|
|
|
|
|
|
BEYOND THE FRINGEFAN
has not been terribly happy with the past fall and winter, and is vastly relieved to see springlike weather finally arriving. He's enjoying it while he can; this being New York, it'll be too hot and humid in a matter of days, and the air conditioners will come on at the N.Y. Cadre ((
(718) NY-CADRE); 
nycadre@alum.rpi.edu; 
http://www.nycadre.org). This is Beyond the Fringefan #397, for readers of APA-NYU Volume 8, #4 (e-APA-NYU #72) and others who put Slinkys in their shoes so as to walk with a spring in their step, published April 2010 as a combined production of Quick Brown Fox Press and Syscrash Consulting, both subsidiaries of 
. Cartoon above from Frank and Ernest by Thaves, 24 March 2010. All uncredited material copyright ©2010 by Marc S. Glasser. Member fwa.
IF YOU'VE USED UP YOUR SICK DAYS, CALL IN DEAD: Donna spent most of the past month more or less safely ensconced at the Ditmas Park Rehab/Care Center on Ditmas Avenue, about a mile and a half from the Cadre. There were assorted less-than-ideal bureaucratic idiosyncrasies, as there always seem to be in places like this, but after a week or so, she finally had things arranged so that she was getting the right meds at the right times, and the nurses who changed her dressings in the morning did so in time to let her get to her PT (physical therapy) and OT (occupational therapy) when she was supposed to. Her wheelchair was in need of some repairs, and the PT staff was working on getting her a loaner so that I could take it in. Time for something to go wrong somewhere else.
I started feeling rotten while working late Wednesday night 10 March, and after throwing up a couple of times Thursday morning, I e-mailed my boss to let her know I wouldn't be in, and went off to see my doctor. It felt a lot like what I'd had a month earlier that had landed me in the emergency room on Valentine's Day, and I was anxious to avoid a recurrence of that. My doctor said that, unfortunately, the immunity to viruses of this sort that one develops by actually being sick with them only lasts a few weeks, so it was entirely possible it was the same virus or a close relative. He recommended Gatorade or generic equivalent, both to stay hydrated and to maintain electrolyte balance, so I lived on diluted sports drinks and acetaminophen for a day or two, and didn't do much but take Donna's wheelchair to Gem Mobility in Flushing and back. Then I realized (with input from Donna) that by suppressing fever with the acetaminophen, I was likely preventing myself from killing the virus with heat. So I quit the acetaminophen, piled a few more blankets on the bed, and prepared to settle down and be feverish. Right about then is when the nor'easter knocked out our power.
In fact, about 200,000 people in the metropolitan area lost power, according to some estimates. It wasn't a vast monolithic blackout, but a patchwork of local ones caused by downed power lines, trees falling on transformers, and the like, all over the boroughs and the 'burbs. That scatteredness made it hard—and time-consuming—to fix; Con Edison had crews out and about, fixing one outage and moving on to the next. Con Ed's computer system, which I was able to access by phone, kept making random predictions as to when our block's power would be back; meanwhile we had no lights and, even worse, no Internet access. Our oil-burning furnace is electrically ignited and controlled, so there was no heat or hot water, and the house was getting steadily colder (it wasn't just the fever).
[Nick Simicich later remarked, by e-mail, "Here in Florida, well, short power outages are considered more or less normal. One or two a day are not uncommon. After Wilma, there were people in my development who didn't have power for several weeks, and who had to stay in a shelter.... After the worse hurricane I went through in Boca, we had power back after three days - and then a neighbor tried to remove a partially downed tree and dislodged his underground utilities....We didn't get our power back for 10 days, as I recall.... All I can say is, 'An advantage of living in NY is that it seems unusual to be without power for a day or longer.'" I guess he's got a point there.]Ultimately, we got our power back in about three days with little real damage except to a few things in the refrigerator and freezer. (I didn't open either appliance during the time the lights were out. The freezer in the basement is guaranteed to keep things frozen for two days in the event of an outage. It seems to have held out into the third. Judging by the condition of the ice cream in the freezer of the kitchen fridge, though, we may want to jettison a couple of packages that were in there.)
The hospital, as I mentioned last time, had demanded, when we checked Donna in, that we pay in advance an amount equal to our copay plus Donna's maximum out-of-pocket for the year under our current medical insurance, totaling over $1700. This amount was not unreasonable—one hospital stay with surgery would certainly cost enough that we'd end up owing that much—though I thought the timing was. It turns out that, in spite of what the people at United Healthcare told me at the time (and now they're telling me different), I should not have paid all that money then. The hospital took its sweet time sending the paperwork in to United, and meanwhile several assorted labs and doctors within the hospital began billing United for their own individual fees. We now have to pay our share of each of those individual bills—more than $500 so far—and once they stop coming, we have to ask the hospital to refund us the total.
Comments on APA-NYU, Volume 8, #3 (e-APA-NYU #71)
LSD* ONE MORE ROUND (Ariel Cinii):