The most disturbing and haunting is a very thick letter envelope from my younger sister while she was on her Mormon mission. It's the thickest of all the letters she wrote me, and may very well contain the answers to the questions I have about why she left the church when she got back from her mission. I don't know. Because I never opened it. An obviously important letter from my sister, and I was so out of it that I never even fucking opened it. No wonder she doesn't speak to me. And she doesn't even know.
I put it on my desk, like I have some intention of opening it soon. I don't know that I do. I'm not sure. I'm scared.
I also found all the hate mail I ever sent Carter. He saved it, and gave it to me when we met back up in 00. I held onto it. I'm thinking about publishing it in a chapbook. Just because I can. I can't wait to read it and find out what an angsty teen I was. I wonder, was my tongue as sharp then? Or did that develop over time?
Back to the Medicaid/SNAP thing. I'm hoping for at least $25 a week in SNAP benefits. That will keep me in bread, tuna, cheese, coffee, milk, sugar and nutrition shakes. And it will give Doc $100 bucks of his money back per month.
I also found the forms he needs to prove that the defaulted student loan that his IRS refunds goes to pay off is MY debt, not his. And since I don't have taxable income, he shouldn't be held responsible for it. They sent a letter explaining it. He doesn't believe me and I can't produce the letter, so I'm going to scour the IRS site tonight and see if I can find documented precedent to show him.
I also have to look into Medicaid dental benefits.
I'm confident I'll get Medicaid because I'm on SSI. I'm not so sure about the SNAP benefits, though. Doc's income is just on the borderline of poverty level for a household of two people. And we got deductions for rent, the truck, utilities, and something else, that I think put us solidly under the poverty line. It's all a matter of whether they accept my documents. I've given them the best of what I have. Anything else, and I have to start writing letters to big organizations for odd pieces of paper.
I also applied to backdate the Medicaid three months to help curb the cost of paying my shrink in cash. $175/hr, which is actually 15 minutes. Billed as Med Maintenance.
We're at war with the Billing Bitch my shrink employs. She just sent us a "bill" - a printed piece of paper with the Doctor's name on it and a random dollar amount with no itemization of my bill. Only a scrawled note that on 3/19, my phone number was invalid. Which is a lie. Oh, she also stamped it "Final Notice" in big red ink. The last time we got a bill from her was in December of last year, for another random dollar amount. Also, she does not note the $140 credit for what I paid last time I was there toward my balance. She is a shit biller. And a melodramatic one, at that. I really want to call her tomorrow and just go off on her. Firstly pointing out that if she looks at her caller ID, she will see the phone call is coming from the "invalid number", and going on from there. Another thing to look up, Patient Bill of Rights, which I believe includes being billed in a detailed manner for any doctor's services. I'm tired of being pushed around by this bitch and getting her little passive aggressive notes on my bill.
Once, a check for my co-pay bounced. It was on Doc's private account and he doesn't have overdraft protection on it, so bouncy bouncy. And Billing Bitch scrawls this note on my bill that it is ILLEGAL (emphasis hers) to write bad checks. WTF? He thought it was good. His account was 57 cents short. He didn't know that. She is such a pain in our asses.
No, nothing under the patient bill of rights. I'll have to battle her on straight ethics and the power of doing one's job correctly. It's hard enough to keep track of my medical expenses. She throws chaos into it. And it freaks Doc out when we get a $300 bill when I've only seen the Doctor once this year. It puts undue stress on him. That may be the way she spends her day being happy, but we don't need it. And I'm dying to use the phrase, "Remember, Lady, I'm batshit crazy. It would be best just to cooperate with me, or no one is going to get what they want, and I'm the one that won't care."
Dog, am I glad Doc went to work tonight. We had a good day. No kerfluffles. We almost kerfluffed, but he veered away from it.
