turning red.
Dr. K said my eye looks good and she wanted to schedule my right eye lens replacement surgery, but I told her I couldn’t do it because I can’t afford the co-pay or even to buy a pair of reading glasses that I’d need after the surgery, since the artificial lenses they’re installing are only for distance. She put me on eye drops again, still worried about my being unable to control the diabetes and told me to be really religious about using them. She now doesn’t want to do my other eye until after the knee surgery, so Instead of scheduling my next appointment, we’re keeping it open for about three months from now.
Dr. K also did something really nice. We talked about how bad the situation was and she said she’d stop the bill from going to collection. She said when she sees my name on the list she’ll pull it. I hope she remembers. I’m so grateful and ashamed at the same time.
I reluctantly drove up to Wal-Mart out of hunger and bought about $50 worth of cheap, salty, sugar-laden food. I stopped at Kroger’s and picked up another $10 in $1 bags of mixed salad greens on sale. No dressing, but at least it’s something healthy. I’ve ridden friends in the past over to food banks, and I’ve contributed to them myself a few times over the years and from my experience with them I know they’re all cheap canned store brand garbage that no one wanted. After all $10 will buy 10 store-brand cans instead of only 6 name-brand and showing up with 10 makes you feel and look more generous than you really are. Being a diabetic I’d have to pick and choose and I’m sure I’d go through hell while they watched me turn down cheap cans of fat-laden corned beef hash and sugar laden jars of spaghetti sauce. Of course this is all rationalization for my real fear of being turned down for help at all because I’m too rich. It’s not that I’m “too good” to go to a food bank and ask for help, it’s that I can’t handle the repeated rejections I’ve gotten from every direction.
As soon as I put the groceries away the damned collection agency calls started non-stop. One was from the 541 area code and I cheerfully answered it thinking it was Betsy. Tempted as I was to take the phone off the hook, I didn’t. But I got really sleepy and spent the rest of the night in bed.
I woke up Friday screaming, I don’t remember from what, but my heart was beating really fast and hard and I was covered with sweat. I’m back to waking up three hours after I fall asleep. I’m also experiencing a problem with my equilibrium again. I’ll get up out of a chair and suddenly fall back into it again, or walk from the den to the kitchen and abruptly fall sideways against the wall
I got an e-mail Friday from my wonderful friend Brenda. She mailed me $10 so I can pay the co-pay when I go to the clinic on Tuesday. God love her. I’m used to being the “kind and generous stranger” and it’s a lot different being on the receiving end of it. I guess more than a few friends still care than I thought.
I got a headache again Friday afternoon and fell asleep and woke up that evening around 10 and suddenly realized I hadn’t gone down to make arrangements to go to a food bank.
There’s an old saying that a rich man’s idea of planning for retirement is contributing to a 401K… A poor man’s idea of contributing to his retirement is buying a lottery ticket. Lately, believe it or not, I’ve been hoping against hope I didn’t win the lottery. I’ve been playing it in one form or another since 1987. I used to even put up $500 for a pool when I was with friends and sell them dollar shares. Now that I can’t afford the tickets anymore as of two weeks ago I’m praying I don’t win (?) For over twenty years I’ve faithfully played 2-5-9-14-16 (22) and have been convinced that the day I stop playing that combination is the day it’ll pop up a winner.
Today (Sunday) I got an e-mail from my sister Dee that my Uncle Bill (mom’s brother) died. Mom’s sisters didn’t even tell her and my aunt Margaret about it until after his funeral. I’ll miss him; he was fun to visit when we were kids. My mom and Aunt Margaret haven’t spoken to each other for about five years and so I called my aunt to see if she’d been told and discovered they were both together in Aunt Margaret’s living room in Pittsburgh.
I guess it’s a family thing. Betsy and I are incredibly close, just like Dee and Jim are incredibly close, but I haven’t spoken to Dee or Jim since my father’s funeral in 2006.
I had a meal and tested my blood and it was at 301-damn it. I injected another 20 units of 100-proof and tested again half an hour later and it was up to 400! Because I can’t afford them, when I use a syringe I re-use it twice more. The usual procedure is to inject, fill it with alcohol and squirt it on the injection site… that’s when I noticed that no alcohol came out. I drew more in and there was nothing in the syringe.
There’s a good possibility that my sugar has been so high because I just assumed I drew insulin in instead of nothing because I was watching the rubber stopper against the scale instead of the liquid. I tossed the syringe and injected again. In other words every third injection may have been empty.
It just never ends.
Tuesday the 24th
Woke up from a nightmare last night but only remember part of it. An English butler dressed to the 9’s showed up at my door with a covered silver tray. He bowed and said, “Miss Lawrence’s compliments sir, lifted the cover and presented me with a .45 automatic to shoot myself. I backed away and he began chasing me down the hall. When I got the fire stairs, I discovered that the floors below were flooded with something sticky and red and above; the stairs seemed to climb to infinity. He chased me up from about three flights below, pausing to shoot at me. The further I climbed, the more my leg hurt and it started bleeding.
I got to the top and went through a hatch that led to the roof and found myself on one of the towers of the World Trade Center. My three attackers were there and began hitting and kicking me. I remember falling over the side and that’s when I woke up.
I spent some time working on the computer and went back to sleep, blessedly dream free.
Thanks to Brenda, I can go to see Dr. S/clinic and also I’ll have enough gas to get to Dr. D/heart tomorrow.
I went in early to scan the lobby directory looking for social workers and food banks. Dr. S. was wonderful and so was his staff. He decided to put off doing the A1C test for a month because of the trouble I’ve been having controlling my sugar. My reading was 303 this morning, so I took ten units because I knew I’d be driving and didn’t want to risk an overdose. When they checked it at the Clinic it only fell to 262.
