Insurance companies...... ARRRGGGGHHHHH

Yesterday we went to the hospital and paid off what I was sure was my last bill from all the procedures done a few months back. It was a good feeling. If you pay it all at once you get a measly 10% off, but every little bit helps, right!

We stopped to get the mail on the way home and I was shocked to find another large bill. They just keep coming.

Now we were told with our insurance we had a $750 deductible we had to meet right away and then our out of pocket max would be $2000. I have paid over the $2000. With this newest bill about $2500.00. Calling my insurance company I now hear I can pay up to $4000.00 out of pocket. When I get to $4000 will they raise it again?

So knowing that I am going to have to cancel my doctor appointments I have set up. My primary doc can manage my asthma since it isn't bad and he will have to manage any new cancer growths I get since my dermatologist isn't on the first level of my insurance plan either. If fact there aren't any dermatologists on the first level of my plan.

I hate insurance companies. I get a EKG. Do I get billed for just the EKG? No..... I get billed for the woman doing the EKG, the doctor reading the EKG and the 2nd doc double checking the first doc's reading. I probably have a charge for the paper and ink tacked on also. I get the growth cut out. That costs me the anesthesia, room, nurse, doc, medications. Someone runs the tissue to lab, another cost. One person gets it ready and looks at it. Cost. The pathologist checks it out, cost. The lab person goes back to surgery and says all clear, cost. Doc sews me up, cost. Bring me to recovery, cost. lab types the report, cost. Nurses get me ready to go, cost.

Now all that used to always cost but not separately. It would all be included in the surgery cost. You would get one bill. Then they figured out they could bill the insurance company for more money if they do it this way. Now I get bills from the hospital, bills from the lab, bills from anesthesia, bills from the heart doc who read my ekg. Bills from radiology who read my chest xray. Each costs me 20 %. $90 here, $110 there., $650 for someone else.

Ask me what I think it is? Insurance fraud. Consumer fraud. They have figured out how to milk the absolute most out of your insurance and you pay the cost. and pay, and pay.

Now I could get this all free. I could quit my job and go on welfare, free health care. I could be here illegally, free health care. But no. I am in the income group that is paying the majority of all the cost for the free loaders we have on the system. I can't afford to get treated so they can run to the emergency room and have their colds and sore throats treated. Ticks me off. And I pay a huge amount of money a month for my insurance. Long gone are the days when my job provided a good insurance plan for us.

So I am canceling my cancer doc, canceling my asthma doc and having do not treat or DNR paperwork drawn up. And what is really bad? It is only going to get worse. Because of practices like I talked about above. Double and triple billing you for every procedure. Like my going to the doc and getting a swab for the flu, but getting billed for a chest xray I didn't get. Because they get better reinbursed for a chest xray then they do a swab. And they don't think patients check their office visit bills. But I do. everysince my last doc keep billing my insurance for the congested heart failure I wasn't having problems with. What did my ingrown toenail have to do with my heart? Why they could bill me more, thats what!

Sad new world

Sweden just passed a gender approved abortion bill. Having a girl when you wanted a boy? Abort it. Its just tissue.....

China finds out a woman hid her one year old 2nd child who was a girl from the authorities. They only allow one child. The child was put down. The sister still visited her homeland because after all..... the law is the law.

Obama approves abortions up until delivery. After all..... a woman can always change her mind.

And stem cell research? Its just tissue...... it doesn't matter that adult stem cell is more effective..... that bone marrow transplants work...... its just people, whoops, tissue. And do they really matter at all?



Sorry but yes it does. YES IT DOES....... YES IT DOES.

My take on Carbon emissions.

A person breaths in oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is an end product in organisms that obtain energy from breaking down sugars, fats and amino acids with oxygen as part of their metabolism, in a process known as cellular respiration. This includes all plants, animals, many fungi and some bacteria. In higher animals, the carbon dioxide travels in the blood from the body's tissues to the lungs where it is exhaled. In plants using photosynthesis, carbon dioxide is absorbed from the atmosphere.


Plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by photosynthesis, also called carbon assimilation, which uses light energy to produce organic compounds (cellulose, lipids, and various proteins) by combining carbon dioxide and water. Free oxygen is released as gas from the decomposition of water molecules, while the hydrogen is split into its protons and electrons and used to generate chemical energy via photophosphorylation. This energy is required for the fixation of carbon dioxide in the Calvin cycle to make 3-phosphoglycerate that is used in metabolism, to construct sugars that can be used as an energy source within the plant through respiration and as the raw material for the construction of more complex organic molecules, such as polysaccharides, nucleic acids and proteins during growth.

So reducing our carbon foot prints would be a bad thing. In the cycle of things all living things depend on our being able to take in rich oxygen from the atmosphere and breathing out the carbon dioxide that makes living plants grow which in turn create oxygen and sustains all life. Its a good thing and it has been going on since the beginning of time. Wasn't God brilliant. Drop the carbon dioxide level even a little and it would be toxic for plants, thus being very very bad for humans. Increase the carbon dioxide level and it is toxic to animal life, also very bad for us.

So the point I am trying to make. I don't need to store my carbon footprints, buy any carbon footprints, watch my carbon credits or any of the other wacko things "I want to get richer Al Gore" is trying to shove down our throats. Simple fact....we breath, we exhale, plants breath, they exhale. O2 to CO2 and back to O2. Its a good thing baby. Go jump in a lake Al.

The long stretch off.

I made it to my long stretch off. Another thing to be grateful for. It was truly a brutal week at work. We haven't been quite that busy for a long time and my body will be grateful for the rest. Except. I might ride my bike tonight. Right now it looks like rain, but it is suppose to clear up and be nice.

I see the stimulus checks are going out now. I find it amusing one of the first ones to arrive was to a woman who has been dead for 40 years. Want to bet she voted for Obama? Acorn is being investigated for voted fraud. Surprise, surprise and even with all the payola money they got for their help in the election they may get their just rewards. Probably not though.

Chester the guinea pig is still living here. There seems to be an unspoken agreement he is now home. I wouldn't be happy thinking about him living in the rec room alone in the basement. He is a friendly little critter and seems to like to be spoiled. He likes to be brushed and have his chin scratched. There are worse things then having him around. My oldest also seems to have left half his clothes he no longer liked and shoes. Old bills and letters. Why do they never completely move out? And he borrowed our mower a week ago and never returned it.

Remember the cysto thing awhile back? Using the same bag? Well there is a lawsuit of course. Some lawyer jumped on that bandwagon and is stirring everything up. I never did go get the blood work. I think the chances of getting anything is slim to none and I certainly am not going to sue my favorite doc. Its things like this that end up costing us more in the long run.

Well, I am ready for bed. It is calling me. Sleep, sleep. Sounds great.

Great Video

Steve Harvey the comedian did this and check out the reaction from the audience. Religion is dead?

Presidential comparison quiz

Subject: Presidential comparison quiz


If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had given Tony Blair a set of inexpensive and useless (to Tony Blair's UK video formatting) DVDs, when Tony Blair had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had visited Austria and made reference to the non-existent "Austrian language," would you have brushed it off as a minor slip?

If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current on their income taxes, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had proposed to double the national debt, which had taken more than two centuries to accumulate, in one year, would you have approved?

If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?

So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive?

Can't think of anything? Don't worry. He's done all this in 10 weeks -- so you'll have three years and nine-and-a-half months to come up with an answer.





Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

2 more nights

2 more nights of work. Tonight I am charge. Tonight I get to do staffing. Lets hope it is good.
Be careful out there. We don't want any accidents tonight.


Drink in moderation, we don't want any accidents tonight.


Smell the lilac's and enjoy your night.

