| |
| Update on our cat situation... the insurance fairy waved a magic wand. I'm so grateful we aren't going to be saddled with these thousands of dollars in bills, I don't even have bandwidth to resent that we were stuck worrying about this all weekend because no one at the insurance company checks email on the weekends. :P (Possibly I am a little prejudiced because when he was promoted, my husband agreed to check his work email every day, and at least fires back some kind of reply to any email received, weekday or weekends alike.) Anyway. They are paying, so we don't have to have our cat put down to stop the torrent of billing, and we don't have to rush the cat's rehab. Just as an example of how crazy this has been... she has been at three vet hospitals. The first one did her surgery and that was quite expensive, of course. But they close on Sundays, so Saturday night they sent her to the second place, Pets Referral Center. PRC had her for 12 hours and all they did was assess her and continue the treatments that the first place had started. Their estimate for the cat's care was stratospheric, so I asked them some questions about their billing, and found they were charging us 2x as much as the first place for the same pain meds. When they couldn't adequately explain that to me, I had her transferred to a third hospital. But that all took time, so in all she was there 12 hours. For the 12 hours that the second place had her, essentially just monitoring a cat who already had a diagnosis and treatment plan, the bill was just over $1000. And both the other two bills are going to be much more than that because she spent/is spending three days at each of those places. But I am much happier with this third hospital, Berkeley Dog & Cat, even though they're also massively expensive. They're still less than the second place, and they seem more responsive. Since we know we're off the hook for the charges so far, we're keeping our cat in care there tonight and she'll probably be discharged tomorrow. She'll get a patch to keep her pain medication going and she's going to be in a soft crate for several weeks to keep her from moving too much while she heals. But she will get the chance to heal. Whew. http://cesare.dreamwidth.org/169723.html |  comments | Comment at Dreamwidth | |
|
| Well, and so I may have to have my cat put to sleep because we can't afford to pay for her medical bills. Our cat pulled a heavy plant pot onto herself and crushed her leg and hip. The vet told us she needed expensive surgery to reset her bones, but because she's otherwise a healthy cat, she'd probably recover enough to go home by Saturday night. The surgery cost thousands. It's a serious strain for us to afford, but we love our cat, so we authorized the surgery. Saturday night, our cat wasn't better. The surgery was harder on her than they estimated (and also more expensive, of course.) Our cat is still on heavy painkillers and refusing food. We were told she needed 24-hour care, but the vet closes their office on Sundays, so she was transferred to another facility. The new place contacted me, and their estimate for 36 hours of care for our sedated cat surpasses the amount of the expensive surgery. This place could not guarantee that our cat will be in any shape to be released after that time, and said that Monday morning we can 'discuss' whether they will release her or continue to charge an unbelievable hourly rate to keep her sedated and potentially on a feeding tube. Oh, also my cat is in California and I am stuck on a visit to my husband's parents in Florida. Our catsitter went way, way beyond her job description to deal with getting our cat treated. When it first happened, we got that happyface prognosis so we didn't seriously consider flying back, but now the situation has become much more serious, only now we can't spend another $500 for plane fare on top of the other expenses. When we discussed the surgery, we estimated how much we could afford to spend coping with this. The bill from the surgery plus the estimate we have been given for 24-hour care are already double that amount. The crazy thing is that our catsitter is insured, and it's possible that the insurance fairy might swoop down, wave a magic wand, and make all these bills go away. But the insurance rep won't be in til Monday morning, so we won't know anything until then at the earliest. And probably even then, we won't know for certain until after we run up more bills than we can conceivably pay and submit them as claims which, let's be real, they're going to turn down, because that's what modern insurance companies do. And so we're in this agonizing situation where we've already gone broke saving our cat, only she's still in danger, and if she doesn't get better soon, we have to seriously consider putting her to sleep because we just do not have the money to keep going with treatment. In which case we will still be broke, and our cat will be gone forever. And yet the insurance might approve the claims and pay those bills, in which case we won't be broke, but we will have to live with the fact that we killed our cat unnecessarily, after extending her suffering for several days after her accident. Or we roll the dice that insurance will pay and keep treating the cat indefinitely, and she either recovers or dies naturally, and if insurance then refuses the claims, we will go bankrupt because our cat climbed a plant pot. I'm not pouring out this sob story looking for charity, I can't accept it, since there is the slim chance we may not even end up responsible for these bills-- though if anyone can vouch for decent 24-hour pet medical care in Berkeley that isn't exorbitant, recs might help. I just had to talk about it, and somehow despite the enormousness of the world, it feels like no one is ever on the internet in the middle of the night when I'm most awake and alone. http://cesare.dreamwidth.org/169330.html |  comments | Comment at Dreamwidth | |
