Health

Health care reform changes go online today

Democrats.org provides an overview of the changes that go into affect today – helping me and thousands of other Americans with direct, real changes. Bold text indicates changes that affect me personally, italics highlights changes that affect people I know.

This week marks six-months since President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law–enacting one of the most sweeping reforms in a generation. Starting today, several important aspects of this historic law take effect. Among those provisions is the Patient’s Bill of Rights, which ends the worst abuses of the health insurance industry and empowers consumers with greater control over their health care. Beginning today, the new law:

  • Prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage to children on the basis of a pre-existing condition, extending coverage to as many as 72,000 uninsured children;
  • Prohibits insurance companies from taking away health coverage from those who need it most, protecting more than 10,000 folks who would have lost coverage because of rescission;
  • Prohibits insurance companies from imposing lifetime limits and restricts annual limits on health coverage and hospital stays;
  • Allows individuals who purchase new health insurance to choose their own doctor within their network and visit the closest hospital that has the Mini C-Arm in an emergency;
  • Requires new health plans must have free preventive care such as free mammograms, colonoscopies, immunizations, and pre-natal care;
  • Allows young people under the age of 26 can now stay on their parents’ insurance longer, which could mean coverage for up to 2.4 million Americans who previously wouldn’t have health care;
  • Empowers Americans to challenge insurance companies’ denial of coverage or treatment to an independent third party.

In addition, the Affordable Care Act has begun to close the Medicare prescription “donut hole,” increases payments for Medicaid providers to expand vital health care for the nearly 50 million Americans who live in rural areas, and will extend health coverage to an estimated 400,000 Americans with pre-existing conditions.

For people like me who have had expensive health procedures, that lifetime cap was a huge stressor – you find yourself questioning whether you should go to the doctor for any procedure, lest they find something wrong that would cost so much that you’d end up without any coverage as you get older, and you think things like – “I can just suffer through this, so I don’t rack up my insurance bill.” That’s a terrible way to have to look at life.

When you’re going to vote in November, keep in mind that almost every Republican has pledged to attempt to repeal these health care reforms – they won’t be able to do it, but they’re running on trying to.

Continue ReadingHealth care reform changes go online today

Weekend Update 2010-06-15

We managed to miss out on pride this weekend – I didn’t feel well due to something I ate on Friday (or Thursday) and I didn’t want to spend the entire festival in a port-a-let, or trying to find a port-a-let, or thinking about poo.

I felt enough better by noon to visit the INDIEhandicraft Exchange at the Harrison Center, although I still made about 5 trips to the restroom. But we got presents we needed to procure, and a few things for ourselves, and lots of ideas for creative projects.

We intended to go to Pride after, but we headed home and I continued to try to recover.

Sometime on Saturday our DVR died. I noticed it early Saturday morning, and did a reboot, but it didn’t fix itself. Boo. Now I need to grab some time to take it in and exchange it. Fortunately, we had watched most of what we had recorded and only had a few figure skating episodes and the last 3 Johnny Weir shows left.

On Sunday we had a bunch of work to get done around the house in the morning, and it was already blazing hot out. We managed to get lots of stuff checked off our to-do list, then went to see Sex and the City 2. It was silly and fun. Some of puns were too over the top, and some of their treatment of international relations was goofy – I doubt there are women wearing designer fashion under their traditional religious garb in Abu Dhabi – but it wasn’t as terrible as some reviewers frothed at the mouth about. And frankly, Samantha’s sexual proclivities (fictional though they are) are 100% fine, and the Islamic religious reaction to them (fictional though they are) was probably pretty accurately portrayed, and also dead wrong, from a moral standpoint. So there!

And we visited Alcatraz after and came home to do some serious reading.

Continue ReadingWeekend Update 2010-06-15

links for 2010-04-10

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Home Again

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So I got home from SxSW late on Tuesday. I didn’t recap the last couple of days of the event because I was catching up on sleep and fighting what I had thought was a wicked case of allergies. Turns out – walking pneumonia. (Also turns out that I managed to spell that word correctly the first time, which given the state of my woozy, drugged-up head right now, impresses the hell out of me, at least.) Yeah. I spent yesterday zoning out and finally got to the doctor late in the day when she delivered the bad news. So I’m forbidden to return to work for a couple days, and I’m on some wicked strong antibiotics and Mucinex.