He’s one of the few that don’t make me feel like some derelict bum coming in from the street begging for quarters. He wrote a new prescription for Coreg for my heart that he said I can get without insurance for $4. Then gave me enough free drug representative samples to last me two months of Lantus insulin pens, 70/30 insulin, and the needles for the pen cartridges and 200 syringes. I also got a month’s supply of Crestor.
Before I left I checked out a couple of social workers but most had gone to lunch. I did get some useful information about some of the charity organizations and news that some changing their rules for the 2nd time this year. All require me to actually call Anthem as opposed to what I was told before and dump them, then get a letter acknowledging it… ha ha fat chance. I told one that I hadn’t paid a single premium to Anthem since I found myself being put on their billing list, and she was amazed that they haven’t dumped me.
Betsy called me this evening to say that my brother Jim is having a fit over my possibly showing up at her wedding. She’s also puzzled by him saying that her having her son Brian walk her down the aisle was sick and immoral??? He acted like he was entitled to walk and give her away as if she had no say in the decision. We lost the cell connection. I won’t be able to talk to her tomorrow because I’ve got doctors all day.
Wednesday:
I couldn’t find a parking slot at OSU for the first time and wound up going through a ritual where I have to go inside the building and find some guy to get a pass to the staff parking garage next door. The trouble was he was out to lunch and I was worried I’d get a ticket for being parked in the no stopping zone out front while I tried to find him, so I had to keep hurrying back to the front door to see if a cop was about to have me towed. It took me about twenty minutes to find him and I couldn’t reach Dr. Mind’s office to tell her what was going on and the ordeal caused be to be about half an hour late.
The session went as usual and I had to watch the time to keep from being late to Dr. D/heart’s appointment. Thank god Brenda sent me that $10 or I’d never have had the gas to get across the county to see him.
At the cardiologist’s they did a test on my pacemaker and downloaded its records, and found no unusual problems with my heart, and the memory in it reported no unusual heart rhythms. Apparently it doesn’t take much to jolt the “dead” heart muscle to work in rhythm with the rest of my heart. Considering it has to do it on every beat, and the thing records everything it does until it’s uploaded, she says the battery is still expected to last at least five years or more!
Dr. D is one of the most caring people I’ve ever met. He went over my chest and is concerned that my left lung isn’t drawing as much air as my right. I was worried and asked if I could develop pneumonia but he said no. It’s from where they literally tore into my ribcage to get to my heart when they did the thoracotomy. He seemed unconcerned when I told him about the pain when I take a deep breath and said it was just something I’d have to live with. If I’m still experiencing it at the next follow up, he may prescribe something.
I told him about the trouble I’ve been having with my equilibrium and he surprised me by saying it had to do with my combination of prescriptions and to let him work on a different combination, and he’d get in touch with me or if it wasn’t too bad, wait till my next appointment.
He asked me to tell his assistant about all the trouble I’m having with GB, I’m not sure why, but they want me to make it a point to have the hospital call him when I’m admitted for the knee operation. He was shocked and acted outraged when I told him that GB won’t pay for my insulin or heart meds while I’m there and how my hospital bills are so hopelessly intertwined because GB will only pay for part of them, but Social Security won’t cover the other parts because it’s a workman’s comp claim, so I’m stuck with the bills… and the collection agencies. He was especially pissed how GB would cover the ride home from the aftercare facility, but not for the cab company to return the wheelchair I was in back to them.
He was great. He gave me more Crestor and some powerful version of Coreg that came in capsules instead of pills that I take every other day instead of daily. He chastised me about my ego and said to call him if I run low and ask for more. I promised I would.
I set to work on “Jet’s General Store” when I got home, and I’m intent on getting it done. I’m going to have to give up on getting any kind of help from Amazon’s “India” tech support and do this on my own. I decided that the technical glitch that tells everyone that the store is temporarily unavailable the first time they log onto it was something I’d have to fix myself, and took three days to completely duplicate it onto another URL… and it worked. It, it, worked!!!
Thursday:
I got an instant message from my nephew Brian out of the blue. I hadn’t heard from him in at least 10 years. I guess this whole “walking Betsy down the aisle” thing is getting serious. My niece Amber apparently called my brother up and cussed him out to the point of making him apologize repeatedly to her! Go Amber!!!
I used part of the day planning my finances for next month. The car insurance is killing me because I have to pay month-to-month, so there’s an $12 surcharge per month as opposed to paying it in one lump sum. It’s beginning to feel like every bill I pay is to a loan shark. The phone wants an extra $15 when I’m late too, and the electric company keeps threatening to shut me off if I’m so much as two weeks late… sigh. The days of having the utilities paid up months in advance are long gone…
Friday:
I was relieved to get my GB check. I still have to e-mail Lawyer K about my next surgery date and ask again about legally making them pay for my insulin and heart meds.
The tough part’s going to be stretching $98 to buy three weeks of groceries and supplies; not an easy task and feed the cat too. Thank god nothing seems wrong with the car.
I kept having these uncontrollable full-body shudders all day and a headache. I rarely have headaches and lately they’ve been hitting me a lot. It’s got to be tension. My ears ringing is going to drive me batty too.
My god I miss cooking. I used to love to take fresh ingredients and make something delicious like homemade chili or a casserole, fancy salads etc. The only thing I can afford now is canned ravioli at .98 cents, and I’ve actually gotten used to eating that right out of the can cold to save on electric… that and I sold all of my bowls with the rest of my china to make ends meet. If I can’t eat it out of the can or package from the microwave or serve it on a paper plate, I can’t afford it. I’ve even resorted to washing the plastic spoons and forks to re-use them again.
I’m serious about getting my paperwork together again and trying for the umpteenth time to go over to Job & Family services and try to get them to help me with my Medicare premiums and prescriptions. Maybe I can talk Dr. Mind into going over there with me. I don’t think I can take another rejection from them.
