Today is the day that they come to take away my wheelchair.
The one I use inside my home.
It’s a rental via medical coverage.
There has been an insurance snafu, and until the mess is sorted out, the equipment supply company has to take it away.
I started to write this very funny and long 3rd person fairy-tale about how I ended up with this crappy (albeit neccessary) piece of mobility equipment. My story included little details about how I do, in fact, outright own a similar looking (but 2" wider) clunker that I keep in my car for running errands, but how I can't get it that chair into the house from the curb.
The entrance to my own home is not wheelchair accessible.
And even if I could get the chair into the house, it is wider than the rental chair (read as: really the right width for my AmpleAss), which makes it too wide to fit through the passageways of my teenytiny shack.
In my fictional kingdom, there was to be a princess that used a skinny carriage inside the house... and for sporting around town, a more well-fitting one (fitting, kind of like Cindarella's lost shoe...only my chair is more like a dirty old tennis shoe than a glass slipper). The Princess in my story uses crutches to get from inside the house to outside the house, from one chair to the other.
The fable included a Fairy-Godmother (occupational therapist) who way back in the beginning of gimphood had given poor equipment advice, based on hopes of all of the things people thought I would accomplish (ummm, like consisitently walking), rendering the need for fancy wheelchairs useless.
And of course, no tale is complete without the Wicked Evil Villian--the big-box-store version of a health insurance company who will either pay for prosthetics or a quality wheelchair, but not both.
I was going to write all that.
Actually, I did write quite a bit of that, but quickly realized that the editing would take far more time than I have.
Especially since every frickin' task I do around my home is now about to become 4-times more difficult and 10-times more time consuming, as they will all be performed on crutches.
~~A note from the non-TeeHeeing AmpuT
Monday, October 23, 2006
..and so this is a day where things will get really interesting.
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11 comments:
I'm so sorry.... :(
What a pain in the ass. Although I suppose that's likely an understatement.
TALK ABOUT STUPID!! this shit makes me so angry and it happened to my now seven year old neice often - took a while to get straightened out, but it eventually did. i know you can make it through this, you sure as hell don't need me telling you this, but you are there and i am here and well, i understand is all. i'm blabbing. this sucks.
Here's to hoping the "insurance snafu" gets straightened out asap.
Argh. Fuck. Sorry, hon. If I could come out there and vacuum and wash dishes and make sandwiches for yourFK for you so you could find the time to write your story, I would.
I can't believe they're fucking REPO-ing your wheelchair!!!!!
Is this United HealthCare that fucked this up, or Kaiser? 'Cause UHC at least had this deal with the home health rental place that if the rental went on for longer than X amount of months, I would own the wheelchair, because the rent would have by then more than paid for the cost of said wheelchair.
Anybody who's ever spent time in a prosthetic knows how ridiculous it is to expect someone to spend all their waking life wearing one, and anybody who's ever been on crutches, no matter how good they are on them, knows how difficult they make simple things, like carrying a dish of soup from the kitchen to the dining room table, for example. ARRRRGGGGGHHHH. You should not have to choose, and at any rate, definitive projections should never have been made that early in your rehab.
Besides, you don't actually have a prosthesis you can use, so the insurance company is in breach of its own policy if it takes your wheelchair away now.
Don't be home to the repo men. If the jig is up, just sit your ground and refuse to give it up. I'm not kidding. Sit in it with your prosthetic off and out of sight and make them either take that wheelchair out from under your ass or have you arrested and taken, wheel-less and legless, off to jail. This is so fucking inexcusable I can't even not curse.
Meanwhile, would you please be so kind as to put a fucking PayPal link or Amazon Tip Jar on your fucking blog so we can help you out with shit like this? You can buy a useable replacement just like my piece of crap, so cheap it's losing bolts that have sheared all over the house after only three years but highly portable, at least, brand new, for $500 online, and you can probably find a better used one for the same price or cheaper. I'm pretty broke, but I can probably scrounge up $20 to throw toward this. I'm sure your other guests and visitors would be happy to throw some bucks either toward continuing this rental or buying you a house chair outright. Call it a loan if you have to for insurance/lawsuit purposes, but please, put out your hand and take the money.
Gah. Fuckers.
Geez, Bonnie, this is such crap. Adn it takes so much energy to deal with it. I wish I could come over with a casserole or sumpin... Sending a hug from downunder.
Oh, Bonnie - This makes me so crazy. What is wrong with this country??!?!?!?
I hope it gets straightened out quickly. I was just on crutches briefly with my ankle and it was impossible trying to accomplish anything on them. (So I regularly fell off of them. But I'm not the lovely and graceful dancer you are. ;-) )
Well ... shit.
Not funny. Not acceptable. Not good enough. Those f**ckers
WCD
That sucks.
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