I feel like poo.

And I feel like quite a douche, because I insisted to everyone that I wasn’t sick, that it was just allergies and I was really not contagious. I swear I thought that was the case; it really did feel just like when my allergies are out of control – runny nose, stuffed up head, sore throat. I didn’t have any other cold symptoms, and I didn’t feel bad enough to seek out a doctor (until Tuesday, when we were already flying home) and also felt like I had a responsibility to learn as much as I could while I was there. I’ve felt much worse at other times in the past, so this severe diagnosis makes me wonder. The thing that really sealed the deal was the two plane rides home though, where my ears popped and I couldn’t hear a thing, and my sinuses felt like they were going to jump out of my face from the air pressure changes. My left ear is still not right.

I so wanted this trip to Austin to go well.

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Costochondritis

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According to WebMD:

Costochondritis is an inflammation of the junctions where the upper ribs join with the cartilage that holds them to the breastbone or sternum. The condition causes localized chest pain that you can reproduce by pushing on the cartilage in the front of your ribcage. Costochondritis is a relatively harmless condition and usually goes away without treatment. The cause is usually unknown.

Relatively harmless? Perhaps, but it hurts like bloody hell. This is the current working theory for the health issues I’m having lately. It feels a bit different than the pleurisy that I previously had reoccurring over and over, although when I look back at a couple of those blog entries, I realize some of them were this instead.

And it’s a bit maddening because the symptoms closely resemble a heart attack or heart difficulties, so the first couple times I went to the emergency room (believe me, if I could have avoided out of going, I would have) both I and the doctors freaked the hell right out until it became apparent that my heart is just fine. More from WebMD:

Costochondritis is also considered as a possible diagnosis for adults who have chest pain. Chest pain in adults is considered a potentially serious sign of a heart problem by most doctors until proven otherwise. Chest pain in adults usually leads to a battery of tests to rule out heart disease. If those tests are normal and your physical exam is consistent with costochondritis, your doctor will diagnose costochondritis as the cause of your chest pain. It is important, however, for adults with chest pain to be examined and tested for heart disease before being diagnosed with costochondritis. Often it is difficult to distinguish between the two without further testing. The condition affects females more than males (70% versus 30%). Costochondritis may also occur as the result of an infection or as a complication of surgery on your sternum.

(Emphasis mine.)

This is the fourth time I’ve had this occur, and each time, the emergency room doctors spring to action, and then when they realize I’m not having a heart attack (my EKG is normal, and subsequent testing shows I’m fine) they act kind of disgusted with me for causing a fuss, and then send me home referring me to follow up care with my primary care physician. You may learn more about vein conditions and treatment here.

By the time I can get in to see my physician, the pain has subsided, and they don’t do a whole lot to try to figure out what the issue was. This time around, I decided to change the game and made an appointment with the doctor first. My regular PCP wasn’t in, but the on call doctor got to see first hand how much pain I was in; enough to want to send me to the emergency room. I explained to him I had had this happen 3 times before and they decided there was nothing wrong with my heart (the most recent time, my cardiologist actually eventually ordered a cardiac catheterization that definitively proved the issue wasn’t my heart.)

This time, the on-call doctor was able to see all that in my charts and put it together. He made me go to the emergency room to rule out a blood clot in my lungs, and once they did that, I went right home, but the emergency room suggested this “Costochondritis” or “chest wall syndrome” as the cause. I need to follow up again with – my PCP.

The gap in my health care is between my Primary Care Physician and the hospital – they like to play a game of hot potato with me. The PCP wants me to go to the hospital for anything they can’t figure out, but the hospital only wants to rule out anything life threatening and send me home without further investigation, so no one ever solves the problem or follows up on anything.

And as far as I’m concerned, I’m so sick of doctors and hospitals and gowns and waiting around with Stephanie — who is as stressed out as I am about the whole business — that I want to avoid the whole thing unless I absolutely can’t function, so I’m not motivated to figure out what the hell is going on, either.