Time to start over. I haven’t written for weeks because it was just too difficult to live through once without reliving it again in writing, but I’ve committed myself to keeping this diary and I will.
Right, so let’s take inventory.
Jet’s General Store ”
I think the damned store’s changed names five times in the last two weeks and I still have had only one customer, God bless her, she’s bought about $700 worth of merchandise, earning me a whopping $19.94. I’m still working on “stocking the shelves” and wording things. It’s hell having to type out every single word on every page, organize products that my specific store carries and deciding what goes where.
Though it’s still not officially open, the Book Department is pretty well solidified (or at least I thought it was) along with the computer, electronics and jewelry department. The idea is to comb through literally thousands of Amazon’s pages looking for products and making them easier to find. It’s like looking for a desk. If you put desk into their search engine you’ll get anything that has the word “desk” in the description and it displays 23-25 thousand items of which only 600 are actual desks and the rest are chairs, tables, lamps, pens etc, or worse, items that they don’t carry anymore but still display because the search engine found them. I took it upon myself to find them, root through only the cheapest, midrange, and the absolute best at the best prices for each to display in my store.
It’s great, but entails a lot of frustration and it’s very time consuming.
~ I wrote the last couple of paragraphs last week, since then I’ve discovered that a technical glitch is preventing the “A-stores” from connecting to Amazon’s main page, keeping my custom store from being able to display not only book prices, but a shopping cart for customers to put them in. In the last four weeks, I called tech support 6 times and got the same results… nothing.
I put up a page of Hugo Boss suits in my Men’s department and let Amazon “auto-pick” what was displayed… of the over 400 suits, all but five showed a “currently unavailable” in the description. When I called tech support, they said that the suits were available, but for some reason weren’t displaying correctly on the A-stores… not just mine, but everyone’s. Then to top everything off, the product description page displays differently on our store’s than Amazon’s. What that means is that the description line isn’t as long and cuts off ¾ of the way through it. Since the manufacturers place the size and color at the end of it, I have to go in and put the needed information of every single item I display on a separate lines so the customer can see it. These are the reasons I still haven’t opened the store yet and Amazon doesn’t seem to think they’re a priority. Their damned tech support sounds like it’s in India and they probably don’t understand half of what I’m trying to explain to them anyway… sigh
I’ve been trying to talk them into including a sidebar price range scale, and size search, but so far nothing.
Mischief”
My cat Mischief is still walking around with her tongue about a quarter inch out of her mouth. I’ve checked her water dispenser, scrubbed it inside and out several times, and I don’t think she’s thirsty. God I wish I could afford to take her to a vet. Since she was a rescued kitten, she’s never warmed up to me, and I firmly believe that she was taken from or abandoned by her mother at a very young age. She barely trusted people when I got her at six months, and she’s just barely improved since. She still shies away from me when I approach her, but can’t stand to be more than four feet away. I’ll be sitting at my desk and she’ll jump up and eventually put her paw on my wrist when I’m typing something. After a while she’ll even rest her chin on my arm and begin dozing off, or licking my forearm… but if I raise my hand very slowly to pet her, she lets me stroke her fur only a minute or less before she jumps down. I’ve tried rubbing my hands in catnip and purring at her, but nothing works. I fall asleep alone and wake up with her sleeping next to my pillow. It’s heartbreaking sometimes.
Finances”
I’ve now built the 6th version of my spreadsheet this year and included what I thought was a foolproof budget page. I factor in my anticipated bills, then deduct them from my income every ten days, so I can see how what I spend effects my cash-on-hand a month in advance, allowing the overages to carryover to the next period. Though things are really tight I figured I’d have around $225 saved up for emergencies by the end of this month. Then, I made a mistake only an idiot would make… I forgot to factor in food and the gas tank. As of last Monday I’ve got about $1.85 in my checking and it only gets worse through the end of the month. I can’t even see my finances past the next check because I no longer can count on one, having GB use any excuse in order to not send me one on any sort of technicality.
I’d hit my $100 target with Adsense last month and hoped I’d get it this month, but they’re playing some fine-print game where anything I earn doesn’t get paid for 4-6 weeks or more, so the money I was hoping to save me this month isn’t coming until God knows when… par for the course.
The same thing with Amazon.com. I’d hoped I was going to get around $20 from them too, but no… more fine print.
Last Friday’s GB check was gone within 12 hours of it being deposited. After the car payment and the phone I had around $60-65 to buy 14 days of groceries and supplies and I’m low on just about everything from toilet paper, paper towels to cat food. I bought $15 in gas to make sure I could get to all of my doctor appointments and then went over to Wal-Mart and picked up about a 6-day supply and held off buying any more in case something comes up. I kept telling myself to factor in the money for gas so I wouldn’t go overdrawn on my checking and not to spend more than $25-30. My 15-year-old hand calculator that cost me $25 died on me. I bought a new one with more features for a dollar. I hate buying garbage food and if I had my way would eat only salads, but that’s out of my reach right now.
Physical health”:
The aftereffects of the attack are still plaguing me psychologically to the point where I feel old and worn out and tired of “fighting the good fight” instead of muscular and ready to take on the world. There isn’t a part of me that doesn’t hurt.
I had hepatitis in 1980 and I’m worried I might be suffering a relapse. The symptoms are yellowish skin, urine the color of iced tea and very whitish-tan stool. I’ve got the latter of the three, but not the yellow tint or the iced tea. I tell myself it’s all the chicken patties and noodles & sauce I’ve been eating, but I’m beginning to worry.
My fiasco involving the phone being off the hook for three days last week really screwed me. One of the calls I missed was an automated reminder for Dr. P/knee last week. We rescheduled it for last Monday, but it fell a week after I saw Dr. T/WorkHealth to reauthorize my checks for the coming months. The appointment with Dr. P was to schedule my knee surgery in September, and I’m really pissed at myself for forgetting it.
