My Adventures In Health Insurance

I’m uniquely qualified to talk about healthcare.  In the past 25 years I’ve been disabled and non-disabled, diabetic and ex-diabetic, insured through employers, Medicare, and no one.  In the past couple of years the subject of socialized healthcare has been a divisive issue here in the U.S.  Aside from brief discussions with a few people I’ve kept quiet.

But the time has come for me to jump into the fray.  Lucky for me, I’ve got insurance if the fray hurts me.

My Type 1 Diabetes was a pre-existing condition (from age 12) which meant my employers’ insurance chose to ignore that area of my health needs.  I paid for the testing supplies, disposable syringes, alcohol swabs, and two kinds of insulin myself—when I could.  There were a few times when I had to use the syringes twice, risking infection.

And that was when I had insurance.  There were times when I had to cough up (pun intended) the cash to pay for every doctor’s appointment.

When I was 27, the diabetic complications started.  My vision and my kidneys started failing.  I had no problem proving I was in bad enough shape to get Social Security Disability.  Not long after that, Medicare became my only health insurance.

This is the part most lifelong healthy people miss.  If someone with a chronic health condition can’t get the help they need to take care of it, they can become disabled.  I went from paying into the system to being a consumer.  Maybe it was inevitable, but it could have happened later and I could have paid more to Social Security before needing it.

To keep from losing SSDI and the Medicare that comes with it, I worked part-time at a number jobs for which was severely overqualified and under challenged.  A diabetic with failing kidneys can’t expect a private insurer to go near them.  A VOUCHER WOULD NOT HAVE MADE ANY DIFFERENCE.  A voucher does no good if no one will take it.

Medicare paid for the kidney/pancreas transplant.  I was lucky enough to have people willing to help raise the money for the unpaid part of the surgery.  Not everyone is so fortunate.  I don’t even want to think about how a private insurer might have tried to dodge the whole issue.

Medicare also paid for a second transplant, four major eye surgeries, laser treatments, dialysis, and a host of other less serious procedures.

In 2004 I landed a state job and employee health insurance started paying for the deductibles and copayments.  Now that I’m a retired state employee, I’m covered by Medicare and private insurance.  I’m one of the tiny percentage of disabled people fully covered by insurance.

I can remember when my situation wasn’t so comfortable, which is why I don’t have that “I’ve got mine, Jack” attitude I hear too often from the chronically healthy.

Even if you don’t have a chronic health condition, an accident or sudden illness could make it impossible for you to work.  Then where would you be?  You’d end up with socialized healthcare.  You would be persona non grata to the private insurers.

You say you’re really careful?  You eat right and exercise?  Great, but your luck could run out.  Yes, luck is a factor, too.  A drunk or distracted driver could crash right into you.  Don’t let luck make you smug.

There’s an old saying, apparently forgotten my many: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Keeping people healthy is so much cheaper than playing catch-up later.

Not only do most healthy people work, they further their education, volunteer, and some even start businesses.

I’ve heard people say, “We can’t afford to cover everyone in this economy.”  With two-thirds of us overweight, we can’t afford not to.  Here is the Land of the Free it’s “eat now, pay later.” 

Well, I’ve seen the bill myself.  Millions of us won’t be able to stiff the restaurant and do a Dine-N-Dash this time.

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Web site JimFairbanks.net

 

An Open Letter to Computer Virus Creators

Dear Computer Virus Creator

I’m one of your countless, nameless, faceless victims.  To PC users a computer virus is about as unavoidable as death, taxes, and spam.  Even the most tech and internet savvy computer users (which I’m not) can fall prey your to dastardly deeds.  I was fooled by a very realistic-looking link when I tried to upgrade software.  Right away I knew I’d done something wrong because my computer froze up.  A manual reboot led to obvious conclusion: virus.

Right now, you’re probably chuckling to yourself like some kind of villain from a Batman movie.  I imagine you look like the garden-variety American computer geek, but you may actually be from anywhere in the world.  In that case, you may not have much sympathy for a white, college-educated American male.  Whoever you are, you’re about to get to know who I am.

The first sign something was wrong after I rebooted my computer was when Zoomtext, the magnifier program I use, didn’t open.  Visually-impaired people like me have to use a program to enlarge what’s on the screen.  I also use it to reduce glare by reversing colors on documents, so I’m looking at white letters on a black background.  Black and white.  Right and wrong.  Some of us know the difference.

