Atomictumor

So, I mentioned that I needed to get the heater fixed, and lo, I got the heater fixed.  The HVAC guy, Chuck, just took off.

I was working at the time on a blissfully slow day (next week will be hellweek at work, so this is the calm before the storm, evidently), and was able to sit outside and shoot the shit while he worked.  Turns out, the problem was that the intake on the unit itself was all clogged up with 10 odd years of dust, so not enough air was making through to the whatsit, and it was going into thermal meltdown, or something.  Those are technical terms, now, so I don’t expect all of you to understand.

We had to take apart the attractive fence blocking access to the thing, which was fun.  Now I have to either put the thing back together again (Daco, looking at you) or leave it sitting in my yard as is my redneck wont.

As we were talking, I mentioned how the letter I got was kinda irritating me.  He told me he knew all about medical bills, that his first wife died of cancer about 6 years ago.

We talked for a bit of loss, and life, and how things keep going.  He was (as is everybody else) amazed that it was just last November, and that it was so sudden.

We talked of the experience of feeling somebody thats dead.  Feeling them in a way that you know isn’t in your imagination, but in a way that you couldn’t possibly expect somebody else to understand.

He wound up getting married again, and we talked about how thats going, loving somebody else when you still have a first love.  He says it works out pretty well, but I still have some reservations.

Still tho, its amazing seeing the kind of things that happen.  Its hard to believe in coincidences when they hit so close to home like this.

The bill was nice and cheap too.  Heaters workin fine!

The medical bills have been good to me, and I’ve been careful to keep up with them.  In fact, the only thing thats come out of pocket out of this whole thing is about $20 or so.

In the week or two before BJ got really sick, she was having some pelvic pain.  Ultimately, in hindsight, its that kidney infection, but we didn’t know that at the time.

She went to the OB/GYN for a regular checkup kinda thing, and to talk about it (she was always bad about going for checkups, and this was the first time she’d be in since Pigpen was born).  She came home completely pissed, because the doc evidently didn’t have any bedside manner, and made it known to her that her troubles were caused by being overweight, and that she’d never keep a husband if she didn’t lose some pounds.

Gee, thanks Doc.

Today I got a letter from them, the first one that I’ve received.  It shows she paid a $15 copayment, but that we owed $3.74.  It also had a note in it that told me that they’ve been trying to collect this pocket change for some time, and that I have 10 days to pay before they lay it on the collectors.

Course, I called today to pay over the phone, and they’re closed.  So I wrote them a letter.

I was pissed when I wrote it, and didn’t save it to share with you people, but in essence it mentions the fact that BJ, now dead, went to the hospital no more than 2 weeks after seeing their office, that the hospital was in communication with the OBGYN clinic to see if they could shed any light on the mysterious nature of their illness, that I haven’t gotten shit from them as far as payments, and that sending a collection notice for pocket change is deplorable.

And it is.

And sometimes, just sometimes, I start to think “Hey.  I bet a lawyer could get me some money over this.”

But that’d be wrong.