So, my new dresser is really nice. Doc bought me some darkened brushed brass drawer pulls to replace the 70s ones on it now. I've so far piled quite a bit on top of it. I only stopped because the pile got taller than me. The dresser is tall, so it wasn't a real reach. I have yet to put anything actually in the dresser. And I have to get the old futon out of there. It smells like cat pee. Lelu used to pee on it. Lelu used to pee on a lot of things.
Get the futon out of my room.
Bring in baker's rack
Bring in black bookshelf
Fill both
That is my project for the week with Doc. Unfortunately I can't do the first three things on my own. The baker's rack and the book shelf are both taller than I am. And I am pretty sure the book shelf out weighs me. I'll take a picture of it when I get it in here and get the books on it. It has a very strange design that I fell in love with. We paid $50 for it. Which is a LOT for us. We only paid $40 for an almost new Lay-z-Boy brocade sofa. We're cheap. But we both fell in love with this shelf when we bought my new bed at the garage sale. We had to have it. And it will look so good in here.
I want to get the house settled. Cleaning out the mudroom was the first part of that. Slowly, but surely I will get this house in order. Doc has to clean off the dining room table, I have to clean off my desk. And set up the photo printer that my Tech Fairy sent me years ago that I never used. It doesn't have traditional ink cartridges. Each pack of photo paper for it comes with a cartridge with enough ink for the pack of photos. Very wasteful, but PHOTO PRINTING! And the paper I have for it is post cards. I may do something creative with that. A limited edition run of 36 of something.
I have also located approximately 700 notebooks, all with a few journal entries in them, and I'm sure, somewhere, forgotten poetry. I really have to just sit down and scan for a solid 8 hours. At least make a dent in the growing pile of journals stacking up on my desk.
I have reason to believe that peri-menopause is not far off. Doc looked horrified when I told him. i tried to comfort him by telling him Ob/Gyns were using Cymbalta off-label as a aid in the mood swings during menopause. And I'm already on that.
We were also soothed by a report of a new memory drug for Alzheimer's patients. Unfortunately, it is not one that can be translated to my memory problems, it effects specific genes that trigger Alzheimer's, so, not good for psychosis.
I told some condescending but well meaning atheist yesterday that I was fucking tired of them blaming religion on mental illness. I told him I had been a psychopath for 30 years and had a zero kill rate, mental illness was just used by an ignorant society as an excuse for behavior that is too scary to be really looked at. The pathology of a religious fanatic is much more organized than your average psychopath in thought and concentration. If I can't communicate to my partner that I need help taking a shower, how am I going to organize a terror attack? Or a prayer group? Religious extremists are focused on outward things, what other people are doing and saying and how to make them believe what you believe. Psychopaths are focused on the inside, where all the noise is coming from. Yes, it is possible to lash out with a weapon and take a few people out. But an organized attack is giving too much credit to broken minds.
What I'm saying is that we need to look deeper. We can't just keep slapping the Mental Illness label and stigma on any white person who acts out and kills or harms a bunch of people. We need to look deeper. We need to look at the ugly. We need to look at the obvious. ur society is failing, this is one symptom. As a mentally ill person, I am not taking the blame for society's ills. In fact, I blame society for making it so hard for me to fight for a "normal" life.
And it isn't just one group of people that are guilty of this scapegoating and treatment. It's everywhere. When the Kennedy's lobotomized one of their own and then locked her up for life because they had ruined her mind and couldn't face that fact every day of their precious lives, they implicitly gave the nation the permission to do the same. Take the troubled and do what you can to fix them, and if that doesn't work, hide them or hide from them. And even with all the work with Special Olympics, they do what is charitable while still avoiding the whole "mental illness" thing. Ever since I found out about that, I have hated the Kennedy's, their legacy, the whole thing. The whole entitled, denial, stigma-laden, selfish family. The Blessed Royals of Camelot that lobotomized their own sister. The rich disgust me. An article here, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, but are curious.
I have so much more I want to say. So much more I wanted to do tonight. At least I got the house dusted and vacuumed. that should help Doc's allergies tomorrow. Good night, everyone.