At least this time I’m closer to understanding what’s going on, but no closer to getting anything resolved. I’m loath to keep asking for pain medication because I don’t want to be dependent on it, but without it, I’m completely dysfunctional.

All of this is driving me completely crazy, too. I’m just tired of the whole mess.

Continue ReadingCostochondritis

Ennui

I’ve been rather blue lately. I’m feeling creatively frustrated.

N is for Neville who died of ennui
N is for Neville who died of ennui

I have some idea in my head that I can’t quite get out – like that time when you had that really fantastic dream, and just as you woke up, you thought “I gotta remember this!” at the same time all the details start sliding away from you and you’re left with just that feeling that the dream gave you – a feeling of awesome, a Stendhal syndrome, that you’re trying to reconstruct…

Like I know there’s a picture there that just isn’t coming into focus, and every time I think I just start to get it, the dog barks, (if I’m at home) or someone comes into my cube (if I’m at work) and I lose track of that vision that I was trying to get to, that I almost just had in my hand if I’d just closed my fingers more quickly…

I find myself wishing for a work space at home that’s more like my workspace at work – a clean, organized desk with plenty of space and a big monitor to get my work done and away from the pets and the phone as distractions. Someplace I can focus. Entertainment Weekly has been doing a “Writers at Work” series, and Neil Gaiman’s is cool:

Gaiman escapes to his wooded Wisconsin hideaway with pup Cabel in tow to craft his fantastical works. Says the author, ”The setting is interesting enough that if I get stuck and need to stare out the window, there’s something to look at, which isn’t interesting enough to make me stop working and look at it for long.”

What a jerk with his “Wisconsin hideaway.” Where’s my hideaway?

On my tiny violin

I know, what a terrible problem to have, right? You play for me the world’s tiniest violin in response.

I think really just want to be more like this kid:

I Fucking Love Coloring
I Fucking Love Coloring
Continue ReadingEnnui

Asphasia

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I have been losing words lately. I seem to have a chronic problem of not being able to find the word I’m thinking of, losing track of what I was going to say mid-sentence, and even sometimes saying words I didn’t intend without realizing I’m doing it–I was talking about the upcoming wedding with someone, and referred to it as Christmas. I didn’t realize I did it, but they assured me I did. Co-workers have noticed and commented on my problem a number of different times with some concerned tones.

I’m also having trouble reading at times, too. I’ll read the same page five or six times and not understand what I’m reading. I picked up a book of classic poems, and I can’t seem to follow a good chunk of the verse. I have a stack of 9 books that I’ve started and read the first few pages, but left unfinished.

I don’t know why this is happening, but I don’t think I actually have a physiological problem. My guess is that it’s a combination of stress and a mild form of ADD I’ve given myself by having too many directions of input — twitter, gmail, work email, blogs and now the IM that our work managers are pushing us to use are all chirping, beeping and blinking at me all day long.

On the stress front, we’ve obviously been wedding planning, (seriously – elope! I’m openly advocating that now) there’s a lot going on at work–I designed, created content for and help launch 3 websites last week, and am working on two more to launch on May 30–and life milestones that I’m in avoidance mode about–I’m turning 40 on June 6th.

So I need to cut back on some stuff. I turned off the gmail notification. I’m refusing to open IM. I check my work email 3 times a day, and I check twitter only a couple times while at work.

While I am looking forward to the wedding, I have to admit, the vacation afterward is what I keep daydreaming about.

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Homebrew Stand-Up Desk

After reading a couple articles on the health benefits of stand-up work stations, I decided to give it a shot at work. The top is a shelf from my locker/cabinet, and the books are, well, books. I originally planned to find a table of the appropriate height; the shelf/books idea is from my co-worker Rich. Turned out to be a great alternative, since I can slide a book in or out of the stack to customize the height in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to with a table, and once I got it set up, it was clear that my height estimate was wrong.
So far, I’m enjoying it. I’ll have to see how I feel at the end of the day and after a few days of trying it.

Homebrew stand-up desk.

Continue ReadingHomebrew Stand-Up Desk

links for 2008-03-06

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