It may not matter to you that one of your victims is legally blind, so it may not matter to you that I don’t drive, either.  I’m fortunate enough to live in a town with taxi cab service.  It isn’t cheap, but I’m lucky to have it.  I’m also lucky my computer guru wasn’t busy.  He even gave me a discount to clean up your mess because I’m a regular customer.  Yes, Mean-spirited Technically-gifted Loser, you’ve plagued me before.

After riding the taxi back home, I kept busy doing other things and tried not to think about lost productivity.  I’m nearing completion of my memoir, in which I talk about several health issues I’ve had to overcome in my life.  Being a single, middle-aged legally blind guy with a couple of transplanted organs isn’t easy.  I really don’t need you complicating my life further.

A kind soul gave me a ride to pick up my computer when it was fixed and also hooked it back up for me.  That saved me from having to feel the back of the PC tower to make sure I inserted the connections properly.  It would have taken me five times as long as it took him and I probably would have ended up with a headache. 

Score one for Jim!

Ah, but you did a thorough job, Mr. Egotistical Socially Unskilled 40 Year-old Virgin.  The virus you made was in there so deep I had to take it back for a full strip-down of my hard drive.  My computer guru removed everything this time, including your masterpiece of computer treachery.  When I picked it up the next day, I had to reinstall software.  Luckily, someone was able to hook up my computer this time and load Zoomtext on there again. 

Score TWO MORE for Jim!

The rest of us can only wonder what motivates you to wreak havoc on our lives like you do.  Are you angry at the world because in high school the cool kids shunned you due to your colossal geekiness?  Is your ego so inflated and your imagination so limited that this is the only thing you can think of to leave your mark on the world?  Do you work for an anti-virus software company desperately trying to create demand for its products?  Does creating computer viruses somehow make your penis larger?

I’d like to think this will make you feel guilty, but it won’t.  I’d love for the rest of us to sniff you out like bloodhounds, surround your sparsely-furnished little apartment, drag you out in the street in the underwear and dirty T-shirt you wear all day while sitting at your computer, and take turns pummeling you with our permanently infected laptops until you beg for mercy, cry like a little girl, and slink away to the safety of the nearest ditch or trash dumpster, but we won’t.

So, Sleazy Misguided Self-delusional Creep, I would like to close by letting your know that you were successful at causing me stress, raising  my blood pressure, delaying my progress, and costing me a small wad of cash.  But I don’t need to use my skills and education to unleash misery on the computer-using public in order to feel better about myself.  And that, in spite of my limited eyesight and tech know-how, means I win.  Until you serve up some kind of Y2K type of worldwide computer mayhem that leads rational people to hoard canned food, beef jerky, and ammo, you not only earn my disgust, by my pity as well—because you are as insignificant as a nanoparticle in the computer chip of an ameba’s tiny flash drive.

 

Finding Out Someone Would Save My Life

Because yesterday was the ninth anniversary of my second kidney transplant, I thought I would share an excerpt from my book, which is in the final editing process.  Maybe it's fitting that it will probably be published in September.  It's a month of intense highs and lows for me.

Blindsided

Why is the word always associated with an unwelcome surprise?  The term comes from something approaching from outside your field of vision, your “blind” side, catching you off guard.

     It’s a situation I am only too familiar with.  With non-existent peripheral vision, people and objects always seem to come out of nowhere.  I get blindsided almost every day.  It can cause everything from mild surprise to injury. 

     But, it’s possible to be blindsided by something good.  Out of nowhere, exactly what you need.  Sometimes, it’s far beyond what you hoped for.  You find yourself saying, “I never would have expected that in a million years.”

     Chance?  Maybe.  Luck?  Probably.  God?  Yes.

     There’s no other explanation for an unexpected gift so completely unselfish that it leaves you shaking your head in awe.  A gift of such profound generosity that Hallmark doesn’t make a greeting card to express the gratitude you feel.  That’s divine intervention.  That is all the proof anyone needs for the existence of a mysterious, but loving God.

     I guess you could say God made me legally blind—and has blindsided me over and over since then.    

