Returned, Revived, Repeat

So my return to work yesterday was mildly busy but not terribly so.  I had the opportunity to waste 30 minutes on the phone, most of that on hold with the NCH billing department.  Yes there is another chapter in the ridiculous ER billing fiasco.  You may recall that I fought with them about the initial bill sent to me for $950 which included a charge of over $700 for a single pill.  The end result of that was them agreeing to totally drop the $700 charge for the pill and them saying they would resubmit the claim to insurance.  So late June I get a new bill for $589.43 which was still more than I hoped but I had two months until it was due so I was just sitting on it, in no rush to give them my money.

So late last week I get a letter, not a bill from NCH.  It said I have an amount due and it now has magically increased to $733.45  WTF?  So I picked up the phone yesterday and got a woman in the billing department on the phone.  I gave her a brief recap of the events leading up to my call.  She said she needed to put me on hold to check with another department.  She puts me on hold and leaves me there, for 20 minutes.  Not once did she come back to apologize for the wait or to let me know wtf was going on.  Nope just hold music for 20 minutes after which I hung up, angry as hell.

I immediately call back but can’t get anyone to pick up the phone so I leave a message highlighting my situation, angrily.  I later got a message on my home number that the account has once again been “submitted for review” and there should be an answer in 4 to 5 business days.  I’ll tell you this experience with the modern day medical quagmire makes me want to avoid hospital care like the plague.  It’s incredible just how convoluted, inefficient, complicated and obscenely expensive medical care is in the USA.

Over my vacation I was pretty sure that I was going to have to be burying another chicken, Katie.  She has had a bad leg for over a year but in the last couple weeks she had developed the same lethargy that other birds have before they dropped.  She was weak, basically stood/sat around all day, and had minimal interest in food.  She even stopped making the cute little noises she is known for which to me was a sure sign she was a goner, the same pattern Kristen followed before she died.  Katie was so weak that I had to pick her up and place her on the perch at night, she couldn’t do it.

So all of a sudden late last week Katie bounced back, amazingly so.  She started being more mobile, eating, and even making her cute noises again.  I was so relieved.  For about a month we have been trying to give the birds cayenne pepper and tumeric mixed in with their food.  It helps battle parasites and worms naturally.  We also add rooster booster to their water, give them yogurt, and watermelon which all supposedly help the birds stay healthy without using toxic chemical dewormers.  This time of year is especially bad for the birds because they insist on drinking the dirty standing water which has countless harmful things floating in it.  So anyway, Katie is doing better and I hope it stays that way.

The latest outbreak of mass gun violence, not perpetrated by Muslim terrorists but by angry, racist, white males seems to have really awakened some people.  Some GOP politicians are actually using the words “white nationalist”, something that was taboo up until this point since they are a core and integral part of the Trumpers.  Maybe, just maybe there is enough momentum this time to actually get something done, but I doubt it.  The gun lobby in this country is so powerful that politicians cower in fear of the idea of crossing them, almost like they have a gun to their head.