I also hadn’t checked the mail for a while and missed a postcard saying that Dr. S/clinic had canceled my appointment asking me to reschedule. Not that it mattered, because I got an automated call reminding me to be there on the date they canceled it/ Of course when I went I had to come back again and that’s when I realized that I had so little gas left, that I was forced to decide whether to see Dr. Mind or attend an eye appointment. I reluctantly chose the eye appointment.
I ended up paying for $5 of gas in dimes and nickels and then realized it’d paid for less than two gallons of gas for the humiliation of holding up the line while I counted it out.
I got to the OSU eye clinic and was presented with a bill of almost $200 and she made it sound like I couldn’t complete my eye surgeries unless I paid it. It turns out that Anthem only covers my prescriptions??? What the hell have they been billing me for? It turns out Medicare is only covering about 80% of my surgeries. She asked me if I had another Anthem card and I didn’t think I did, but I searched my wallet and with a sense of relief I found one and she said that was the problem all along, that she’d re-submit it and everything would be alright.
Halfway through my exam, she came into the examining room and told me the second card was a prescription card too even though it looked completely different. Now what do I do? I just can’t win.
I guess every doctor in the city decided to go on vacation that week.
I attended the appointment at Dr. T’s only to discover she wasn’t there and a substitute was filling in for her. He was nice, but clueless. He refilled my Cymbalta and sent me on my way. After I filled out the C84 paperwork to reauthorize my GB checks I was hit with a stroke of genius and asked the receptionist for a copy of the “fax received” receipt showing that GB got it. No more of them claiming they didn’t get the paperwork in time. Since I couldn’t tell them when the surgery was, I have to go back again in three weeks…. Presumably when Dr. T will be back from vacation. Because I didn’t know when surgery was… groan.
I’ve developed sores on the top and back of my head where they hit me with the gun in 2004. They appear and disappear seemingly at random and I wonder if they’re psychosomatic. They feel like a cross between little pimples and warts and vanish after a few days, seemingly during hard times of stress.
The ringing in my ears is just as loud as it ever was; even louder when I clench my jaw or interlace my fingers and rest my hands on the top of my head. Dr. Mind calls it tintinitus. It happened right after the attack and a doctor I saw says there’s no cure for it. It’s so loud that it interferes with my hearing at certain sound frequencies. Imagine a loud high-pitched tone 24/7 and you get the idea. When I’m trying to create my logo for the General Store or something where I have to concentrate, I have to put music on my headphones to drown it out.
I can still predict the weather with my right shoulder where my upper arm was broken in four places. It’s still nearly impossible to take a full breath without pain in my upper chest. The emergency thoracotomy where they tore everything away to get to my heart to save my life after the blood vessel exploded is still muscularly and skeletorily sore. Coughing, sneezing and yawning are an exercise in agony. Thankfully the ulcers haven’t returned even after being cut off from the Nexium.
When I began writing this today I took a blood glucose reading and was shocked that it was 448. Normal is around 90-100 and you start worrying at around 150. I did 25 units of the 100-proof insulin. I just checked it again and it’s fallen to 269 in a little over 45 minutes. I shot up 30 units of the 70/30 stuff before I ate and it’s got to be true what Dr. S said, the 70/30 stuff has lost its potency. I’ve a limited supply of the 100-proof, so I’ll have to be careful. It’s just driving me crazy that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t and I’m in real danger of overdosing on it, thinking I’ve got a bottle that’s withering and it’s actually a full-strength one. I’ve got till the 24th to figure out how to come up with the $10 co-pay to see Dr. S. If I can’t I can’t get the drug rep samples of the medicines I need for my heart and diabetes.
My left leg was nearly destroyed during the attack to the point that there’s still one operation to go on it almost 6 years later. The pain in my knee isn’t as bad as hearing the damned thing crackle when I move it… ughhhhh. They warned me that my inner left calf muscle would vanish, but I guess I wasn’t prepared for it to. That muscle works with your ankle and when they destroyed my ankle, the doctors had no choice but to fuse it into one piece, the leg muscle withered away with it. I still try to flex it every so often, but it doesn’t seem to help. I make it downstairs to the gym every-so-often to ride the bike, but strangers are still a problem.
My right shoulder above where my arm was shattered in four places crackles even louder than my knee. When I’m playing a mouse on a string with Mischief I wind up giving up after about 10 minutes in pain… I hate this
My left foot is fine, but you’d never know it to look at it. After 20 or so operations and being in a cast for so long, the circulation returned, but the iron in my blood pooling in my skin caused it to stay there and it sort-of tattooed the pattern into the skin on my foot. It’s fine, but it looks ghastly. I have to check my feet nightly before I sleep to make sure I haven’t stepped on something and it might get infected. The nerve damage makes it impossible to feel certain areas of the bottom of my feet, either that, or my brain processes it as feeling like my ankle, knee or even hip has been injured instead. In other words my nerves are like a badly rewired stereo.
At my appointment with Dr. P/knee he was really nice. The x-rays say the bone is healing really well and he offered to take the hardware out any time I wanted to. I picked September 21st and he said that fit well into his schedule. I told him how much trouble I’m having with my diabetes because of only eating one meal a day and he said I should be eating at least two and a bedtime snack. He said when I go in for surgery, he wants to keep an eye on it, and made sure I was authorized for about four meals while I was there. I told him they’d all be salads… and they will be.
After seeing him, I drove up to Family Medical to renew my Cymbalta prescription. GB wouldn’t authorize it after about 20 minutes of phone calls citing something about prior authorization with Dr. T’s office. I’m so fucking tired of these games. I nearly went into a rage right there and was terrified that I might hurt someone, so I went and sat down for a minute and collected myself. I got back up and we tried to get ahold of Dr. T’s office for 10 more minutes and only got voicemail over and over again. This has happened so many times before that the Pharmacist Maria just refills it without the authorization, knowing they’re playing their games and it’ll come through in an hour or so, but she wasn’t there that day and her underlings wouldn’t fill it for me.
