Yes, a mere child, not even of retirement age yet! 
My craptastic insurance company has decided that it will no longer approve a medication that I really need to live. It is true that I won’t die immediately if I quit taking it, but I will die very slowly, with a lot more health care expenses. It makes me angry that insurance companies can decide my treatment, not my doctors. I’m wishing bad things on all of the people who make these decisions.
This isn’t the first time Blue Cross has done this, but I’ve had alternatives for other medications that they’ve declined to cover. I don’t think there are any other alternatives for this one.
It was my understanding that the doctor can challenge this with the insurance company if indeed you need this medication.
My sister has taken to ordering some medicine from Canada that Medicare removed from its formulary, which would have cost hundred of dollars a month. Idk how much she’s paying now through the Canadian pharmacy, but she says it’s a lot less.
I can appeal it. The last time I did this, it wasn’t successful, but I don’t need that medication to stay alive. 
I’m interested in doing the Canadian prescription thing, if I can figure out how it works. I can’t do that with this prescription because it needs to be refrigerated.
Some people will set a container of water on top of the radiators to add a little humidity. Or you could get a cool mist humidifier (though that’s an extra expense).
Back to the billing fun with the hospital: I went ahead and kept my appointment for the ultrasound yesterday. I had to check in at an electronic kiosk - which displayed “You have a balance of 2400 dollars” (or whatever the amount is) " would you like to pay it today?". Answers were “Yes, Partial, or Not Now”. There was no “You’re asking an insane amount of money” selection. I just chose “Not Now”. I fully expect to get a similar huge bill for the ultrasound.
Google says that they will often ship it expedited with ice packs in insulated containers. Might be worth looking into.
Thanks for that DHL…
I almost never return anything I’ve bought from Amazon but I’m doing it tomorrow, due to a pair of sneakers that are too big, with a smaller size already on its way. I appreciate that Amazon has made returns easier than ever; the option I’m using is to take the shoe box, as is, to Staples, show them a QR code, and they handle the rest.
Which is great. The part that pisses me off is Amazon saying “just show them the QR code on your smartphone”. What if you don’t fucking have a smartphone? Well, I do, but I don’t have a data plan so this doesn’t work. If I click on “View Instructions” on the email that authorizes the return, it goes to an Amazon website with the QR code. Fat lot of good that will do me when I’m out of range of my home wireless.
I hear you saying: so just go through the process on a computer at home, and print out the page with the QR code.
Nope. Doing a “Print preview” of that page shows only the headers at the top, no content and no QR code. Doing a “Print to PDF” is equally useless. This was the case with two different browsers.
In order to print what I was actually seeing with my eyeballs, I had to do a screen capture, paste it into Photoshop, and print it as an image.
Listen, Amazon, I appreciate you trying to make returns as easy as possible, but not everyone is a teenager with an iPhone-27X-Plus permanently wired to their brain and featuring a 250 GB/s internet connection allowing them to instantaneously communicate with the universe. How about just sending me an old-school “authorization return code” in the form of, you know, a sequence of digits? How hard could that be?
Just do a screen capture and save it to your photos. Pull up the picture at Staples.
Yesterday I got home from work at 1 pm. My gf WFH. She told me I just missed seeing my brother, who dropped by unannounced to give us our yearly calendar (he’s an amateur photographer and makes a really nice calendar each year).
Here’s the thing. He lives in Denver, used to live in Ann Arbor. So he drove from Colorado to Michigan to western Pennsylvania, stopping along the way to visit anyone who was home.
My gf cracked up. She said she no ever imagined I’d be the sane one.
Make a screenshot of the QR code. That’s how my wife can make my returns.
Yes, this.
I have a great phone with an unlimited data plan but with Murphy’s Law what it is, my phone will choose that moment to not want to connect as I need the QR code. That has happened to me too many times. So now I save it to my phone through a screenshot.
Movie tickets, plane tickets, Amazon returns, all on my phone so I don’t have to stress.
I suspect that’s how the teenagers with phones wired to their brains do it, honestly it’s just common sense.
