I'm Back...again

Insurance companies suck

Baby is now about two months old and doing well. But these first two months have been an adventure.

Baby was breastfed for the first few weeks, but she lost nearly a pound and she had blood in her stool so her pediatrician recommended stopping the breastfeeding and put her on a hypoallergenic formula at about $25 per 16 oz. can. She gained some weight but she was still in terrible pain with each feeding so after a few weeks her pediatric gastroenterologist changed her formula to Neocate which costs $135 for a case of four 14 oz. cans. Right now we are using a can of Neocate every two and a half days.

We tried to get our insurance company to help with the cost of the formula. I called the insurance company and they told me that infant formula is not covered. I called Health Advocate the next day and they talked to the insurance company and again they told me that infant formula is not covered unless the baby has one of four conditions that they are required by state law to pay for formula--she does not have one of the four--and they told me to have her primary care physician (PCP) put through a pre-authorization request for the formula. The PCP's nurse called me back the next day and told me that they got a fax from the insurance company saying that infant formula is not covered. I called my wife's employer's benefits office who called the insurance company and got the same response.

Next, I called my state representative. His office took the information and contacted the state insurance department and they got back to me and said that there is nothing they could do to help. The representative's office suggested calling the manufacturer to see if they have an assistance program and if all else fails to call the county assistance office to apply for Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). We called the manufacturer and they had no program. So I called the county assistance office and they said that I should apply for Medical Assistance for Baby and then if she gets that she will automatically qualify for WIC based on medical need even though we don't qualify financially. So I filled out the application online and dropped off a stack of documents. They called me back a few days later and said that Baby qualified for Medicaid and that we should call the WIC office to set up an appointment. A few days later Baby got her gold card in the mail and we have an appointment with WIC in a few weeks.

I think it is a crime that insurance companies get away with this crap. We pay about $1,000 a month for health insurance and they won't cover something that my baby needs to to survive. I was hoping that they would at least cover some of the cost since the Neocate costs two or three times the cost of regular formula. Baby has multiple food allergies (including cow's milk and soy) and that was causing colitis and keeping her from gaining weight. She also has Gastro Esophageal Reflux and she was in terrible pain during and after eating. Shortly after she started on Neocate she gained weight and the colitis went away.

Insurance companies in the United States cover only healthy people. Old people, poor people, and people with health problems have to get health insurance from the government. If it were up to me I would like to see everyone in the US covered by a national health plan and do away with private, for-profit health plans. Right now these for-profit plans collect thousands of dollars in premiums for people who are basically healthy and then when they incur healthcare expenses the insurance company does everything in its power to deny coverage.

So now I have to swallow my pride and take my daughter in to the WIC office so she can get her monthly supply of formula. But she is now thriving and we won't have to go into debt to feed her.

Birth Story II

Baby number two came on Wednesday. This time was so much easier than the last one. It is still scary and the most exciting thing I have ever witnessed.

This time we went in around 9:00 am with regular contractions. The doctor examined Mom and she was dilated to 3 cm. So doctor told her to go for a walk and to come back in about two hours and they would check her again.

At about 1pm we went back. Her contractions were getting stronger and now she was dilated to 4cm. The doctor said with her Russian accent, "I think we'll have a birthday party before midnight."

They took us to a room and we got settled in. The nurses were in and out for the next few hours monitoring the fetal heart rate and contractions. And everything was going smoothly.

A little after 6pm the nurse came in and said that she was going to have the doctor examine Mom again and see how she was progressing. By this time the shift was changing and a new doctor came in. He didn't introduce himself he just said that he was going to check her and then he said that she was still about the same and sent the nurse for something. She handed it to him and as he is inserting this thing he said that he was going to break her water and get things moving. Then he told the nurse to get some Pitosin and he left.

Now Mom was in tears. This whole pregnancy had been very good until this point. She had seen the same two midwives for all her regular exams. Now, on the day that she goes into labor there is no midwife on call. So not only is she stuck with a doctor that she has never seen before, but he is also a jerk.

I got the nurse and told her that Mom was very upset about that doctor and asked if there was any way to get a midwife, since that was the plan from the beginning. She said that she understood and she would see what she could do to help.

A few minutes later she came in and said that she could not get one of the midwives to come in and Mom was sobbing by this point. I asked if there was any way that the Russian doctor could do it because she was very nice and took the time to explain things and listen. The nurse went to check. Within seconds the Russian doctor and another female doctor, Dr. B, came in. The Russian explained that her shift was ending in a few minutes but Dr. B would be there and she could do the delivery so that we did not have to see Dr. Jerk again.