I left there infuriated. Every time I think I’m safe from them, they pull some shit on me that I’m not expecting.
Psychological health… or the lack of it ”
I got halfway home and realized I’d seen a tall radio antenna to the right of the expressway I’d never seen before. Soon after I crossed a bridge over a river that was wider than any in Columbus and I started getting really puzzled. I guess I drifted over in my lane and a big tanker truck blared its horn at me and I overcorrected and hit a “rumble” strip on the right side of the lane. I recovered in time to see a “Hospital Next Exit” sign and overhead signage for State Street and some numbered street. I was near downtown. I live three blocks from State Street so I figured I was near home, and while I was still puzzling over the river I’d just crossed that shouldn’t have been there, It dawned on me that ’71 doesn’t have a State Street exit!
Just then I passed under a sign that said Downtown Zanesville next two exits - ZANESVILLE???
I was halfway to Pennsylvania and nearly out of gas!
I’d been driving in a coma for more than an hour and a half or more. This happened once before in 2005 a few months after I was attacked. I didn’t get a job at Safelite and nearly wound up in Indiana before I “woke up”. I wandered around Zanesville trying to find a gas station and kept getting lost out of panic and confusion, just trying to convince myself that I was really there. I put $20 in the tank and prayed it was enough to get home on. I sat in the parking lot of a Denny’s that looked like it was being converted to a Big Boy’s or something and was hungry as hell. I’d probably just emptied my checking of what little I had left in it and got back on the road before I stopped somewhere to eat with money I didn’t have.
That’s when I noticed my watch was broken. This was getting too fucked up to be real. It’d stopped on 4PM. I figured the batteries were dead, but the LCD display still worked and I puzzled that the display was stuck on January 1st and as I watched it just by coincidence flipped to January 2nd. I felt like I was in the twilight zone.
About halfway home the upper right side of my head started hurting really bad to the point of distracting my driving. I kept reaching up to feel if it was swollen and sometimes it felt like I’d been hit with a two by four or a baseball bat. I spent about five minutes in the carport checking the car for evidence that I might have hit someone’s car in my “sleep” and called Dr. Mind but couldn’t reach her and knew better than to call her cell, so I gave up. I’d lost about 4 ½ hours somewhere.
I kept thinking maybe I have some sort of split personality that takes over my body and maybe I wanted to drive home to Pittsburgh. The more I thought about it the more my head hurt.
Dr. Mind called me that evening and assured me I wasn’t losing my mind. I don’t really remember a lot of what she said, but I felt better after talking to her.
Now I don’t have any money for food and I have one meal left. I remembered that I’ve accumulated a bunch of “points” on my checking account and one of the “prizes” is $15 for something like 12,000 points, so I called them to redeem them for groceries. They confirmed that the money would be direct-deposited into my checking and I was glad and nearly hung up and headed straight to Wal-Mart when she told me it’d take 4-6 weeks. I got pissed and asked why, if it’s coming from the bank and it’s directly deposited, why the wait. When she started spouting doubletalk at me I hung up on her.
It also turns out that to get discounts on air travel, it not only takes the same amount of time, but you have to buy a ticket full price to get another ticket “sometime in the future.” More about that later.
I keep looking at a huge framed collection of pictures I’ve taken of my travels across the country and it hurts that all that’s been torn away from me. I’ve been tempted to pull out my viewcam movies of it all, but it’d hurt even more, so I haven’t.
Though I’ve wanted to, I haven’t written a single article for BC in I don’t know how long. I get ideas for them, but they die almost as fast as they come to me. Another creative outlet that I miss.
The damned loneliness, not having a lover or sex for 6 years because of the physical and psychological damage done that night is devastating. I came close to offing myself last month. I’m still close because I’m beginning to feel like a trapped animal with only one way out.
The damned collection agency calls are coming as fast and furious as ever; sometimes 6 or 7 a day. I don’t know what to do. I’ll go into the hospital for a Workman’s comp operation and GB won’t pay for my heart, insulin or chest pain meds. I suffered a heart problem after my last knee operation and had to be transferred to the heart ward from the joint facility. GB decided they weren’t going to pay for that part of it, Medicare won’t pay for it because it should be included in the WC claim. The bills are so hopelessly intertwined that I can’t make heads or tails of it anymore and frankly have given up. It’s like the time GB paid to transport me home from my last operation, but refused to pay for them taking the wheelchair I was brought home in back to the aftercare facility… so I got stuck with the bill.
Why I haven’t developed another ulcer is beyond me.
The depression, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and hopelessness are almost too much to bear. The stress is building again. Though they promised me they’d fix it, I’m still getting two different electric bills a month, but with different totals, and they’re usually followed a week later with a red shut-off notice for a payment that’s only 10-14 days overdue. We’ve been over 100 degrees so many times this month that I fear what the next bill will look like.
We had two huge electrical storms last week. All the buildings downtown have lightning rods on them for safety and if a storm passes directly over like these did, strikes are common, and very very close. So close that they sound like horrendously loud whip cracks instead of flash and thunder. Both came around 4-5 in the morning and lasted half an hour, waking me up to what I perceived as gunfire, leaving me cowering on my side of a barricaded door to my apartment, trying to assuring myself it was only a dream and that it’s only thunder.
With them discontinuing my physical therapy, I only leave my apartment once a week to see Dr. Mind; and lately I have to make a serious effort just to force myself out the front door for that. It doesn’t help that some Ohio State University newbie cop gave me a parking ticket last month for parking in a slot that two other officers over the last year or more have said it was okay to park in. I gave the ticket to Dr. Mind’s boss and he failed to reason with them and I can’t afford to pay it, leaving me in fear that my car will be towed for an unpaid ticket or a warrant will be issued for me… sigh.
