Ghost-of-a-Chance

Sorry about the late response, everyone. I got locked out of my account after the update and just got back in. Thanks for all your messages of support and commiseration. Cold is still hanging in there right now, and struggles aside, so am I. I don’t really have any news, unfortunately. It’s just becoming apparent that moving back to my hometown was not only a good thing, but something we did not a day too soon. If we didn’t have my family close, I don’t know how we would be getting through this.

Sorry about the late response, everyone. I got locked out of my account after the update and just got back in. Thanks for all your messages of support and commiseration. Cold is still hanging in there right now, and struggles aside, so am I. I don’t really have any news, unfortunately. It’s just becoming apparent that moving back to my hometown was not only a good thing, but something we did not a day too soon. If we didn’t have my family close, I don’t know how we would be getting through this.

Sorry about the late response, everyone. I got locked out of my account after the update and just got back in. Thanks for all your messages of support and commiseration. Cold is still hanging in there right now, and struggles aside, so am I. I don’t really have any news, unfortunately. It’s just becoming apparent that moving back to my hometown was not only a good thing, but something we did not a day too soon. If we didn’t have my family close, I don’t know how we would be getting through this.

Sorry about the late response, everyone. I got locked out of my account after the update and just got back in. Thanks for all your messages of support and commiseration. Cold is still hanging in there right now, and struggles aside, so am I. I don’t really have any news, unfortunately. It’s just becoming apparent that moving back to my hometown was not only a good thing, but something we did not a day too soon. If we didn’t have my family close, I don’t know how we would be getting through this.

Unfortunately, the current regime considers any “right to life” to cease the moment the kid’s evicted from the womb, as society’s only embrace of the metric system is “9mm on the playground”.

I’m sorry you’re all going through or have gone through that bullshit. That really does majorly suck. I’m so glad Australia has free health care, otherwise I wouldn’t be here now.

same. my parents who are both retired are barely making ends meet at the moment. we found out in February my mom has non Hodgkin lymphoma (stage 4) and they want her to pay thousands of dollars they don’t have for my moms chemo and the other injuries she accumulated all last year. plus me not getting full use of my physical therapy to go back to work. I was only allowed 20 sessions and then i have to pay out of pocket and due to NO WORK, i cant afford it. this just sucks! hope everything turns around for you and they finally get the stick out of their asses and FIX THIS SHIT

Think that quote (from his recent video) about sums up the current state of the country…   
Not like every other civilized country has some sort of publicly funded healthcare… oh, wait, they do.  (Though there’s internal debates to how effective it is, at least they’ve got something vs our “go-fund-me” and private equity maximum extraction/insurance nightmare.)
Oh, I remember the remember the anti-healthcare adverts when Hillary Clinton was pushing for something; oh “death panels”, but we’ve outsourced them to ins. companies, and to citizens who face bankruptcy in this minefield (thereby delaying/self-denying critical care).
Gah… if they want to make America Healthy… tackle *that*, not the current anti-vax campaign.

I wish there were answers for this, I really do. Insurance companies are only in it for their shareholders, and when my mother was busy dying, I had to argue with hospitals, nursing homes/rehabilitation centers, and even a hospice that would not take her because she had a Medicare Advantage plan, i.e., an insurance company that would drive the hospice staff insane with prior authorizations and denials of service.
The only thing I can even think of is to try and get a good social worker on your side, one that will read the fine print of the insurance coverage and the stipulation of a specific clinic for Cold. Someone who isn’t afraid to go right up the chain, past the robo-responder to a peer to peer review, where a doctor has to justify risking Cold’s future mobility against some reciprocal arrangement with a specific clinic that gives the insurer a kickback.
Damn, Ghost. Sending love and hugs to you and Cold, and offering a claims reviewer’s liver to the Morrigan.

I feel you, Hon. My hubby has been out going on two months over his spinal surgery, and now they’re pushing it into August. It’s infuriating. Try to rest that wrist, okay?

