Things were going too well. I won't pretend that's anything other than an excuse. More accurately, I need an angle to write about things so let's just pretend that I believe things going "too well" is a bad sign. Things are much better than they were last summer. Last summer was bad on an epic scale that I hope to never see again. The pain was screaming pain all the time with record amounts of stress keeping me from resting. It turns out that sleep is somewhat important to successful pain management.
There was a moment over the winter or Spring - I do not remember which - when the pain was so bad that I was either asleep or in agony. At the same time, MSN decided to make me jump through hoops in order to use email here on my PC. I tried to jump through the hoops but failed miserably. At the same time, settings changed on my tablet email which is also through MSN. I took months to figure out that my email was disappearing out of my email inbox after two days whether I'd read it or not. Considering my mental state of the time, it slipped my mind that I should have been getting certain bills. I was just too sick to perform those duties that I'd assigned myself and too sick to ask anyone else to do it.
Eventually, I reached a point when I felt a little better. It might be more accurate for me to say that I was worried enough to jump through extra hoops to find the information that I needed. We can skip ahead a bit to the point where I had ditched the provider who had managed to jack up prices two to three times while I was current on my bill. That phone call might have been funny if I hadn't been in agony the entire time. It turned out that I needed to renew my special fixed rate plan every so often and the phone person would not accept that I cannot depend on my ability to pay close attention to these things. I refused to enroll in a plan that would save me money for 90 days or something like that and then become absurdly expensive unless I remember to renew after that. Eventually, I resorted to rudeness and informed the phone person that she would either cancel my plan so that I could go back to the normal plan (with another company) and deal with mild price fluctuations or she could get her supervisor to do so.
Eventually, I found myself with a gigantic bill but with a foolproof plan for dealing with it. The first plan that unraveled was the plan to use email to stay current on bills and my technology just couldn't keep pace with my increasing disability. The second plan was to use my giant tax return to pay off the unpleasantly large bill. It was upsetting to know that I wasn't going to have enough money to replace the furniture for which the insurance adjuster never approved either a list of replacement items or gave me a dollar limit on. My brain is already falling apart so it's not surprising how that slipped.
I was already accepting the terms of no replacement furniture, no vacation and no splurging shopping trip when that plan fell apart. After a decade or so of being able to garnish Melissa's part of our federal tax return, the Department of Education chose this year to carry out the threat. I might not have noticed in a normal year but this wasn't the best year for me to take responsibility and handle things. Some people would relish the chance to say they told me so but I would simply hang up on them or shut my door in their faces. This was the year of serious complications and serious downturns in my health. I defy you to figure any of this out with a screaming headache and vertigo so bad that you fell out of chairs a couple of times. That left us with no money to pay off debts or pay our property tax bill for the year. That's not even including another bill I can't run down but suspect the "I told you so" people might have taken care of it. The shame of that mere possibility is almost enough to kill me.
Nonetheless, it takes more than that to beat me. In 2012, we took out a loan against Melissa's 401(k) plan and we're scheduled to pay it off this year. (The payments were so small that I never noticed the automatic payroll deductions.) So, we can take the money we do have/will get in the next seven days and pay that off half a year early. This makes us eligible to take out a new loan of the same type with no nasty liens on anything. We can borrow enough money to pay everything possibly even including replacement furniture and pay it off relatively painlessly. That's better than effectively taking out loans from the county and the power company at the maximum interest rate allowable by law.
As you can see, I have a backup plan for this which you might call Plan C. Let's just ignore the fact that Plan C will not even get me to where I should have been at this time last year. Let's ignore the fact that I'm in absurd amounts of pain. (Pay no attention to the spike being driven into the side of your head, the swelling in your joints and the fact that your persistent cough gives you whiplash style pain.) I have a plan to survive today and make it to tomorrow. That's progress.
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