 

Connie

     My parents and I sat in the waiting area of transplant office at OU Med Center.  I was there for a checkup with Dr. Squires.  We had been there long enough for them to finish reading the Ft. Smith and Greenwood newspapers they had brought to keep them entertained during the wait.  Mom was reminding me of things to ask Dr. Squires.

     She added, “And be sure to tell him that Connie wants to donate a kidney,so find out how that works.”  

     What?? 

     “What are you talking about?” I said.  “Who is Connie?”

     Did I hear her right?  Someone wants to give me a kidney? 

     “Didn’t I tell you Connie Grote wants to give you a kidney?” she asked.

     “No!”

     “Oh, I thought I had told you about that,” she said, a little embarrassed at the oversight.

     “Someone wants to give me a kidney?”  I asked incredulously. 

     “Yes, Connie Grote, who cuts my hair, offered to give you one.”

     At that moment, the nurse called my name and I went to have my vital signs checked, which was the first part of a typical appointment at the transplant office.  My throat had suddenly gone dry and I could barely speak to the nurse.  This unexpected announcement had triggered a dozen emotions all at once. 

     Someone wants to give me a kidney!  I can’t believe this.  I don’t even know her.  Mom said her name is Connie something.

     I couldn’t even remember her last name.  I wanted to dart back to the waiting area and ask my mother for more details.  She had just casually dropped this information in my lap and now I had to have my checkup.  While waiting in the examining room, I pressed my thumb and forefinger in the corners of my eyes to stop the tear ducts.  Shock, gratitude, curiosity, desperation, hope, skepticism, worry, relief, exhilaration—those and a dozen other emotions elbowed each other out of the way in a rush to the front of my brain, which had suddenly grown crowded with thoughts and unfamiliar emotions I didn’t have a name for. 

     “I just found out someone wants to give me a kidney,” I told Barbara, the transplant coordinator as she began to go over my medications on my chart.

     “That’s wonderful,” she said.  I can’t remember what else she said, or what all Dr. Squires told me when I shared the news with him.  He explained all the steps necessary for her to be tested to make sure she was a suitable donor for me. 

     After my checkup, my parents and I went to eat lunch in Bricktown, an area of Oklahoma City with several restaurants.  It was our custom, but this time was different.  Over lunch, I told my parents what Dr. Squires had said about the subject of a live donor and got as many details as I could from my mother. 

     Mom said she had talked to Connie about my situation the last few times she had gone for a haircut. 

     “One day, she tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘I’ll give your son a kidney.’  Well, I was flabbergasted.” Mom said.  So, the news had come right out of the blue to her just as it had for me. 

     She went on, “I asked her ‘Connie, what if someone in your own family needs a kidney someday?’  She said ‘God will take care of them.’  So I said ‘Well, OK then.’  Can you believe that?” 

There's more to that chapter, but you have the main part.  It's actually the first part I wrote when I started the book.  It just seemed like the right place to start.  What do you think?

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Author site http://www.jimfairbanks.net/

Festivals, Fayetteville, and Roots

The Fayetteville Roots Festival is August 23-26.

It brings in live music, food, vendors, and is a celebration of Ozark Mountain culture.  And no, Ozark Mountain culture isn’t an oxymoron.  One of the great things about Fayetteville is that it embraces the future without abandoning its past.

For the majority of people now living in Northwest Arkansas, the roots don’t run deep yet.  For the most part, that’s a good thing.  It means this area has a healthy economy and people want to retire here or move here because it’s a great place to live.  All you have to do is travel east of Little Rock to see what the other side of that coin looks like.

For some of us, “Fayettevile roots” has a literal meaning.  I was born in the Missouri Ozarks and my parents came back here when I was a few months old.  Some of my early childhood was spent in the River Valley before my family returned here.  I grew up, for the most part, less than a mile from the U of A campus.  It was the 70s and early 80s, when Fayetteville was a notorious party town.  It did not escape my attention, but that's for another post.

My mother was born here.  My parents were married in a church just down the street from where she attended grade school.  They met in the 50s when they both worked on the square.  She worked at a dime store—one of the first handful owned by Sam Walton.  Right after they got married, they lived in some apartments on Meadow Street that, just like their marriage, have withstood the test of time.

My grandfather was a football star at Fayetteville High School in the 1930s.  The school won the state championship all three years he played for FHS.  His name is engraved on the sidewalk at Harmon Field with other winning team members throughout the years.  The “football jock” gene somehow didn’t get passed down to me.