I’m definitely in that “two spaces after a sentence” crowd, and somebody trying to use correct grammar/syntax – which, apparently, is also an indicator of being AI written.  (Think my biggest beef with AI is what the hype is doing to computer part prices!)  My background...yeah, my SAT written was pretty abysmal, it was the math portion that did the heavy lifting.  (At that time, only two components, not the current three.)  And in school, pretty much believed what my mother had latched onto, that “I hated writing”; took Harry Potter fanfiction for me to realize it was directed writing that I hated, thus creative what I want to write on just for fun – got a 2.6M fanfic that’s proof there.

what the hell am I supposed to do? Just let your tantrum drag down my writing score because you can’t find any actual errors that need to be fixed?!
I had a boss like that once.  It prompted me to find a new job.

You’re not doing anything wrong; that’s actually an option suggested by the program. It just doesn’t work for me. If it works for you, more power to you. 🙂 If what I wrote came across judgy, I’m sorry about that; it wasn’t intentional.
My focus in college was creative writing and literature, but it was long enough ago that some of what we were taught is now obscure if not obsolete. Think following the origin language’s rules for words adopted into English, shorthand as a subject, tab-starting instead of adding an extra line between paragraphs and two spaces after a sentence, etc. It’s left me with some tough habits to break—or cling to like life rafts—and some newer practices make my brain short circuit. (“Anti-Capital-ism,” apparently, is a thing, and it has nothing to do with money or capitalism. It makes my brain hurt.)
Frankly, my college and university didn’t even have programming or computer science degrees until a few years after I left “because these computer things are just a fad” and “nobody is going to spend money on a degree that won’t make them money.” I’m impressed anytime someone can make computers work because my school district, in their stubbornness, raised a whole generation of technologically illiterate students. The other day, I took my (wired, optical) mouse apart to clean out the cat hair and almost couldn’t put the damned thing back together. It had four removable parts. 🫠

In-a-gadda-da-vida, honey
Don't you know that I'm loving you?
In-a-gadda-da-vida, baby
Don't you know that I'll always be true?

But that was the beauty of those ‘60s pseudo-psychedelic songs.  The artist sang like they had a mouth full of peanut butter, and you picked your own damned lyrics!

::Laughs in Missourian:: We don’t have seasons down here. We have “what fresh hell does Mother Nature have in store for us today? Over the last two weeks, we’ve alternated between pouring rain, no rain/drought, sub-zero temperatures, record-breaking heatwaves, sleet, hail, severe thunderstorms, flash flooding, wildfires and prescribed burns in the same week, spitty drizzle, increased smog due to wildfires due west, a several day tree pollen explosion, and a snow-nado. Apparently those are a thing. Yep. A snow squall is a sudden blizzard with zero visibility and tornado-speed winds…and this one happened on a day that had been around 80°…with no warning. 
Not joking. Not exaggerating. This all happened over the course of a couple of weeks, this month. Somebody, please, get Mama Nature some chocolate, Midol, and Thorazine or something because this is straight up PMS psychosis behavior. I’m just waiting to see frogs raining from the sky. (Considering we live near a crick full of the little croakers, frog-rain is totally possible.)

::Laughs in Missourian:: We don’t have seasons down here. We have “what fresh hell does Mother Nature have in store for us today? Over the last two weeks, we’ve alternated between pouring rain, no rain/drought, sub-zero temperatures, record-breaking heatwaves, sleet, hail, severe thunderstorms, flash flooding, wildfires and prescribed burns in the same week, spitty drizzle, increased smog due to wildfires due west, a several day tree pollen explosion, and a snow-nado. Apparently those are a thing. Yep. A snow squall is a sudden blizzard with zero visibility and tornado-speed winds…and this one happened on a day that had been around 80°…with no warning. 
Not joking. Not exaggerating. This all happened over the course of a couple of weeks, this month. Somebody, please, get Mama Nature some chocolate, Midol, and Thorazine or something because this is straight up PMS psychosis behavior. I’m just waiting to see frogs raining from the sky. (Considering we live near a crick full of the little croakers, frog-rain is totally possible.)

