Of Moving, Masks, and Medicine

I've been mostly silent on social media lately, but decided that I should give a quick description of how my last six months has been.

In March, Ron suggested that it was time for us to sell our home in Washington and move back to California, and I immediately agreed.  I have moved a LOT in the past 16 years (I think 11 times, if I am counting correctly), and I was actually feeling a little restless having been in the same house for five years.  In addition, our little town was growing more and more polarized due to a Q-Anon-promoting mayor and his henchpeople. Our next-door neighbors were getting closer to moving into their house full-time, and had made it very clear that they weren't happy with our "liberal a$$hole" presence, and we missed our friends and family in California.  Lastly (but not the least important, by far), Ron had a couple medical issues that turned out to be okay but made us realize that we were MUCH too far from specialized medical care in our small town.

So, we made a trip to Roseville, got on a wait list for a new house, got a house offered to us, went into contract, put our house on the market, sold it, packed up, and closed escrow.  All in the space of about three months.  It was cray-cray.

Our new house wasn't actually going to be completed until early September, so we were going to be nomadic for about three months.  This seemed like a fun, adventurous idea!  We have dear, amazing friends who offered us places to stay, we had an extended stay hotel in our back pocket, we had a couple trips planned, and it was all going to be (as my friend Mary Kay would say) both hunky and dory.

And then reality struck, in the form of a mystery medical issue...not for Ron this time, but for me.  Let me give a tiny bit of backstory here that would come to be very, very important: while living in Washington, there was only one medical insurance plan that the State of California (Ron's employer) would offer us: a Blue Cross PPO.  As of February, I was also on that plan because Ron had the good (?) sense to marry me on January 1, 2021.  We planned, once we were back in California, to reassess that situation and probably change plans during open enrollment in October so that we had an HMO (likely Kaiser or a similar Sutter-type plan) that would give us lower deductibles and lower out-of-pocket maximums per year.  That will come into play here in a bit.

Beginning in late May, just before we left, I began experiencing abdominal pain that was sometimes very slight and sometimes really, really ugly.  Over the course of the last six months, I have seen numerous doctors, had one surgery that ended up not fixing the issue, and ended up getting a referral to the Chief of Surgical Specialties at Mercy.  The ONLY reason I was able to use that referral (which was a godsend, believe me) is that we missed the open enrollment closing date and were "stuck" with keeping our PPO.  Since I have had numerous imagings, doctor visits, and that one surgery already (which would add up to about twenty thousand dollars, so far), and since those procedures have been in the Sutter, Hill, and Dignity systems, our less-desirable PPO has become a glowing light of happiness.  All of this has made us both realize just how lucky we are to have really decent insurance.  JUST SO DAMN LUCKY. If I were on the same insurance I was on last year, who knows how this would have gone.  And for people who have no insurance?  Holy smokes.  If we still lived in Sequim, I would likely have had to travel one to three hours for some of these specialized visits and tests, which would have sucked because one of the things that makes me really uncomfortable is any lengthy car ride.

Now, I have the utmost faith that Dr. House (not his name, but it's what I call my current specialist, because he is a medical sleuth extraordinaire) is going to get to the bottom of this pretty soon and I suspect I will have another surgery in January (hopefully) that will fix this.  But I cannot possibly be more grateful to my family, friends, doctors, medical assistants, schedulers, et al who have made this journey as easy as possible.  I have learned a lot about the medical field, and about myself. I so appreciate the hilarious things that have kept me smiling (like my friend, Kati, who asks me during phone calls, "Is it a day for platitudes or no platitudes?"). My sister texts or calls me multiple times a week, and makes me realize that her own chronic pain renders her probably the most able to help me deal with mine. I will endeavor to do a better job, as I and my peers get older, to help them in the same way. Paula, you will never know how much I appreciate you.

And Ron?  Holy cow, he has been a saint.  He picks up whatever slack I leave, he expects nothing from me other than what I say I can do day to day, he understands that I can go from "mostly okay" to "I need to go spend the next 30 hours in bed," and he has watched countless hours of Beat Bobby Flay and even the Great British Baking Show with me. (He does still watch a lot of Sci-Fi, but usually when I'm in bed or lying down).  I couldn't even have begun to imagine what an amazing COVID lock-down companion he would be.  And I couldn't have asked for better.

And now, I am still mostly at home.  I still struggle with being on lockdown (because I am a total extrovert), but every test means being COVID screened, and if I fail, it would mean rescheduling the test, which could delay things by weeks.  I had to be COVID-tested prior to my surgery in October; if I had tested positive, it would have been January before I could have rescheduled that surgery.  So, I am just so careful.  I know now that the "COVID comfort level" scale goes from "complete hermit" to "Aaron Rodgers," and I am somewhere at the lower part of that scale.  Be kind to each other, my friends.  You never know what someone else is going through, and what his/her reasons may be for being uber-careful or being a little less careful.  (And sorry, Aaron, but there's no excuse for your level of idiocy).

So, mask up, get vaccinated and boosted, be immensely grateful for modern medicine, and....don't move unless you have to (Ron says he is NEVER doing it again!)

Happy Holidays, my friends!