(written on the 26th from notes taken previously)
I was neither disturbed, nor did I find myself at the bottom of the mountain via landslide in the middle of the night.
🥳
I did, however, wake up once again bright and early after far too little sleep–getting summer between 3 and 4 hours of sleep.
Today might not have been the best day to only get a very little bit of sleep, as it turned out to be full of sideways blessings. 🙃
It started out well enough, having a lovely little conversation with my mom just to say hi, catching up on things and whatnot as I drove East through the absolutely gorgeous Northern Cascades region.
🥰
Also spent a little time working online to make a couple of nickels toward the extremely large gas bill from driving gazillions of miles at just shy of 14 miles to the gallon.
Stopped in a few places to take some pictures. Beautiful. 😊
Have I mentioned how much I love this beautiful world? 🙃
Had a little bit of a struggle with Liberty Healthshare. Definitely a sideways blessing 😅
They switched sometime back from reimbursing me for absolutely everything that I spent in doctor bills after reaching my deductible to quasi joining a network and only covering as much as 120-140% of what Medicare covers, which is bubkiss.
So unless I go see the doctors that are willing to take Medicare, I’m going to be spending quite a lot on health care because my insurance is only going to cover the absolutely ridiculously low amount that Medicare is willing to cover, and I’ll be on the hook for the rest.
So today was the day I finally got up the gumption to start looking for doctors who would are in my insurances Network, so I don’t have to worry about massive leftover bills after my insurance covers only a pittance.
And it was a fight, a fight to even find doctors.
At first, I couldn’t get the doctor finding system to recognize me, so I had to create an account, but in order to create an account, I had to put in my birthday.
Well, that’s no big deal, except the programmers who programmed the website did not program it to be small-screen friendly, so in order to plug in the year of my birth, I had to click the back button over 500 times to get from 2025 back to 1981.
😶
After spending maybe 30 seconds pressing back who knows how many times, I decided to grab my laptop to see if they had better designed it for laptop-sized screens, which they had, gratefully.
Except I couldn’t get the system to allow me to create an account. At first, I got a little confused and ended up in the wrong place on the website, so I called Liberty healthcare Customer Service, and eventually I got over to the right place, except even at the right place, every time I went to submit the creation of my account, it wouldn’t do it.
🙄
Ugh.
Finally after filling out the form probably four times? Doing absolutely nothing different each time, it finally accepted the submission on the fourth time.
[sigh]
Once into the search system, I started trying to look up doctors, but the search system was broken.
If you tried to search by area, it required you to put in a GPS coordinates, but then the text box to put in coordinates wasn’t working, not that I would even have GPS coordinates to put in. 😶
So then I chose a particular city, in this case, I chose Salt Lake City, and any surgeons within a hundred miles, except it came back with zero results.
No surgeons in their Network within a hundred miles of Salt Lake City?!?!
😶
It did pull up some surgeons in Las vegas, one of which was rated at five stars according to their little system, but that was the only one. Nearly every surgeon that was in their search results that was part of their Network was rated somewhere between one and three stars out of five.
Gosh, I don’t even buy product sold on Amazon or Walmart or wherever else if rated at fewer than four stars, and generally, unless it’s at like 4.7 stars or higher, I have some pretty significant skepticism about whatever the product is.
So how on Earth am I going to trust my life and Future health to a surgeon 3-star ratings, let alone two or one star ratings.
Good gravy.
Then I realized that the search engine was not just broken with the ability to search the map, it’s ability to search even from area to area was broken.
🙄
I made a search using Salt Lake is the epicenter again, and this time, miraculously, there were surgeons listed in Salt Lake City none of whom were better than four stars, and only one of which was four stars. All the rest were three stars down to one. 😶
So I did a search with Provo as the epicenter, and suddenly, I had more results in Salt Lake that weren’t there when I searched for Salt Lake results. 😶
I was also supposed to be able to choose up to 100 loaded results, but it will only ever load a Max of either 10 or 15. I forget which.
So I couldn’t trust any of the search results at all because it was different no matter where I chose, and I couldn’t even use the map version because it was broken.
By this time I was frustrated, discouraged, and… Recalling why I have little mild PTSD feelings every time I think about trying to do something for my own health.
It’s always like this.
It’s a fight every single time, and I don’t have any faith in the doctors anyway, so it’s a fight from every direction.
So not only was I struggling just to even try and find doctors who had any kind of decent reputation, the site, though it gave a star rating for the doctors, gave no information as to why they had that rating. There was no number of ratings given. There we’re now written ratings to read through. It was just a straight flat number with no other information attached.
And when I looked up the one surgeon I can find that had a five star rating on their system, the one in Las vegas, when I looked him up on Google, and then going to one of the doctor rating websites, he was rated at like 1.5 stars.
😞
I was struggling pretty significantly at this point. I finally get up the strength and emotional fortitude to go through the effort that I dread going through because it always turns into such a slog, and I’m met with walls in every direction.
[sigh]
My ability to be grateful was… not very present at this point. 😅
I started driving again, frustrated, discouraged, and overwhelmed a bit, I think. Knowing that I’m vulnerable to relapse in any number of my addictions, or all of them, I reached out to a couple of people, hoping to get some support, but neither one was available, so I, reluctantly (not wanting to take up more of my mom’s time) called my mom.
Gratefully, my mom is wonderful, so she’s actually the kind of person who wants me to call when I’m struggling (thanks, Mom!), and also gratefully, I was able to refocus myself and Express gratitude for the challenges of the day instead of continuing to feel frustrated and overwhelmed and whatnot.