::Laughs in Missourian:: We don’t have seasons down here. We have “what fresh hell does Mother Nature have in store for us today? Over the last two weeks, we’ve alternated between pouring rain, no rain/drought, sub-zero temperatures, record-breaking heatwaves, sleet, hail, severe thunderstorms, flash flooding, wildfires and prescribed burns in the same week, spitty drizzle, increased smog due to wildfires due west, a several day tree pollen explosion, and a snow-nado. Apparently those are a thing. Yep. A snow squall is a sudden blizzard with zero visibility and tornado-speed winds…and this one happened on a day that had been around 80°…with no warning. 
Not joking. Not exaggerating. This all happened over the course of a couple of weeks, this month. Somebody, please, get Mama Nature some chocolate, Midol, and Thorazine or something because this is straight up PMS psychosis behavior. I’m just waiting to see frogs raining from the sky. (Considering we live near a crick full of the little croakers, frog-rain is totally possible.)

Lol
We’ve been having 2 seasons down here in Australia: hot and slightly less hot. I miss having seasons. They were fun!

Mother nature is bipolar in March...😁

Desiderius Price, it sounds like you’re suggesting a line-break—a horizontal line that divides two passages of text. I use those in my writing as a rule, but the program plum doesn’t recognize them when it sees them. Using a character’s name as a subheading works for other people, and there’s nothing wrong with it. I pride myself on my ability to indicate the target character without explicitly stating it, though; we’re talking word choices, idiosyncratic behaviors, deep-diving into their chain of thought through the use of third person limited, etc. Even just the way a character structures their sentences can be used to identify them. It’s comparable to method-acting versus skill acting. (Hence why I’m barmy at the least and neurotic at most; I’ve got at minimum a hundred different characters fighting for dominance in my head at all times, and the loudest of them are even more emotionally constipated than I am.)
That said, my writing instructors hammered into me with a ruler and red pen that if you force-feed your readers, you’re going to choke them and have no readers, so I can be a bit too...careful about it.
And DemonGoddess, Pro Writing Aid is like Grammarly, only a bit better. They’re spelling and grammar checking programs that leave the built-in options twitching in the dust. I got started with PWA because Grammarly wouldn’t function with Libre Office, and it worked so much better, I just kept using it when I got access to Word again. The free version is effectively neutered now, unfortunately, and the price for the lowest tier makes me wince every time I see the charge.

Desiderius Price, it sounds like you’re suggesting a line-break—a horizontal line that divides two passages of text. I use those in my writing as a rule, but the program plum doesn’t recognize them when it sees them. Using a character’s name as a subheading works for other people, and there’s nothing wrong with it. I pride myself on my ability to indicate the target character without explicitly stating it, though; we’re talking word choices, idiosyncratic behaviors, deep-diving into their chain of thought through the use of third person limited, etc. Even just the way a character structures their sentences can be used to identify them. It’s comparable to method-acting versus skill acting. (Hence why I’m barmy at the least and neurotic at most; I’ve got at minimum a hundred different characters fighting for dominance in my head at all times, and the loudest of them are even more emotionally constipated than I am.)
That said, my writing instructors hammered into me with a ruler and red pen that if you force-feed your readers, you’re going to choke them and have no readers, so I can be a bit too...careful about it.
And DemonGoddess, Pro Writing Aid is like Grammarly, only a bit better. They’re spelling and grammar checking programs that leave the built-in options twitching in the dust. I got started with PWA because Grammarly wouldn’t function with Libre Office, and it worked so much better, I just kept using it when I got access to Word again. The free version is effectively neutered now, unfortunately, and the price for the lowest tier makes me wince every time I see the charge.

There are things I monitor with Nina as it is.  I already lost her sister to kidney failure.  Honestly, with thyroid issues and whatnot, the kidney problems were just a matter of time.  Fortunately, Nina does not have the same issues as her sister did.
She is a smart old girl.  She has figured out that the happy hoodie will not cover her ears as long as she doesn’t scratch.  So it and the steroids the vet has her on have her on the road to recovery.  The gash is scabbing over.

And once they stop being cranky… you know something’s wrong.  Been there with the last one.

Luckily, in dog years, that’s not as harsh.