Dr. B introduced herself and said that she had trained with the midwives and would do everything possible to have the same type of delivery as we would have with a midwife. Then the Russian said that she would be only a few minutes away and would come in assist as long as the attending allowed her to come in. But, after checking with him she came back and said the she was not allowed and she assured us that Dr. B was very good and that she would do a great job.

At about 8:30 pm, Dr B. came in and examined Mom. She was completely dilated and +1. "It's time to have a baby," she told us. She predicted that that baby would come in 10 to 15 minutes.

Mom started pushing and by the second push I could see the baby's hair. Thirty minutes into pushing Dr. B said that the baby will come with one or two more pushes. They brought in the pediatrics team and the attending physician and she pushed one more time and out came baby's head. Dr. B suctioned the mouth and Baby screamed. One more push and we had a baby girl--a beautiful pink, screaming baby girl. Dr. B cut the cord and handed her to the pediatrics team. They checked her out and she was fine.

This was not as scary as Baby One's birth. He was blue when he came out and it took a while for him to cry, but he is now a very healthy two year old.

Baby Two and Mom get to come home tomorrow.

Smokers stink

Last week I was driving with my son to the hospital to visit my mother. On the way there I was behind a car driven by a woman who was smoking. We would stop at a traffic light and then start up again and I would have to drive through the cigarette smoke. At the third stop I noticed something move in the back of her car. I got a closer look and saw that there was a baby in a car seat in the back of her car.

This got me extremely angry. I was thinking that it should be illegal to smoke in a car with a child. It's not--but it should be. There was a police car stopped at the light on the other side of the intersection and I wanted to stop and ask if there is anything that he can do about this woman forcing cigarette smoke into her child's lungs, but I knew there wasn't anything he could do.

Then we arrived at the hospital. With my 2 1/2 year old son holding my hand, I approached the entrance which was surrounded by people smoking. By the time we reached the door we smelled like an ashtray. And right there on the door was a big sign which read, "smoking prohibited within 50 feet of this entrance." Yet, there they were just 10 to 15 feet from the door.

I don't care if these people smoke and kill themselves. Smoke in your car or home (with the windows closed and no children present). I do care that I have to breathe their disgusting smoke and that they force there children to breathe cigarette smoke. We should not even need a law, people should just know better.

Update

OK, so I wasn't really in jail. I just needed some reality.

So here's what's been going on:

I have a happy, healthy 2 1/2 year old who keeps me busy and entertained. We are doing Kindermusik right now. I'm not a big fan. I've done several of these music classes for babies and toddlers and this is my least favorite one. It could be because it is sponsored by a church and they throw in a few Jesus songs. It could also be that there are about twice as many kids in the class than there should be.

Oh, and we are expecting baby number two in a few weeks!

What else? Well, I am still running my own business. It is going pretty well. The best thing is that I can pretty much work as much or as little as I want.

We joined an organic community supported agriculture (CSA) farm. It is great! I highly recommend it if you can find one in your area. We get a big box of fresh organic vegetables every week. It is fun to see what's in the box and then trying to put together a menu for the week based on the box.

That's all I have time for right now. More later.

Back from the dead

I just got out of prison and I am back online. I look forward to seeing my online friends again.

Last entry

This is it--the last entry on this blog.

I no longer have the time necessary to devote to this blog or even to this online persona. Rob will now fade away. I will likely be back in some form in the future but ConNiPtioNs is going away.

In August 2002 I started blogging. I never intended to make it a long term project but I soon found that there was something cathartic about posting--even when there was almost nobody reading what I wrote. I did not know what to expect or what direction this blog would take. I soon found that this was a pretty safe place to vent my frustrations with the US government and the idiots who voted them into office.

Here it is over three years later and until a couple of months ago I was posting pretty regularly. Now I think that the time is right to close this door and move on.

Thanks to everyone who has commented here over the years. I've enjoyed "knowing" most of you--even those of you who disagreed with me. I have learned something from each of you. Au revoir.

--Rob

“The world is full of wonders, special radiance, and marvelous secrets, but all it takes is a small hand held over the eye to hide it all.”
--Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, 1955

Baby update

Well, Baby turned one year old a few weeks ago. Things have been crazy and I haven't had the time or the energy to post much. Anyhow, we had a little party for him and he had his first taste of cake and ice cream.

We are just overwhelmed with toys now. Between the gifts for his birthday and xmas...ugh. We were tempted to stop at Goodwill and unload half of his xmas presents on the way home from visiting grandparents and aunts and uncles on xmas.

