John's been denied critical medical test!

Family and friends, please read and heed!

While some are so busy raving about Obamacare and how no one can be denied coverage (even illegals,) maybe it’s time to really think about assessing its merits, about exactly what 'coverage' you will get, especially when its effects hit this close to home!  Insurance companies aren’t going to sit idly by and lose billions of dollars over Obamacare, and are finding new ways to absorb these tremendous extra costs.  Ever hear of death panels?  They are real, folks!  Emails have been going around for quite a while detailing various American’s dilemmas with being denied life-saving procedures or surgeries because of their age, etc.  Now it has come home to John.  That’s right, John, who has been having this annual test for five years since his three heart-attacks and five stints.

John called his cardiologist’s office to set up his annual physical and nuclear stress test and was informed that it is now disallowed by Arizona Blue Cross/Blue Shield, as well as any other insurance company that they are aware of, stating this is directly due to Obamacare . . . the insurance companies are cutting costs by denying more and more life-saving tests/procedures.  The nuclear stress test is so critical because it is the one diagnostic test that definitively shows potential blockages going into and out of the heart . . . and can thereby prevent a heart attack, and it is the test that is directly responsible for John being alive and well today.  They shoot the nuclear material in his vein before he steps on the treadmill, and they take a detailed picture before the stress test, during and after the heart has rested when the test is over.  If they find damage or blockage (which they have in the past because a few years ago John was clogging up faster than the kitchen sink) then they call for further tests, mainly an Angiogram.  Because of the combined benefit from these tests, the resulting stints and medicines John was put on, he is fine and has passed every annual test with flying colors.  But that doesn’t mean his situation couldn't change.  So in a nutshell what the insurance company is saying is: So sorry, not allowing this preventative diagnostic test, John . . . and what they are really hoping for is that John will just drop over with a heart attack and die . . . save them any additional expense.   

This test, now that we are forced to pay for it out of pocket, is outrageously expensive!  And THIS after we already pay $1,000 a month for a personal group insurance major medical policy with a $5,000 deductible each, and after we received a notice three months ago from Az. Blue Cross/Blue Shield that, exclusive of the annual birthday threshold increase and annual cost basis adjustment they make, they were raising the whole groups' rate per month to cover ‘Recent unforeseen cost expenditures.’  Our added monthly premium amounted to $300.00. About a 40% hike in our rates out of the blue.  We jumped from $700.00 a month to $1,000.00.  Now we’re being denied a vitally important test which would alert John’s cardiologist if John needs further care to prevent another heart-attack. 

Frankly, John and I are livid.  You should be, too.  So please, friends and family, before you offer support or praise for Obamacare, ask yourself how you would feel if this were to happen to you personally, your spouse or your children!     John says, “Well, I've survived three heart attacks, so I guess we’ll just have to see if I can survive a fourth.”  We’ll see.

CREEPY IS AS CREEPY DOES!

Hello all:  

During a recent family conversation a subject was brought up that I wanted to share with you . . . a story . . . well, an experience my family had some years ago.  Despite everything that has happened to us as a family which could be labeled 'paranormal,' no experience has been as flat-out, Twilight Zone creepy/scary as this.  Even during this most recent discussion, my hubby, the girls and I were still scratching our heads and giving a little shudder over the experience, wondering just what the hell happened that one afternoon while we were four-wheeling?

We were camping at Alamo Lake in Arizona for the weekend, which is located in Southwestern Arizona.  The lake is surrounded by gently rolling hills which are covered in low profile desert vegetation.   These multitude of hills are crisscrossed with dirt roads from years of mining exploration and off-road exploring, or four-wheeling as Arizonans call it. Having gotten our fill of fishing for the day, we struck out in our Suzuki Samari late that afternoon to go explore the area.  We were fairly avid rock hounds with a long history of four-wheeling the Arizona back roads, and though the girls weren't overly excited about bouncing up and down on dirt roads in the Samari (very similar to a jeep with the stiffest of shock absorbers,) they were even less excited about the prospect of more fishing, so off we went.   

We found our first dirt road easy enough and followed it several miles to the crest of a long hill, and there it dead-ended.  We turned the Samari around and took a long appreciative look at the panorama of the lake below us in the far distance. The dirt road had a soft, almost sand-like composition and the tracks made by our SUV cut deep and clean in the dirt.  Our tracks should've been easy to follow back . . . except that when hubby made the u-turn and headed back down the same road following our tracks, about three miles down the road they abruptly disappeared, and a few hundred feet further the road dead-ended . . . again.  Okay, this was weird, but at this point we were only shaking our heads, confused.  We took a look at our position in respect to the lake. Yes, no doubt this was the road we'd come in on, so why didn't it go back to the main highway?  We u-turned a second time and . . . a few hundred feet back once again there were no tracks, on the same road we'd been on all this time.  And our u-turns were very tight, we weren't meandering around in long loops.

We all exclaimed in unison, "What happened to our tire tracks?  Where'd they go?"  as we progressed along the road.  We finally got up to the same crest of the hill, still with no tracks before us, and this time the road kept going out into the desert wilderness.  Now what had happened to the dead-end?  By this time it was getting a little too close to sundown and we were all getting a little too nervous.

