The Mandelbear's Musings

It's Forgetful Friday, because I forgot Wishful Wednesday and Thankful Thursday. We'll get to the Furious part later. Before I forget again...

... I could really use a job in the Seattle area, that uses my skills, pays well, and will pay for relocation. Or half a million dollars. I can't afford to be picky, though I'd greatly prefer the latter. (And if wishes were horses, we'd all be up to our necks in manure by now.) (And no, I don't want my Mom to die and leave me the money; I love my Mom, and you can take that damned monkey's paw and shove it up...) But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I'm thankful for...

• My friends
• Colleen
• An occasional sense of adventure (though mostly I'm of Bilbo's opinion on the subject)
• The difference in rent between San Jose and Seattle
• Being almost far enough out of middle age to retire
• Good benefits

I would grateful to the company that manages those benefits, but that's where the Furious part comes in. (I told you we'd get to it.) Both my 401K and my defined-benefit pension plan are managed by the same company, AON Hewitt. The part of Hewitt that manages the 401K also manages my other benefits; and apart from having one of the crappiest websites in the known universe I can usually get things done there. (Part of the fury is about their recent redesign, which leaves me with no obvious way to find out what documentation they want for the stupid FSA. Another part is spending 10 minutes on the phone going through menus and listening to idiotic messages telling me that I could use the web, and by the way did I want to stay logged in?, only to get to the part where they tell me they closed for the weekend half an hour ago.)

That bit came after finding out that the other part of the company, the one that manages my pension, has my social security number wrong. Now they want me to mail them a copy of my card. Which I haven't seen for two decades. So I'll have to apply for a new one. For which I'll need either a birth certificate (which might be in the stuff I got from Mom a dozen years ago), or a passport (which expired a year ago and might be lost somewhere on my desk waiting for me to renew it).

Furious doesn't BEGIN to cover it.

This all happened between 2pm and 2:30; I am still not really back to normal, eight hours and a glass of gin later. Oh, and add an hour or two of something that felt a lot like depression, between 4 and 6. Probably was depression, considering. Ya think?

Welcome back to the American health care don't give a damn and don't make any fscking sense system.

You may remember back at [15] that they were about to send Colleen home from the hospital before she was ready. The sent her to a nursing home instead. Now she's ready to come home from the nursing home. All she needs is a portable pump, a supply of "food", and a home care nurse to come out and train her family members (i.e. me and Kat) in how to attach and detach the pump.

... and certify, according to some whacko Federal Medicare regulation that shouldn't apply because we're not on Medicare, that she's "housebound". Otherwise she has to stay in the nursing home. EXfrackingCUSE ME?

Apparently the only other way to get this done would have been for her to go directly home from the hospital. And it's not clear that she'd be getting the kind of portable pump that they were looking to send her home from the hospital with. Because she's "housebound" and doesn't need a pump she can carry around with her if necessary.

I am hoping that Kaiser will figure out some way to get us the equipment, training, and supplies we need to take her home and save them thousands of dollars. But I'm not very hopeful.

Now, it's entirely possible that this was explained to her back three weeks ago when she was high on morphine and crying hysterically. I wasn't there.

Up until 5:30 when all this came down, it was a pretty good day. We went in to Kaiser to see her gastroenterologist, and had a nice drive back. The news on the GI front was encouraging, though it confused Colleen badly. Basically, the surgeon in SF who specializes in fistulizing Crohn's Disease says he's never seen a Crohn's-related fistula in a hernia pouch, especially since Colleen's problems have all been in the colon and since the fistula is closing on its own, which doesn't generally happen in Crohn's. So it's almost certainly related to the hernia, which in turn should be relatively easy to fix. However, the timing of that fix is totally unclear at this point.