It's 5:40. This is a very personal diary. I voted yesterday.
It's very late, or very early, and I don't know if it's 3:30 or 4:30, I'll have to get the cell phone to see. I still have to do something about that, the cell phone. It was my husband's but I hardly use it, I have to decide whether to keep it or just keep the landline. I live in Florida and have been through some hurricanes so I like the landline, you can still make calls while the cell towers are out or overloaded. But I run high anxiety lately, probably explains my sleep patterns, and I miss my husband so I don't want to give up his cell.
I voted yesterday and that was something that Bruce and I always did together, we stuck the 'I voted' sticker on the little cooler that he took to work. It's got a lot of them and would have had more but it was just a spontaneous thing that started some years after we had gotten together. I mean it would have had to be after he started working for him to have the cooler. He took a job for the insurance; I've had some experience with insurance.
I met Bruce very shortly after my first husband died - yeah, I'm a catch, widowed twice, right? Anyway, my first husband, Steve, had thyroid cancer you know the one that is 99.9% curable and was sick and treated and operated on and radiated and chemoed (repeat) for 3 years. He died 4 days before our daughter graduated from college. I barely remember the ceremony but we went knowing he would have wanted her to.
Dealing with the insurance during that time was interesting; thank God his company provided it and the portion we paid was reasonable. Did you know that there are separate deductibles for different things? Like oxygen tanks or lab tests and all the doctors bill differently and so do radiologists and physicists. And there was no one to ask how to deal with all the paperwork, not the insurance company that's for sure and the hospitals and doctors didn't know. Maybe there are some people that are smarter than we were but we just paid the bills as they came in never knowing if they were right or duplicates or whatever. We started living on credit cards.
We also didn't know other stuff like unemployment or disability. His company continued to let him work even when he was spending more and more time away, even when they had to have someone else covering for him when he was there and lastly even when the tumor in his head left him unable to add simple numbers. Of course he had to leave then and that meant no more pay checks and the total insurance cost was ours. By the time he had signed up for disability and was eligible he was dead.
I had taken a part-time job; they knew my circumstances and were flexible about doctor visits and the like. I worried each day on the way home if I would find him dead when I got there but that's not how it happened. A hospice nurse who I had met through a co-worker visited us pretty regularly. She knew and had me call my daughter home. She helped with his medicines too. I was so concerned about how much morphine to give him, the warnings on the bottle and from the doctor scared me and Steve was taking so many different medicines. She told me it didn't make any difference to give him as much as he wanted. Believe it or not that is the first I honestly realized that he really wasn't going live.
When I met Bruce I knew he was meant for me and he was. He saw me through the aftermath of watching Steve die. He heard the stories of the insurance companies and the medicines and the doctors. He didn't want to have me go through that with him. I didn't.
He had a good business that he had retired from but found getting insurance difficult and expensive. But we did get health insurance, separate policies from different insurance companies. Blue Cross would insure me but not him. The independent agent found him the cheapest he could but it ran over $700 a month and that was a bargain with high deductible (wouldn't McCain's health plan just have helped sooooooooo much!). Almost 2 years into the policy the agent called and told Bruce that he could get him a better deal with a different insurance company. Bruce's insurance was up over $900 by then. Of course we went for it, foolish people.
Bruce went in for his annual physical and was rushed to surgery to have stints. His doctor said he was lucky that he had been in the office that day, the day before Thanksgiving, we had turkey in his hospital room. You know he was only concerned about how the nurses were going to tell me, he didn't want me scared. He need not have worried so much I'm the deer in headlights type.
The operation was a smashing success, no damage to his heart. The dealings with the insurance not so much... They canceled him. Pre-existing condition and refunded his premiums. That $6,000 was a help toward the over $40,000 in bills.
In the insurance world anything you have in less than 2 years is pre-existing, that's why the agent could get the policy for less money. Didn't know that then. But I know what Barack is talking about when he says his mother's insurance company claimed that. I called the Attorney General and the Insurance Commissioner but I got only shrugs that I felt through the phone.
It was then that Bruce decided he had to take whatever job he could to get insurance. He got a job doing maintenance and we got married. A year and a half later he died at home of sudden cardiac arrest exactly a week after I had made the final payment on his medical bills.
I'm luckier than most I have COBRA and although I haven't found a 'real' job yet, I've done some temp work, I still have some life insurance money, and I own my house (mostly). It's probably better not to talk about what is happening to our retirement fund but I have/had that too. This election, this man is important. Nothing is more important to me. I have donated money that I don't have and volunteered time when for me depression still makes leaving the house hard.
And yesterday, I voted for Barack Obama after waiting in line without my husband. I haven't been able to put the sticker on the cooler. Please vote. Please vote Obama/Biden.