Gratitude

 Wow, so, first week of 2021, really packing it in, huh? Only six days in and our first Doomscroll day of the year. I'm extremely thankful for a lot of things right now, and one of them is that I was still unambiguously on medical LOA while an armed mob signaled the end of our track record of "peaceful transfer of power" Democracy. 

I'm also grateful that, if it taught business people anything, when these doomscroll days happen there's no point in expecting anything to get fucking done; almost everyone I know who was trapped in view of screens reported that their bosses had given everyone a Mulligan for the day. Nobody can be expected to focus on work when History is happening - it's just been happening more and more frequently in the last year or so.

I'm grateful for the rain we've been having - mostly overnight, mostly in long slow downpours, mostly with sun breaking through in the afternoons. I have my fingers crossed that our aquifers recharge and the snowpack is deep and wet, and that the fire season gives us a bit of a reprieve in 2021. And I'm enjoying walking along the beach in the thin afternoon sunlight.

On Thursday, I logged in to work email for the first time since before my surgery, to request that we extend my LOA from the "best case" 4 week duration, to the full 6 weeks. It was *so* needed, and, looking back at my cuticles (which are picked and bloody) it was giving me a lot of anxiety apparently.

So I'm officially off work until January 26th, and friends, oh my god I need it so badly. I'm so grateful to have it and so grateful that I'm in a place in my life where it's available. 

And while I'm at it, let me say how grateful/angry I am about my health care coverage? As I'm tallying up the charges for medical services leading up to this, it's approaching $400k of billing. I hit my out-of-pocket maximum right before surgery so theoretically I'm not on the hook for any of that, but it's not clear that the individual providers won't come after me for the shortfall, which the imaging companies are already doing. I've been keeping all those charges on a single card since last year, just for tracking purposes, and it's already over $600 in post-insurance-settlement charges. Fuck those vultures. I'm scared.

Today was my one month check in, and now I get to track down and schedule the PT. The xray shows that my fusion is going well, and my doctor was shocked that I was still wearing the hard collar the whole time, and said to stop wearing it unless my neck feels tired or sore. I was worried about how puffy and lumpy the incision site is still, but I'm told that it actually looks great, and the level of puff I have is totally normal. 

My biggest question that I kept worrying about - what happened during the surgery that took an extra three hours has been answered. Apparently they didn't start the procedure until about 4, and I was held up an hour in the OR because there was no room in post-op yet. (The ICU bed shortage, and the extra-thorough cleaning of the rooms between patients has some knock-on effects.) Let me tell you folks, looking at the bill, that's like another $10k in anaesthesia drugs alone. The doctor also amusedly told me that it explains why Martin got an incredibly drugged out Laura call several hours earlier than expected; apparently the anaesthesia people get the task of monitoring/hanging out with the patient while the rest of the surgical team is dismissed, and they'll do puzzles and have whole conversations with you and put you on the phone with people if they're bored. 

And now... I want a nap.