Red Tape - An Adventure

It’s 5:00 p.m. on a Tuesday, late enough in the Spring to feel like afternoon instead of the evening almost-night of the same time in Winter. In about an hour I’ll have dinner just about ready – leftovers -  and not long after that will settle in for the slow decline of day before heading off to bed at a reasonable time so I can get up in the morning and go make a living. My weekend is over and for the first time in ages I feel accomplished and rested. (Maybe I shouldn’t say that out loud; it might be tempting fate or the sandman. It might reek of bragging.)

The house is cleaned, laundry finished, business bookkeeping and errands are caught up, the garden is holding its own. I even stretched out on the couch with a book and drifted into a twilight kind of sleep for a half hour or so. It was lovely. And now, from that place of feeling a deep breath in my soul, I’m writing. It’s time to catch up on this blog.

For a while, a couple months, I managed to post a few times a week. A little rhythm developed, take some pictures, write a few paragraphs, polish it up a bit, post. Then things went a little sideways.

Here’s the short version of what happened: Last autumn my husband had knee surgery. Nothing major, a little repair that should have corrected the problem and had him back on his feet better than new in six to eight weeks. Piece of cake. But that’s not what happened. Instead we discovered what a bureaucratic nightmare the Worker’s Compensation system can be. We learned about the ways a person can fall through the cracks of a medical system that doesn’t listen to the patient and that the insurance program intended to protect injured employees requires constant monitoring and advocacy. When it was long past obvious that his knee wasn’t healing properly the system failed. Our dining room table has been strewn with papers for months, a trail of events and notices, requests for information and confirmation, copies of letters we’ve sent, and notes to help us keep track of it all. My husband’s supervisors delayed filing paperwork, resulting in a tangle of over-payments and crossed wires, leading to demands for re-payment and proof that a doctor’s report should have amply answered. And the part that frustrates us the most? My husband’s knee is no better than before surgery.

We looked for an attorney, only to learn that there are only four lawyers in the state who will take on this worker’s comp insurance. It’s a big, bad, mother of a federal system. And we’ve been going head-to-head with it.

In the end it’s most likely going to be just fine. My husband’s knee is finally getting stronger, he’s returned to work, and we’re gradually getting our feet back under us again. We took a deep breath on Sunday morning and had a delightful day.

And this blog? Sheesh, it needs some serious attention. Bear with me while I figure out how to bring it back to life and re-establish a writing and photography routine. There are amazing things in this world, even in dark times, and I plan to string together words to describe them. Red tape be damned.