But, my grandmother’s knack for telling a story did.

When I was a kid, she told me countless stories of what the area was like in the early 20^th century.  My favorite is about the Saturday her family rode in from Farmington after a rain.  Most people came to town to do their trading on Saturday.  It was the 1920s, before the square was paved.  Their wagon got stuck in the mud.  It’s pretty hard to imagine now.  It was hard to imagine back in the 70s when she told me that story.

These stories about my family and this area made one thing cliear: the two are intertwined, as impossible to separate from each other as vines of stubborn kudzu.

For me, going to the farmer’s market on the square to buy fresh, locally-grown produce feels like it’s in my DNA.  I’m a consumer.  Two generatons of my family were the producers and sold it to general stores downtown.  I can find a high point in town, look across the hills, and know they haven’t changed at all since since members of my family first saw them in the mid-1800s—no matter how much the buildings on them have.

The university has definitely helped make this town what it is today.  Enrollment jumped in the 60s and 70s when the Baby Boomers reached college age.  They helped make Dickson Street “funky” and cool.  After that, the city’s reputation was sealed.  Artsy, eclectic, creative, progressive, laid-back, fun, quirky Fayetteville was the perfect place for an artistically-inclined kid like me to grow up.  It had plenty of opportunities and was an accepting place for me to return to after losing part of my vision.  It’s always been fertile ground for the mind of the writer I was destined to become.

I love hearing newcomers say things like, “I didn’t know this was such a great place!” 

I just smile and say, “Yes, it is.”

But, it has been a great place for a long time.  Even my great-grandparents knew that.

 

The Newcomers Field Guide to Hill Folk, a humorous look at Northwest Arkansas, is now available in print AND ebook.  You don't have to be a newcomer to like it.  You might even recognize people you know.

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Lost In the Gym

A couple of weeks ago I went to the gym and almost everything had been rearranged since my last visit.  I know what you’re thinking.  “That’s what he gets for only going once every six months.”  But it had only been two days.

Looking down, I noticed the carpet was cleaner.  If I was able to tell the difference it must have been pretty dirty before.  They must have taken the opportunity to put those heavy machines—with their seats, bars, and stacks of weights—in a formation that made more sense.  For me, it was like a bad Helen Keller joke.  I spent a few minutes after using each one I needed to slowly spin around, looking for the one I needed next.

It made me feel a little self-conscious until I saw that I wasn’t the only one.  A few people even said stuff like, “I can’t find anything either.”  If misery loves company, so do blind folks.  I decided I would give myself some extra time each time I went until I memorized where everything was.

I really like the health club that I use.  It’s been at the current location two years.  The building was once a six-screen cinema.  I’ve lived in a former printing building, a former Catholic church, and a former carriage house.  I like old buildings that are remade into something different than their original function.  This one was originally a two-screen cinema when it was built in the 1970s.  The first movie I ever saw there was Star Wars.  Looking at in now, you would never guess what it had been before.

A week after the rearrangement, I was using a machine to work out my legs.  I hate working out my legs and I take unusually long breaks between sets.  Looking around, I finally realized the system they’d used when they moved everything.  There was a long, wide aisle running the length of the room.

Sometimes when we bother to look up at the bigger picture, we notice things are more orderly than we thought.

You Don't Have to Be A Standout to Be Somebody

Thanks to Facebook I was invited to the 30 year reunion for the class I went to school with, but didn’t graduate with.  Midway through 11^th grade my family moved.  That didn’t matter to those who planned the reunion.  It was about the shared experience of growing up here.

There were over 400 who graduated from FHS in 1982.  I wasn’t involved in any activities, wasn’t athletic, or a standout by any definition of the word.  I doubted many people would even remember me.  In addition to that, the big hairstyle of that era has been replaced by a crewcut and mostly relocated to my face in the form of a beard.

That tiny insecure voice inside told me to be ready for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, “You didn’t actually graduate with us, so you have to leave.”

It also told me to be ready in case someone copped an attitude with me, like a high school student would.  Health issues (some potentially fatal), life in some big cities, vision loss, life in a couple of large cities with vision loss have all created a much less easily intimidated version of me than the one people might remember in high school.  I’ve had to learn to stand up for myself over the years.