For the last month or so I haven’t been able to sleep for more than 2-3 hours at a time.
Miscellaneous news ”
My sister Betsy’s fiancé Norm has kinda-sorta set a wedding date for early October. He asked her if she could have anyone at the wedding, who would it be and she said me without even thinking. She says there’s an argument going on between my younger brother Jim and her son Brian as to who’s going to walk her down the aisle and give her away. They don’t know it, but she’s determined for that it be me. Now all I have to do is figure out a way to get there.
I feel bad because they’ve begun scrimping for an airline ticket for me.
Betsy went through a rough time last weekend up at Crystal Lake. A ramp collapsed from the restaurant to the boat docks and several people and a baby fell into 36-degree mountain water. Fortunately no one was hurt seriously but there were a lot of cases of hypothermia and she was pretty shaken by it.
Same shit different day…
Sunday the 22nd
Wednesday’s talk with Dr. Mind was reassuring. She pointed out that everyone has an experience where they have a lot on their mind on a long driving trip and they suddenly become conscious that they’ve gone farther than they realized and were puzzled about it. The act of driving is such an automatic thing that our brains sort of go on “autopilot.” She called it “disassociation,” and said that it’s possible for that part of the brain to just take over the chore while we do other stuff, and that it’s different from falling asleep at the wheel because that particular part of the consciousness stays awake, while the other part shuts down.
She warned me not to drive if I’m really upset about something. While it was helpful advice’ I’ll still worry every time I get behind the wheel, or see the gas gauge lower than I expected. That’s another thing; a quarter of a tank doesn’t go as far as it used to… damn it! As cars got smaller, so did their gas tanks to save weight, and I’m still in the mindset that a half of a tank could get me to Pittsburgh… back when gas tanks held 25 gallons. Now, $5 gives you a quarter of a tank, but that’s only a little over two gallons!
One of the other things I thought of was that it makes me feel like the “old Jet” when I’m driving. A Chrysler Sebring convertible get’s a lot of envious stares, especially the red one that I have that looks like a full-sized luxury convertible instead of the down-sized Japanese thing Chrysler’s selling nowadays. They give me looks like they’re saying, “God, I wish I could afford one of those!” Little knowing that when I bought it, I could, but now I can’t and the only reason I don’t sell it is because I owe more on it than it’s worth. That and if push comes to shove and I get desperate, I can always sell it for 7 grand and disappear.
6 years ago I’d never be thinking like that.
All the way home I thought of following Dr. Mind’s encouragement and stopping down at a charity organization that could hook me up with a food bank. At first I thought my reluctance was ego, or lowering myself to beg for help, but now I’m fairly certain it’s a strong fear of rejection. Every time I go somewhere for help I get turned down to the point of I just ask myself “What’s the use?”
Out of food I started putting small amounts of dehydrated chopped onions in my mouth and waiting for them to plump up, which is all I have left with some garlic salt. That’s when I got hit with another disaster, or blessing or both. I decided to check my financial spreadsheet and when I do that I check my on-line checking balance. That’s when I discovered I was one day from catastrophe. I’ve got an option on my account that let’s me know if I’m overdrawn, so I was relieved that I didn’t get an e-mail after buying gas in Zanesville. The trouble is that on my spreadsheet, I’d already deducted a timed payment on a $77 phone bill due to go out electronically Thursday… but I only had $71 in the bank. If I hadn’t checked it when I did, the phone payment would’ve bounced causing me $35-40 in bank fees. I immediately canceled the payment, and now I’ll have a double phone bill next month + a $15 late payment fee from them… but I’ve got money for groceries.
I slammed my fist on the desk and hurt it. Will this ordeal end? Will it ever FUCKING end? Hunger was getting the best of me, but I knew not to go out upset, so I opened the mail… a bad idea.
#1 was the electric bill. $114; I know better than to be hopeful because a 2nd will be along any day now for about $75. Both amounts due will be wrong and in a week there’ll be another that’s a red shutoff notice for around $225.
#2. GB sent me a letter saying they don’t think they have to pay Dr. Mind because they don’t have some kind of medical records. It’s all bullshit. I’d be dead by my own hand by now without her.
#3: Google Adsense has owed me $100 for a few months now for earning a couple of pennies or so for each ad click on my websites, and I’ve been depending on that to get ahead of this disaster. It took me 5 years to hit that threshold before they’d direct deposit that check. They sent a letter with a $100 gift card toward advertising my websites on their website. 5 years - five fucking years. I know I selected cash not a damned gift certificate, and when I went into my account there was no way to get ahold of them and no “Contact us” information. I sent out an e-mail to them on the only address they gave for some “phone verification and hoped for the best. I feel like a damned rape victim and I’m pulling all of their ads off of my sites if I don’t hear from them in three days. I also plan a system-wide e-mail to all the BC writers and Blogspot writers warning them that earning pennies a month on their ads isn’t worth it and is a scam.
I emotionally shut down after that and tossed the rest of the mail in a pigeon hole in my desk’s hutch.
Thursday I checked my account to make sure the phone payment didn’t go through and discovered that even though PNC said it’d be 4-6 weeks, they deposited… are you ready for this? $5 points bonus in my account this morning. I asked for $15. This means going through the whole process all over again and blowing 20,000 “points” to get a lousy $20.
I went to the OSU eye clinic to see Dr. K. I spent the whole trip wondering if I’d actually arrive there or “wake up” in Cleveland somewhere. Of course on arrival the receptionist handed me a demand note for nearly $200 again and I felt like some skid-row bum looking for a handout when I had to tell her I couldn’t come up with it. She seemed reluctant to let me have a seat, but I guess by law they have to treat me… but they don’t have to act like they like it. I felt like shit standing there and could feel myself turning red.
