I'm OK - I think

I wanted to take a break from digging through medical bills and get a word in here.

We are doing OK I think. It is all relative of course, but we are doing what we have to do to take care of the little daily bits of business (like school). After the flurry of family presence that accompanied the week preceding and the few days after C’s death, the house feels very quiet and peaceful during the day when it is just me and Sophie the Wonder Dawg. There seem to be endless little chores that need doing which is fine with me.

I finally worked up the gumption to tackle the medical bill issue. I can tell you now that the reason we pay the highest cost in the world for only mediocre care is that 40% of medical costs go to cover paper and stamps. If our mail carrier didn’t drive a little truck, he/she would certainly be a part of the medical system as a hernia patient. The volume of notifications, bills, not bills, insurance FYI’s, and general communications is obscene.

And that is just the start. When you factor in the letters we have to write when some low-level bureaucrat transposes a couple of numbers as they type and daydream at the same time, the US pulp supply drops ten percent.

Of course, C always handled this in the past. She hated imperfection and accounting errors and would spend hours pouring over explanation of benefit forms and hospital “this is not a bill” (but if you ignore it, you could go to jail). She would pencil in annotations, write firm letters, badger bureaucrats, and generally run a tight financial ship.

Now I must try to pick up the pieces. Where C kept track of this stuff in her head using her nearly infallible memory, I must use spreadsheets. So now, I am in the process of entering all of the important bits (I hope) from the reams of paper that spill out over our cupboards and counters into neat little rows and columns in the hope that I will be able to ascertain what has been paid, what needs to be paid (and by whom), and where the aforementioned nitwit account specialist inadvertently moved a decimal a few places in either direction.

Well, my break is over and I now return to battle. The picture posted at the top of today’s entry shows K at last Sunday’s teen driving clinic. She is piloting my car around and around a wet parking lot in a circular pattern trying to lose control. Her instructor tried to help in the process by randomly pulling on the parking brake handle. She did well and had a great time.

Later.

P.