Baby woke up with two new teeth on Christmas morning, so he now has eight teeth. I also noticed a big purple-blue spot on his lower gums right where his 12-month molar will come in. The poor kid had to be in pain but he was as pleasant as he always is. The next day he had a cough and some congestion. After he finished his breakfast he had a coughing fit and gagged himself until he vomited. Yuck.

He has been signing lots of new words and repeating words when I read to him. I took him to the shoe store a few weeks ago and as he was trying on shoes he was signing "more". I thought that he was hungry because sometimes he uses "more" when he wants to eat. Then we got home and I told him I was taking his shoes off and he did it again. I finally realized that he was trying to sign "shoes" which is very similar to "more". I was kind of surprised that he remembered the sign for shoes because it is not one that we used a lot.

Today he was sitting on the floor looking through his "Ten Little Rabbits" book and he turned the page and there was a picture something like this and he looked up at me and put his hand in front of his mouth and said "hushhhh". That is what we do when we read "Goodnight Moon" and we get to the old lady whispering hush. And she looks like the rabbits in the book he was looking at. Sometimes I am amazed watching his little brain work.

We go for his twelve month check up and shots in a few days.

Cops suck

We had to drop off the car at the garage this morning and it was fairly nice for a December day so instead of packing up Baby at 7:30am and taking two cars Baby's Mom said that she would take it and walk the mile and a half back home. She started back from the garage, which is just outside of town, and she heard dogs barking. She saw that there were three large dogs in a fenced yard running toward her. She stopped in fear and just then a truck pulled into the driveway of that house which was across the road from her. She continued on and a few minutes later a police car pulled up to her and the cop asked what she was doing, where she was going, etc. She asked what this was about and he said that they got a report of a suspicious person standing on the road watching that house. She then came home and told me about it and she was upset.

It turns out that the house with the dogs belongs to another cop. That explains why there was a car there within minutes. She also was wearing a big winter coat and an Elmer Fudd hat with ear flaps that connect under the chin. It is possible that she could have been mistaken for a teen aged boy instead of a woman with a PhD.

This is just another example of abuse of power--a very minor abuse unless you are the one being harassed. How long do you think it would take the police to send someone out if I reported a suspicious person in my neighborhood? And do they regularly stop people for looking suspicious?

Impeach Bush

Even Barron's wants him impeached:

Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.

It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law.

War on Xmas

I have been unable to blog for a few weeks. I don't want to miss out on the fake War on Christmas which is being promoted by Fox News and the American Family Association. Do these people have nothing better to do than start some kind of pseudo-controversy? If they want to boycott stores which use the phrase "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" that's fine, but let's not get carried away and pretend that there is a "War on Christmas" in the United States or that Christians are being persecuted.

I am all for a right-wing christian whacko boycott. But let's not be hypocrites. Why don't you persecuted christians boycott stores that do not "Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.." Surely, those stores that choose to break one of God's commandments in order to make more money should not be patronized by Christians.

This country is really losing it. I don't really have anything to add to the discussion but I wanted to go on the record here and say how stupid this whole thing is.

Gia has an excellent response to the War on Christmas nonsense. Welcome back Gia! We have missed you.

Site of the Day

Don't Bomb Us - A blog by Al Jazeera Staffers

5 things you should know about Al Jazeera

1. Al Jazeera was the first Arab station to ever broadcast interviews with Israeli officials.
2. Al Jazeera has never broadcast a beheading.
3. George W. Bush has recieved approximately 500 hours of airtime, while Bin Laden has received about 5 hours of airtime.
4. Over 50 million people across the world watch Al Jazeera.
5. The Al Jazeera websites are http://www.aljazeera.net (Arabic) and http://english.aljazeera.net (English). AlJazeera.com, AlJazeerah.info and all other variations have nothing to do with us.

This Friday is Buy Nothing Day

Yes, it's that time of year again! Regular ConNiPtioNs readers will remember Buy Nothing Day from the past three years that I've posted about it. I don't have time to say much about it this year, but click on the banner below for details.

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Also, checkout the Wal-Mart Takedown Center

The President cares about America's poor

The President of Venezuela that is. Hugo Chavez is sending cheap heating oil to two communities in the US.

From HoustonChronicle.com - AROUND THE REGION

Citgo to help poor on heating oil costs

Citgo Petroleum said Thursday it plans to distribute discounted heating oil to the U.S. poor to help them cope with expected record fuel costs this winter.

The Houston-based company, a subsidiary of Venezuelan state oil giant PDVSA, said it will send up to 12 million gallons of cheaper heating oil to communities in Boston and the Bronx borough of New York City next week.