Then a different tiny voice told me that time and maturity hasn’t ignored all those people.  It told me to just expect a good time.  Never mind the high odds of me being the only legally blind one there.  Or the only one with a couple of transplanted organs.  I might not be the most enviable one there, but I was pretty sure I had the most atypical life.

Three weeks before the reunion, I had my gall bladder removed along with a hernia repair.  I was down 15 pounds, which would have been a blessing for some, but not in my case.  In just a few weeks I went from being in the best shape of my life to the same scrawny body I had in high school.  It was a chore to find clothes that didn’t hang off me.  Everybody wants to look at these things, whether it’s been 10 years or 70. 

Yes, I was a little self-conscious beforehand about being the only visually-impaired one there.  But, that's almost always the case and I'm finally coming to terms with it.  Besides, most of the others have to use reading glasses these days.  I guess that makes me a trendsetter.

I had a good time.  People walked up and spoke to me, so it didn’t matter that I couldn’t see across the room.  I said, “You actually remember me?” about a dozen times.  The usual response was, “Of course I do.”

When I said that to Ziva, followed by, “I was such a nobody,” she looked me in the eye and said, “Everybody is somebody.”  This from one of the cool, tall, pretty chicks back in high school who I didn’t really know back then.  I had approached her wanting to connect with a fellow writer.

The next thing I knew, I was having a great time with her, Jinger, and Lisa (more cool, pretty girls who were at the reunion) on Dickson Street.  I expected to see old friends that night, but never expected to make new ones of people I hadn’t known back then.

Since then, I’ve done a little revising on the history book in my head.  I already knew that sometime since 1982, I had become somebody.  It turns out you don’t have to be a standout to be somebody and more people notice you than you think.

Now I stand out without really trying and not for the reasons I would have chosen.  Now I’m somebody because of that.  But it turns out I was somebody all along.   

My L.A. Odyssey Part 7: Diagnosis and Time Warp

Friday, my parents and I get up before dawn and drive to Oklahoma City.  For the first time ever, I hope I’m having a rejection episode.  If that’s the case, I’ll be put in the hospital and given strong anti-rejection drugs that virtually take my immunity to zero.  But, my pancreas may start working again.  If it’s not rejection, it means the pancreas is just worn out.

We're at OU Med Center, where it all began in 1998 with a new kidney and pancreas.  I want to go back in time to when I was full of optimism, full of excitement and wonder about what my body was about to experience.

My battered veins don’t want to cooperate and it takes several tries before they can draw blood.  The result: it’s not rejection.  Aside from high blood sugar, all the other numbers are normal.  I'm diabetic again. 

Then I get more bad news.  I have t be cancer-free 2-5 years before I can list for another one.  That means I’m looking at another year or more before I can be put on the waiting list.  I will have to wait before I can wait.

Now I have my answer.  It’s a long, quiet drive back to my parents’ house.  Everyone is very tired.

That evening I was feeling restless and sat on the covered patio behind my parents’ house.  In the distance I heard cheering every few seconds and remembered Greenwood High School was holding graduation at the football field not far away.  I walked to the front and stood on the driveway, caught up in the swirling memories of the past couple of weeks and a graduation ceremony on that same football gield thirty years ago.  How can it be thirty years already?  But the past week made me feel every minute my age and then some.  The images of my high school graduation flicker by me, but none take form.

I’m a middle-aged man standing on a driveway listening to a man’s voice on a loudspeaker.  I can’t make out what he says but I can tell he’s reading names.  Applause and cheers follow each one.  A few lots behind me, little kids play in a yard.  They’re really little—much too young to imagine high school, much less have trouble remembering it. 

The hot breeze whips around my face and I am in a time warp.  In only a few days I’ve been drawn backwards from racing toward my future at an amazing conference in fast-paced L.A. to high school graduation in 1982.  I’ve just been diagnosed with diabetes again, like when I was twelve.  Except I’m not back there.  These are just pale watercolor shades of the past being brushed onto the modern version of me.

The task ahead of me is to blend the new ambitions, plans for the future, and a newfound self-confidence and identity with a disease I had through my teens, twenties, and early thirties—a disease that damaged me, a disease that I hated and felt I had conquered 14 years ago when I got the new pancreas.  It will be a struggle to keep from being sucked into the diabetc time machine pulling me back there.