Code Brown Weekend

It is true. One of the duties of a nurse is bedpan duty. If poo bothers you, you would not be a good nurse. And sometimes you have a code brown weekend.

We have code blues, people who stop breathing. Code Greens, people who are out of control. Code red.... Trauma and expect lots of blood. Code browns though?

They are not called overhead and people from all over the hospital don't run to help. You wish they would though. Really wish they would.

There are many reasons for code browns, C-diff is a big one. Every 5 minutes some poor soul makes a mad dash to the bathroom, (if the nurse is lucky) and it lasts about 4 days. This weekend however the code browns were procedure induced.

There are certain tests we do where it is to the doc's advantage to have the patients bowels squeaky clean. The doc's sit in their shiny clean office and decide to order this test on your sweet sleepy patient.

You bring in mass quantities of liquid laughingly called...... Go Lytely....... Ha Ha Ha. Sweet patient gets to start drinking 3000 cc's of this liquid about a hour before they are thinking of turning in for the night.

If drinking 3ooo cc's of lime flavored liquid doesn't make you sick to your stomach, "loosely 3/4's of the patients do get sick to their stomach", the next 6 to 8 hours will make you turn green. Sleep is out of the question.

If the nurse is lucky the patient will make it to the restroom and you just give lots of sympathy. If your unlucky, "like I was this weekend" the patient soils the bed.. Every 5 minutes. Sometimes as soon as you turn the patient back onto the clean linen. All night long. And if your really lucky you have 2 patients that are getting prepped and neither of them can make it to the bathroom. Meaning your changing their beds every 2 minutes average. Plus when they are not missing the bedpan they are throwing up all over.

Now add in the fact that after 12.5 hours of your shift if they are still passing stuff that isn't as clear as the stuff that comes out of faucets you get to give them enema's. Big enema's. Til clear enema's. So over the weekend out of my 4 12.5 hour nights I had 3 nights I did this for the lucky patients. I gave 9 enema's this weekend. I changed beds an estimate of 300 times. And while I was giving one patient an enema the confused lady in the bed next door pulled off her colostomy bag and her bowels which had been sleeping since surgery decided to start working again and there was code brown all over the room.

So...... If anyone out there thinks nurses don't earn the pay we get. If anyone out there wants to change jobs. If anyone out there thinks they might like to be a nurse. Make sure code browns don't bother you. Because as they say.... S--t happens. Often.

By the way, how does a partially torn rotator cuff handle a weekend like this. Not very well.

Mad at the Christian Children's Fund.

The Christian Children's fund announced today they were dropping the Christian from their name, it was to hard to get funding with Christian in the name. What a bunch of hypocrites. What would Christ do? Not that. Will they get any money from me? Not anymore.

Mother's Day flowers

My son gave me these, aren't they pretty on the love seat.

Why Mothers Cry

Why Mothers Cry...

"Why are you crying?" he asked his mom.

"Because I'm a mother," she told him.

"I don't understand," he said. His mom just hugged him and said, "You never will!" Later the little boy asked his father why Mother seemed to cry for no reason.

"All mothers cry for no reason," was all his dad could say.

The little boy grew up and became a man, still wondering why mothers cry. So he finally put in a call to God and when God got on the phone the man said, "God, why do mothers cry so easily."

God said, "You see son, when I made mothers they had to be special. I made their shoulders strong enough to carry the weight of the world, yet gentle enough to give comfort. I gave them an inner strength to endure childbirth and the rejection that many times come from their children.

"I gave them a hardiness that allows them to keep going when everyone else gives up, and to take care of their families through sickness and fatigue without complaining.

"I gave them the sensitivity to love their children under all circumstances, even when their child has hurt them very badly. This same sensitivity helps them to make a child's boo-boo feel better and helps them share a teenager's anxieties and fears.

"I gave them a tear to shed. It's theirs exclusively to use whenever it's needed. It's their only weakness. It's a tear for mankind."


Best Wishes for Mothers Day!.