Dr. K said my eye looks good and she wanted to schedule my right eye lens replacement surgery, but I told her I couldn’t do it because I can’t afford the co-pay or even to buy a pair of reading glasses that I’d need after the surgery, since the artificial lenses they’re installing are only for distance. She put me on eye drops again, still worried about my being unable to control the diabetes and told me to be really religious about using them. She now doesn’t want to do my other eye until after the knee surgery, so Instead of scheduling my next appointment, we’re keeping it open for about three months from now.
Dr. K also did something really nice. We talked about how bad the situation was and she said she’d stop the bill from going to collection. She said when she sees my name on the list she’ll pull it. I hope she remembers. I’m so grateful and ashamed at the same time.
I reluctantly drove up to Wal-Mart out of hunger and bought about $50 worth of cheap, salty, sugar-laden food. I stopped at Kroger’s and picked up another $10 in $1 bags of mixed salad greens on sale. No dressing, but at least it’s something healthy. I’ve ridden friends in the past over to food banks, and I’ve contributed to them myself a few times over the years and from my experience with them I know they’re all cheap canned store brand garbage that no one wanted. After all $10 will buy 10 store-brand cans instead of only 6 name-brand and showing up with 10 makes you feel and look more generous than you really are. Being a diabetic I’d have to pick and choose and I’m sure I’d go through hell while they watched me turn down cheap cans of fat-laden corned beef hash and sugar laden jars of spaghetti sauce. Of course this is all rationalization for my real fear of being turned down for help at all because I’m too rich. It’s not that I’m “too good” to go to a food bank and ask for help, it’s that I can’t handle the repeated rejections I’ve gotten from every direction.
As soon as I put the groceries away the damned collection agency calls started non-stop. One was from the 541 area code and I cheerfully answered it thinking it was Betsy. Tempted as I was to take the phone off the hook, I didn’t. But I got really sleepy and spent the rest of the night in bed.
I woke up Friday screaming, I don’t remember from what, but my heart was beating really fast and hard and I was covered with sweat. I’m back to waking up three hours after I fall asleep. I’m also experiencing a problem with my equilibrium again. I’ll get up out of a chair and suddenly fall back into it again, or walk from the den to the kitchen and abruptly fall sideways against the wall
I got an e-mail Friday from my wonderful friend Brenda. She mailed me $10 so I can pay the co-pay when I go to the clinic on Tuesday. God love her. I’m used to being the “kind and generous stranger” and it’s a lot different being on the receiving end of it. I guess more than a few friends still care than I thought.
I got a headache again Friday afternoon and fell asleep and woke up that evening around 10 and suddenly realized I hadn’t gone down to make arrangements to go to a food bank.
There’s an old saying that a rich man’s idea of planning for retirement is contributing to a 401K… A poor man’s idea of contributing to his retirement is buying a lottery ticket. Lately, believe it or not, I’ve been hoping against hope I didn’t win the lottery. I’ve been playing it in one form or another since 1987. I used to even put up $500 for a pool when I was with friends and sell them dollar shares. Now that I can’t afford the tickets anymore as of two weeks ago I’m praying I don’t win (?) For over twenty years I’ve faithfully played 2-5-9-14-16 (22) and have been convinced that the day I stop playing that combination is the day it’ll pop up a winner.
Today (Sunday) I got an e-mail from my sister Dee that my Uncle Bill (mom’s brother) died. Mom’s sisters didn’t even tell her and my aunt Margaret about it until after his funeral. I’ll miss him; he was fun to visit when we were kids. My mom and Aunt Margaret haven’t spoken to each other for about five years and so I called my aunt to see if she’d been told and discovered they were both together in Aunt Margaret’s living room in Pittsburgh.
I guess it’s a family thing. Betsy and I are incredibly close, just like Dee and Jim are incredibly close, but I haven’t spoken to Dee or Jim since my father’s funeral in 2006.
I had a meal and tested my blood and it was at 301-damn it. I injected another 20 units of 100-proof and tested again half an hour later and it was up to 400! Because I can’t afford them, when I use a syringe I re-use it twice more. The usual procedure is to inject, fill it with alcohol and squirt it on the injection site… that’s when I noticed that no alcohol came out. I drew more in and there was nothing in the syringe.
There’s a good possibility that my sugar has been so high because I just assumed I drew insulin in instead of nothing because I was watching the rubber stopper against the scale instead of the liquid. I tossed the syringe and injected again. In other words every third injection may have been empty.
It just never ends.
Tuesday the 24th
Woke up from a nightmare last night but only remember part of it. An English butler dressed to the 9’s showed up at my door with a covered silver tray. He bowed and said, “Miss Lawrence’s compliments sir, lifted the cover and presented me with a .45 automatic to shoot myself. I backed away and he began chasing me down the hall. When I got the fire stairs, I discovered that the floors below were flooded with something sticky and red and above; the stairs seemed to climb to infinity. He chased me up from about three flights below, pausing to shoot at me. The further I climbed, the more my leg hurt and it started bleeding.
I got to the top and went through a hatch that led to the roof and found myself on one of the towers of the World Trade Center. My three attackers were there and began hitting and kicking me. I remember falling over the side and that’s when I woke up.
I spent some time working on the computer and went back to sleep, blessedly dream free.
Thanks to Brenda, I can go to see Dr. S/clinic and also I’ll have enough gas to get to Dr. D/heart tomorrow.
I went in early to scan the lobby directory looking for social workers and food banks. Dr. S. was wonderful and so was his staff. He decided to put off doing the A1C test for a month because of the trouble I’ve been having controlling my sugar. My reading was 303 this morning, so I took ten units because I knew I’d be driving and didn’t want to risk an overdose. When they checked it at the Clinic it only fell to 262.