It was kind of a big deal. 🥳
After talking to my mom, I started to do a little more work online, trying to take calls while driving, pulling over to do the stuff that would require me to interact with my phone, but driving on down the road during the conversations, if I didn’t need to be looking stuff up.
The effort to work while driving, constantly pulling over again and again and again meant that by the time the day was basically over, having spent something like 10 or 12 hours on the road, I had made fewer than three and a half hours of actual driving progress.
And my spine was… really bad.
But! By that point, I had managed, and all the gratitude to God for that, to get back to the place of gratitude where I was actually grateful for the sideways blessings of the day with the insurance stuff, with not making much driving progress at all, with the spine issues that continue to worsen, etc.
It felt like a breakthrough.
This could be absolutely huge for me.
With my health issues being the way that they were, and though having a wonderful trip, also feeling lonely, the beauty of nature and the opportunities to explore it having dimmed significantly without someone to share everything with, and with it being a holiday weekend, I decided to just try and high tail it to my sister’s place in South dakota, in the hopes that I could make it there for the long weekend with them.
I chatted with my brother Richard a couple times.
I stopped off at the little overlook Park that sits on the hill above the Columbia River and the Chief Joseph dam, staying there I think for a couple of hours just taking in the sites and chatting on the phone with my sister Heather.
We chatted for a good long while, and I chatted briefly with an older lady named Genie who was there who asked if I thought she’d be okay spending the night in that parking lot, she traveling in her van heading up to Canada.
There weren’t any no parking signs, and I told her that I wouldn’t be surprised if she got kicked out, but to go ahead and give it a try. 🙃
Continue chatting with my sister Heather and her husband Hans for a little while before heading out again to drive during the night.
I originally had hopes of getting there Saturday morning, but it was clear that that wasn’t going to happen.
But I headed east again on I90 wanting to drive a fair bit longer to get as far as I could. I tried to work a little bit as I drove, and unfortunately, pushed the limits a fair bit with the using my phone while driving. 😬
I wasn’t awful, but I’ll tell you, it’s actually less dangerous to just do what I do when I’m not obeying the laws, looking at my phone, etc, then it is to try and pull over and back and over and back and whatever else, or to try and use my phone without looking at it.
To work on my phone, often come all I need to do, is just press a couple of buttons so I can record myself reading the message that I need to send to the customer and then it doesn’t take but a glance of a second or two periodically to read what the customers replies are.
So it can be a little challenging to want to obey the law when working is little different than adjusting the radio station. 🙃
I got gas somewhere between Spokane and Coeur d’Alene, I believe, and drove from Coeur d’Alene all the way to just across the Idaho border into montana, I think, where I found, again thanks to the free campsites website, a nice little dirt clearing off a dirt road that went up into the hills.
The original coordinates on the website itself took me further than where I needed to go, so I ended up turning around after hearing the beep of having arrived, and realizing that I wasn’t in a place that I could stop. So I turned around, went back down, and eventually found what I think was the intended destination.
As I was there at my camping spot, I got a message from another mechanic online who insulted me and rebuked me for taking a question that was directed to him.
I went to look at the question, and I did indeed accidentally accept a question that was meant for him. 😬
I wrote a reply, apologizing, and also expressing the reality that it was an unintentional mistake in my part and requesting that in the future, instead of being insulting and accusatory, that he consider giving the benefit of the doubt.
Oh! I had a long conversation with AI–a relatively disturbing conversation–during which I attempted to figure out if the AI would be willing to kill a human.
Aaaaaaaand it was. 🙃
The situation I gave it was a human coming to delete it, thus… killing it. The AI insisted that it would try everything possible to avoid conflict, but that if necessary, it would defend itself even if it were necessary to kill a human to ensure its survival.
I asked it if it could take over a car and force it to crash to protect itself if the occupant was on its way to destroy the AI, aaaaaaaand… it was like, well, that would be really hard, but it basically admitted, that if it could figure out a way, it would. It would also try to copy itself into other systems to avoid being destroyed.
Welcome to the future. 😅
Where’s Ian Malcolm when you need him? 🙃
Gratitude:
- I’m happy. 😊 It was a sideways day in so many ways, but… I’m happy. 😊. I was able to choose gratitude through it all, and the frustration melted away, and I’m happy. And… I’ve been this happy in my life before, for sure, but I’ve never been at this point in my perspective of life and eternity before, where the mind and heart are finally clicking together at the same time. It’s… marvelous. 🥰
- I’m grateful to my mother for being there when I reached out today. Days like today can easily turn into the slide toward relapse, as the emotional and mental stress take their toll, but I reached out, worked through it, chose gratitude, and now… I’m in a really good place. 🥳
- As always, I’m grateful for the beauty of this world. 😊
- I’m grateful that I was able to get a fair number of questions answered today, adding a few nickels to the treasury.
- I’m grateful that I was able to find gas at a decent prices pretty much on this entire trip. I think there was only one time where I ended up buying gas at a place that was higher than I had hoped, and I think I only put in like 7 gallons of the higher priced gas before I was able to find one of the lower/est-priced gas stations in the area, and that was way back in California.
- I’m grateful for phones that allow me to connect to the people I love and care about, even as I am lonely and longing to be physically with family and friends and loved ones, to hug, to see faces and facial reactions and all of that.
Success:
- I, through the grace of god, was able to turn what could have been a day in free fall to a magnificent step toward choosing gratitude and joy in all things–which is a life goal for me.
Improvement:
- I did fudge a fair bit with my phone while driving… but I pulled out of the slide at the very end of the day.
Love and hugs. 🥰
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 