It is the second offer of energy assistance from Venezuela — whose leftist President Hugo Chavez is a harsh critic of President Bush — since hurricanes disrupted oil operations in the Gulf of Mexico this summer.

Baby's first Halloween

My sister invited us to bring the baby to the annual Halloween party at her church. So we quickly put together a costume for him. We dressed him in a red sleeper and put a red turtleneck over it. We glued a piece of white fabric over his tummy. Now he just needed something for his head. I ran into the Family Dollar store and found a red knit hat for $1 and a $1 red plastic crazy straw cup that was shaped sort of like a heart with a hole in the middle. I put the lid of the cup inside the hat and screwed the cup on the outside. Put the hat on his head and he was Po. And he looked pretty good for a $2 costume. In fact he won the prize for the cutest. The prize: coupons for Burger King french fries and a small Coke. I guess those coupons will go in the scrapbook. I know that people feed that crap to kids but I can't imagine encouraging it.

My mother and father were there too. Just as we were getting ready to leave my mother said she would hold the baby while I put on my coat. She had him for maybe ten seconds and I turned around to get him and she is wiping white icing from his mouth. He is ten months old and she is feeding him icing, and after she asked me earlier if he could have some and said no. So I took him back from her and said, " Nanny has lost her baby privileges." Grandparents!

Anyhow, we had fun. We felt like we were crashing the party since we do not go there, but it is the family church. I went there as a kid and my parents and sister and various cousins attend, so it is sort of like a family gathering.

We will have another family gathering today at the hospital. My father is getting his knee replaced today. He is probably in surgery right now. He is not in the best health and I'm a bit worried about him having any surgery but he could hardly walk on his knee. I hope this helps him.

Catching up on current events

There has been so much going on and I haven't had time to comment on any of it.

Dubya's approval ratings are at an all-time low.

The FTAA went down in flames. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel, and Bolivian populist Evo Morales stole the show by leading a peaceful People's Summit of over 450,000 people in Arghentina. Chavez declared, "The FTAA does not exist; let's create a fair trade." But he warned that FTAA supporters will try again to revive it.

Bush continues to "restore honor and integrity" to the Oval Office. Secret prisons.

Bush is now even refusing to listen to his own God (speaking through Bush's own United Methodist Church) and withdraw from Iraq. God told him to invade, now God is telling him to stop the unjust war.

And, of course, the quote of the week that exemplifies the Bush administration:

"Please roll up the sleeves on your shirt -- all shirts. Even the President rolled his sleeves to just below the elbow. In this crisis and on TV you just need to look more hard-working ... ROLL UP THE SLEEVES."

-- Sharon Worthy, in email to FEMA Director Michael Brown during the Katrina disaster

There was a lot more that I missed in the past few weeks, but that's all I have time for right now.

Quotes for Veterans Day

“I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind. If nations were to go to war for every degree of injury, there would never be peace on earth.”
-- Thomas Jefferson

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in a final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed—those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending its money alone—it is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a speech on April 16, 1953

"War is as much a punishment to the punisher as it is to the sufferer."
-- Thomas Jefferson

"What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?"
-- Mahatma Gandhi, "Non-Violence in Peace and War"

"War is delightful to those who have not experienced it."
-- Erasmus

"When I take action, I'm not going to fire a 2 million dollar missile at a 10 dollar empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive."
-- George W. Bush, Newsweek, September 24, 2001

"How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy."
-- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Baby update

It doesn't seem possible but Baby will be a year old in a few weeks. This year has gone by so fast.

He has one more physical therapy appointment for his CMT. There has been a great improvement. When we started PT he had about 50% range of motion on one side of his neck and now it is almost 100%. We do stretching exercises three times a day with him. I wish that I would have pushed the doctor to send us to PT earlier. He waited three months after I first asked about it, so now Baby's head is flat in one spot.

We are still signing. He uses several signs--more, milk, eat, book, shoes, hat, all gone. And he understands more but does not make them. He has even started to put some signs together like more milk or more eat. He says a few words--dada, mama, bye-bye, bubble, pap pap.

He is also walking pretty well for an eleven month old. He hasn't quite mastered the stopping part. He usually just keeps going until I stop him or he falls over. I have lost about five pounds in the last month or so. I think it is from chasing him and carrying him up and down the stairs about five or six times a day.

He is still a really good sleeper. He almost always takes two naps during the day and the sleeps from about 8:30 until 7am. We are afraid that if we have another baby we won't be able to handle it because he has been so good and relatively easy to take care of.

Roman Catholics have the "obligation to listen to that which secular modern science has to offer"

So says The Vatican.