He’s one of the few that don’t make me feel like some derelict bum coming in from the street begging for quarters. He wrote a new prescription for Coreg for my heart that he said I can get without insurance for $4. Then gave me enough free drug representative samples to last me two months of Lantus insulin pens, 70/30 insulin, and the needles for the pen cartridges and 200 syringes. I also got a month’s supply of Crestor.
Before I left I checked out a couple of social workers but most had gone to lunch. I did get some useful information about some of the charity organizations and news that some changing their rules for the 2nd time this year. All require me to actually call Anthem as opposed to what I was told before and dump them, then get a letter acknowledging it… ha ha fat chance. I told one that I hadn’t paid a single premium to Anthem since I found myself being put on their billing list, and she was amazed that they haven’t dumped me.
Betsy called me this evening to say that my brother Jim is having a fit over my possibly showing up at her wedding. She’s also puzzled by him saying that her having her son Brian walk her down the aisle was sick and immoral??? He acted like he was entitled to walk and give her away as if she had no say in the decision. We lost the cell connection. I won’t be able to talk to her tomorrow because I’ve got doctors all day.
Wednesday:
I couldn’t find a parking slot at OSU for the first time and wound up going through a ritual where I have to go inside the building and find some guy to get a pass to the staff parking garage next door. The trouble was he was out to lunch and I was worried I’d get a ticket for being parked in the no stopping zone out front while I tried to find him, so I had to keep hurrying back to the front door to see if a cop was about to have me towed. It took me about twenty minutes to find him and I couldn’t reach Dr. Mind’s office to tell her what was going on and the ordeal caused be to be about half an hour late.
The session went as usual and I had to watch the time to keep from being late to Dr. D/heart’s appointment. Thank god Brenda sent me that $10 or I’d never have had the gas to get across the county to see him.
At the cardiologist’s they did a test on my pacemaker and downloaded its records, and found no unusual problems with my heart, and the memory in it reported no unusual heart rhythms. Apparently it doesn’t take much to jolt the “dead” heart muscle to work in rhythm with the rest of my heart. Considering it has to do it on every beat, and the thing records everything it does until it’s uploaded, she says the battery is still expected to last at least five years or more!
Dr. D is one of the most caring people I’ve ever met. He went over my chest and is concerned that my left lung isn’t drawing as much air as my right. I was worried and asked if I could develop pneumonia but he said no. It’s from where they literally tore into my ribcage to get to my heart when they did the thoracotomy. He seemed unconcerned when I told him about the pain when I take a deep breath and said it was just something I’d have to live with. If I’m still experiencing it at the next follow up, he may prescribe something.
I told him about the trouble I’ve been having with my equilibrium and he surprised me by saying it had to do with my combination of prescriptions and to let him work on a different combination, and he’d get in touch with me or if it wasn’t too bad, wait till my next appointment.
He asked me to tell his assistant about all the trouble I’m having with GB, I’m not sure why, but they want me to make it a point to have the hospital call him when I’m admitted for the knee operation. He was shocked and acted outraged when I told him that GB won’t pay for my insulin or heart meds while I’m there and how my hospital bills are so hopelessly intertwined because GB will only pay for part of them, but Social Security won’t cover the other parts because it’s a workman’s comp claim, so I’m stuck with the bills… and the collection agencies. He was especially pissed how GB would cover the ride home from the aftercare facility, but not for the cab company to return the wheelchair I was in back to them.
He was great. He gave me more Crestor and some powerful version of Coreg that came in capsules instead of pills that I take every other day instead of daily. He chastised me about my ego and said to call him if I run low and ask for more. I promised I would.
I set to work on “Jet’s General Store” when I got home, and I’m intent on getting it done. I’m going to have to give up on getting any kind of help from Amazon’s “India” tech support and do this on my own. I decided that the technical glitch that tells everyone that the store is temporarily unavailable the first time they log onto it was something I’d have to fix myself, and took three days to completely duplicate it onto another URL… and it worked. It, it, worked!!!
Thursday:
I got an instant message from my nephew Brian out of the blue. I hadn’t heard from him in at least 10 years. I guess this whole “walking Betsy down the aisle” thing is getting serious. My niece Amber apparently called my brother up and cussed him out to the point of making him apologize repeatedly to her! Go Amber!!!
I used part of the day planning my finances for next month. The car insurance is killing me because I have to pay month-to-month, so there’s an $12 surcharge per month as opposed to paying it in one lump sum. It’s beginning to feel like every bill I pay is to a loan shark. The phone wants an extra $15 when I’m late too, and the electric company keeps threatening to shut me off if I’m so much as two weeks late… sigh. The days of having the utilities paid up months in advance are long gone…
Friday:
I was relieved to get my GB check. I still have to e-mail Lawyer K about my next surgery date and ask again about legally making them pay for my insulin and heart meds.
The tough part’s going to be stretching $98 to buy three weeks of groceries and supplies; not an easy task and feed the cat too. Thank god nothing seems wrong with the car.
I kept having these uncontrollable full-body shudders all day and a headache. I rarely have headaches and lately they’ve been hitting me a lot. It’s got to be tension. My ears ringing is going to drive me batty too.
My god I miss cooking. I used to love to take fresh ingredients and make something delicious like homemade chili or a casserole, fancy salads etc. The only thing I can afford now is canned ravioli at .98 cents, and I’ve actually gotten used to eating that right out of the can cold to save on electric… that and I sold all of my bowls with the rest of my china to make ends meet. If I can’t eat it out of the can or package from the microwave or serve it on a paper plate, I can’t afford it. I’ve even resorted to washing the plastic spoons and forks to re-use them again.
I’m serious about getting my paperwork together again and trying for the umpteenth time to go over to Job & Family services and try to get them to help me with my Medicare premiums and prescriptions. Maybe I can talk Dr. Mind into going over there with me. I don’t think I can take another rejection from them.
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