|
| Oh hey I wrote Night Vale stuff. Both Carlos/Cecil. You Are In My Vision @ AO3. Let's say you're a guy in his thirties, still young enough that the grey hair starting to glint at your temples is a little premature. Let's say you're this guy, who has occasionally been described as perfect and beautiful by certain observers, and you're in a car headed to Las Vegas, taking stock of your love life, such as it's been.Dig Here @ AO3. "I got a call at the station about a time capsule!" Cecil carefully clears the dirt away from the violet-silver domed hexagon, and digs a little more around the edges. "According to the caller, it’s from 2075."*drops here, runs away* http://cesare.dreamwidth.org/169213.html |  comments | Comment at Dreamwidth | |
|
| I've been taking Effexor for a week, and I've benefited from a friend's med diary about her early experiences with it, so in the spirit of paying it forward, here's what my first week has been like. 1. Side effects. I've had nausea and headaches. It was really marked at first, dwindling each day. Though I'm actually still getting a bit of this, depending on what's in my stomach when I take the pill. I also feel like I'm sweating a little more than usual when I get a little warm or exert myself, but it's hard to be sure. 2. Mood improvement. Not sure yet. ( Details, with some negative self-talkCollapse ) Getting the prescription left me feeling optimistic. Which is still how I feel most of the time... neutral with some optimism that it's going to get better. But the better hasn't actually happened yet. Not surprising. It's supposed to take three weeks. One plus: earlier I worked out on the exercise machine for 30 minutes, and for the first time in memory, exercise actually made me feel good. I've written before about how it drives me crazy that people claim exercise always helps depression-- I'm sure it does help with many individuals' depression, but I've been exercising regularly for 16 months since we got the machine, and it never helped my mood, not immediately and not in the long-term. I kept at it because I do want to be healthier. But this time, I felt good after 30 minutes of activity. Hope that keeps up. 3. Writing. I do feel like slowly my will and ability to write is ebbing back. I did some writing tonight. Over the past few months, even my usual habit of telling stories to myself while doing dull chores had deserted me, and it felt horrible to lose that. Now it's coming back. Huge relief. So, that's a week in on Effexor. I'll add more when I'm further along. http://cesare.dreamwidth.org/166144.html |  comments | Comment at Dreamwidth | |
|
| Dear Tumblr, The fact that you are ignorant about something that you could learn in less time it takes to type about it... is not in itself funny. Granted, this "Dear group/concept/inanimate object" conceit is hackneyed too. Never mind, Me. Aka: I've seen quite a few 'What I Know About A Fandom/Show Despite Never Watching It' Tumblr slideshows where photos are captioned "Idk who this is lol" in Comic Sans and that's the joke. I'm kind of tempted to make a deliberately joke-free slideshow, just a bunch of character shots captioned 'This guy is in it' and 'This other guy is also in it' and 'I guess this lady is in it too'. 'Here is a picture of them all eating food so I guess that happens.' 'They stand in rooms sometimes.' 'He's probably breathing here? But I've never seen it so idk lolololol' http://cesare.dreamwidth.org/165385.html |  comments | Comment at Dreamwidth | |
|
| Saw Iron Man 3 this week! Spoilers behind cuts. I enjoyed IM3 about as much as the others, that is, a lot, in a "whee! shiny!" kinda way. I really liked how much time RDJ and Don Cheadle spent out of the armor, though there's no shortage of armor geekery. One of the things I really didn't like about 1 & 2 were the slut-shaming bits with a pretty reporter ( and that stuff doesn't happen in 3, yay.Collapse ) It actually even eked out a pass on the Bechdel test. I was also happy because at the end of IM2 I thought Pepper made some remark about not being able to handle the CEO position and that annoyed me because I thought it must be a joke but wasn't totally sure. Well, she's still CEO in IM3. Previews that showed Pepper ( doing superheroics were overstated a little, but she gets a couple of big BAMF moments.Collapse )Finally: I love Tony/Pepper lots, but post-X-Men First Class, I can't seem to see RDJ as Tony Stark without imagining a younger Tony getting with XMFC's Charles Xavier. Because RDJ/James McAvoy would make for an amazing visual, and young Tony Stark and young Charles Xavier would be so, so spectacularly bad for each other. There's a 1999 scene with younger swingin' bachelor Tony Stark and I could just see him phoning up Charles the next day. Hooray for AUs & fan fiction to satisfy that headcanon. Rebecca Hall is in IM3, so now every major player in the Starter For 10 cast has been in a blockbuster-level genre success: James McAvoy in X-Men: First Class, Rebecca Hall in IM3, Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark in Captain America, Catherine Tate in Doctor Who, and Benedict Cumberbatch and Alice Eve in Star Trek: Into Darkness. http://cesare.dreamwidth.org/165106.html |  comments | Comment at Dreamwidth | |
|
|