What's this? An order from upon high for Roman Catholics to believe Science? Did you hear that Mrs Proctor?

Earlier this year she stated, "Just like with evolution, people of faith TEND to be inclined to disbelieve it and dismiss the 'science' that is used as evidence (although it's a theory)." And then in February she said, "I believe in the creationism movement and frankly think all Christians should unless science can PROVE otherwise, which (it) has not been able to do." Like any good hypocrite she will no doubt use science if it supports her beliefs and dismiss whatever she disagrees with.

Newsday.com: Vatican: Faithful Should Listen to Science

Vatican: Faithful Should Listen to Science

By NICOLE WINFIELD
Associated Press Writer

November 4, 2005, 10:12 AM EST

VATICAN CITY -- A Vatican cardinal said Thursday the faithful should listen to what secular modern science has to offer, warning that religion risks turning into "fundamentalism" if it ignores scientific reason.

Cardinal Paul Poupard, who heads the Pontifical Council for Culture, made the comments at a news conference on a Vatican project to help end the "mutual prejudice" between religion and science that has long bedeviled the Roman Catholic Church and is part of the evolution debate in the United States.

The Vatican project was inspired by Pope John Paul II's 1992 declaration that the church's 17th-century denunciation of Galileo was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension." Galileo was condemned for supporting Nicolaus Copernicus' discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun; church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe.

"The permanent lesson that the Galileo case represents pushes us to keep alive the dialogue between the various disciplines, and in particular between theology and the natural sciences, if we want to prevent similar episodes from repeating themselves in the future," Poupard said.

By the way, we are still waiting for the results of Dumbgirl's investigation of Global Warming. I can't wait to find out what she has uncovered.

Memories

I heard a piece on NPR's All Things Considered tonight called Grandmother: A Story of Aging, Decline and Love by Jake Warga. It brought back memories for me of a similar situation.

The woman who lived in the house next to ours for my entire childhood was like a grandmother to me. She was a registered nurse who retired when I was about five years old. She was the youngest daughter of Irish immigrants and lived almost her entire life in that house. I would visit her almost every day. Sometimes we would have lunch together, or I would help her make cookies, or just do household errands for her. My job was to take out the trash each day. In return I was treated to her delicious homemade pies, cakes, and cookies. Not a bad deal.

As the years went by, I was old enough to drive and her vision was failing due to cataracts, I became her chauffeur. We would run to the farmers' market or we would load gallon jugs into the trunk of her 1971 Chevy Malibu and go to a spring than ran out the side of a mountain through a metal pipe. We filled the jugs with water and put them back in the trunk. When we returned home I would carry them to the house and place them under the cellar steps.

Each visit I was also treated to stories. Some of the stories I had heard dozens of times, but once in a while she would tell me about something I had never heard before. About being in New York for nursing school during The Depression. About registering to vote as a Republican by mistake and never telling her father and never switching parties because she didn't want to be a "turncoat" like Ronald Reagan.

By the time I started college she was in her late 70s and starting to have mini-strokes. My visits became less frequent because I was two hours away, but my parents still lived next door and they checked in on her often. Then she broke her hip. That was the beginning of the end. Up until that point she was very active. She attended mass every day, she cooked dinner for her friend nearly every day, and she often went out to eat. After the broken hip she needed a home health aid and soon she needed full-time nursing care and ended up entering a nursing home.

Each time a visited she was a little more out of it. At first she knew who I was and would talk about sports and current events. But gradually she started to forget my name. She still knew who I was but could not remember my name. Then maybe a few months later she would call me by her brother's name. Her brother died in WWII. Then she would ask me to do something because she wanted the place to look nice when Mary (her sister who died 30 years before) came to visit later that day.

Eventually when I went to visit we would just sit there silently. She was almost completely deaf for most of her adult life but she could read lips. In her mid-80s her cataracts were back and she could not see to read lips, so she was trapped in a silent fuzzy world full of strangers.

As Mr Warga points out in his NPR piece, his grandmother has been slowly fading away and is now all but gone. That is how I felt with each visit. Her body was still there, the person that I had known for the past 25 years was already gone.

A few months after my last visit she passed away in the nursing home. I returned for the funeral. My brother and I were pallbearers. It was sad to see that very few people attended the funeral. She had out-lived most of her friends, and all of her family. She never married and had no children. There were just a few neighbors and the old ladies who attend all of the funeral masses.

After the mass we travelled to the cemetary. To the gravesite that she showed me dozens of times as we tended the graves of her parents, grandparents, and siblings. "There's Mom and Pop, I'll be down here on the end next to Mary," she'd say.