I have been in four wrecks in 5 years, all of them some one wasnt paying attention and plowed into the back of my car. Totalled one car a couple of years ago and it looks like last nights escapades will be the swan song of my current car. I was turning into my driveway (very sharp turn) and this woman hit my car so hard I was pushed forwards about half the width of my front yard. Once i was calm enought ot get out of my car, she starts yelling at me about being stopped, I told her I wasnt stopped I was turning, she starts screaming that i dint have my blinker on. I always turn my blinker on but it is possible that i didnt this particular time (I said that to the officer taking my statement). I have a white crossover and my rearlights were working fine, so she just wasnt paying attntion and had to be going well over the speedl imit to hit me that hard. I hurt all over today but nothing seems to be damged on me. My car is probably totalled since the rear ender last year did a lot of damge to the back of my car. It is still drivable just not pretty.
I am so tired of people trying to run me over.
I’m sorry, it’s a bunch of bullshit that you have to keep dealing with that.
I have Informed Delivery from the USPS, which has saved me from wasting time walking out to my mailbox when I don’t have any mail that day. (Unfortunately magazines are not included in the notice, so I never know that there’s a magazine in my mailbox.) In the past few weeks, however, my Informed Delivery notice has included a “Awaiting From Sender” section, which will show the name of someone who is supposedly sending me a package, along with what appears to be a tracking number. Clicking on the tracking number takes me to the USPS website, which shows the scan history for the package. Today’s was from some place called “One Stop Mailing” and originated from Phoenix AZ on the 23rd, then went to North Las Vegas, and then to Austell Ga; It’s now in Raleigh NC (I think, which would make it in my area) and is identified as “bound printed matter”. I’m not expecting anything that I can recall.
Last week, on the 17th, I was notified of something from "Passport Services DOS Tucson. I’m certainly not expecting anything from a passport office in Tucson (my earlier issues with getting my passport having been resolved) and after a few days this disappeared from my daily notices without anything ever being delivered. Is this sort of failed scam attempt? I’m used to getting text messages about “undeliverable” FedEx packages, but this is something new.
A fairly obvious solution, thank you, but my use of the phone is so limited that I had to figure out how to take a screenshot (what I mainly use it for, as befits a phone, is to make phone calls). I Googled a how-to for my phone and all my attempts to take a screenshot just caused it to want to power off. Turned out, I was using option #1, whereas my specific phone wanted option #2. And now, due to the incompetence of my ISP, the stupid thing has stopped receiving emails, though my computer’s email client still does.
I’m a former IT consultant but I cannot describe the extent to which I positively loathe these fucking little toys. I am told that a smartphone is “a full-fledged computer”. No, it isn’t. Listen up, boys and girls. I have attached a picture of an actual computer so you can tell the difference. Notice in particular that (a) it is not controlled by two microscopic tiny little buttons that do 38,835 different things depending on how you press them, and (b) Amazon does not assume that everybody and his dog has one.
Nope sorry, you are wrong.
This is an actual computer.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/c9/5c/c95c809c-8d12-4795-91ee-5b773d100de3/jun2019_d09_prologue.jpg)
I broke a tooth, and it’s abscessing. My dentist can’t see me until the 12th of December, and my doctor is reluctant to order an antibiotic because it’s a dental concern.
So I guess they expect me to suffer until I say “fuck it” and go to an urgent care and get the prescription on my own.
Your doctor is an idiot. Left untreated for too long, dental infections can spread to other parts of the body and potentially cause serious health conditions. Sounds like he’s mainly interested in protecting himself in case he prescribed something inappropriate. You should get your dentist to write a scrip even if he can’t see you right away.
Trust me, I’m working on that. This isn’t uncharted territory for me.
When I was a kid, my mom caught my finger in one of those big, heavy apartment doors, and it cut off the tip.
When they did the surgery to reattach it, I was apparently running a fever. The fever and the anesthesia combined caused my permanent teeth to come in with no enamel on them (this is how it was explained to me, anyway. It’s been 40+ years, however, so I can’t vouch for the scientific accuracy of this, and both of my parents have died, so I can’t ask them. As such, I have very brittle teeth that break easily. I’ve had sealant treatments and such, but nothing was as effective as the actual enamel would have been.
I need to have the rest of them pulled and get dentures or implants, but I just can’t bring myself to actually get it done. I suppose it’s a pride thing. I haven’t yet reached the moment where the personal discomfort outweighs the pride of still having some of my own teeth.
It’s coming, though. The dentist has already told me that there’s really no hope of saving any of them.