"There's the damn lake right there- we can see it," my hubby gestured at our front window as once again we turned around along the crest of the hill.  We weren't venturing a foot further into Alamo's eerie Bermuda Triangle.  "So help me, if I have to I'm heading straight out through this desert towards the lake!  I'll get us to that main highway!  To hell with these bizarre roads!"  I asked him to please not do that, not yet, because there were too many moguls and bushes which made it unsafe in my opinion to just strike out through the desert.  Without a dirt road we wouldn't be able to tell what kind of drop-off might be over the next ridge.  I could tell my hubby wasn't giving deference to my request for long, especially when he snapped back with, "I'm not gettin' us stuck out here in the dark in this Twilight Zone!"  The girls had started whining from the back seat, obviously I was getting more out-voted with each passing minute.  

Halfway back down this same main dirt road, which, by the way, did show our prior tire tracks this time, there was a suddenly a road branching off where there had been no other side road before.  Hubby took that road . . . and there were our tire tracks!  Aarrrgh!  Now our family unit was getting seriously creeped out.  We took that road off in a direction paralleling the crest of the hill and . . . it dead-ended!  We u-turned around again, following our tracks to the main road and turned right, back towards the lake.  Several hundred yards further and we found another off-shoot road that also hadn't been there before, so we took it next . . . all the way to where it dead-ended.  By now our whole family had a case of the jitters as we watched the sun slide behind the mountain and the landscape grow sinister with creeping shadows.  I stole a sideways glance at hubby's expression and I knew we were going four-wheeling for real.  We turned around in a u-turn one more time and followed our tracks back to what should have been the junction with the main dirt road, but there was no junction.  No junction! This time this small secondary road went all the way back to the main highway! WTF????????

My hubby let out a string of expletives which my girls are still fond of using to this day!  We have no explanation for what happened out there in that desert; what kind of phenomena we bumped into.  Some kind of energy vortex?  It felt like a parallel universe.  Your guess is as good as ours.  There were no other tracks besides ours on those roads to have misled us.  There wasn't one second of this hour-long tour de farce where we weren't absolutely sure of our location and the road we were on.  We could see the lake and our position to it at all times, for Pete's sake, which is what made the experience so frustrating.  And scary. Our tire tracks just kept doing a frightening slight of hand- now you see  'em, now you don't.  Roads kept changing under our tires, appearing and disappearing seemingly at will.

So, my friends, if you ever decide to venture out anywhere near Alamo Lake, take a compass, water, and a video camera!  You'll want to document your experience if you happen upon Arizona's Bermuda Triangle!  And tell someone where you're going . . . so they can send out a rescue party if you disappear!  Later, friends.   

MERMAIDS? INTRIGUING . . .

Hello all:  We have returned home from our vacation and it was wonderful, if for nothing else than the fact that hubby's internal parts held together just fine through the trip and there were no emergencies to contend with, other than losing our kitty along the way to kitty AIDS. That cut deeply, but the trip was so much more than that one heartache.  It was the best trip we've had in a long time.  Spent treasured time with family and went on many new adventures, including finding the final resting place to pay my respects to some of my relatives I  never knew. Now I'm home and settled in for five minutes,  and though slightly embarrassed to admit it, tuning into a show that sounded completely far-fetched. While making sure I was alone in the living room last night I watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel about mermaids.  Seriously.  I'm still shaking my head.  A show claiming to have had actual remains of a mermaid as well as capturing one.  Notice I used the word had.

I have to say after watching the two hour special, some of their evidence is compelling, no doubt.  And mermaids seem to be woven through our cultural depictions all the way back to caveman walls. Could another parallel species of humans have evolved under our oceans?  Isn't that intriguing to imagine.  Why not?  If so, then the next question I would have to ask is are they thriving, or struggling?  I would guess the latter, because man is delving further and further into the domain of the deep, making it harder for anything to continue its existence undiscovered.

The documentary made a plausible hypothesis of how man and mermaid could have split apart on the evolutionary chain, one taking to land, the other finding their best chance for survival under the waves.  I studied the antique photographs they had depicting large whales and sharks pulled from the ocean with intricate spears sticking out of them of unknown origin. I watched the videos highlighted in the show; a boat of fishermen in some South American country (I think it was South America) dragging up a web-handed creature in their net and so shocked they dropped the net back into the sea; a video showing South African officials raiding the scientists' office and carting off all evidence; a sonar blip of a webbed hand slapping against the lens, and finally the cell phone video taken by a boy on the beach here in the U.S. showing a beached and trapped mermaid lunging at the boy as he poked at it with a stick.  Pretty awesome looking stuff . . . and yet . . .

  

My skeptical side lumps this in with Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster.  Even with the impressive videos and build up of facts given by those interviewed in the documentary, I find myself drawing the same conclusions . . . why is it that with all documentaries of this sort, physical evidence is nonexistent?  Either there never was any to begin with, or it has been lost, confiscated or destroyed, so all you are left with is a convincing video and some scientist or intrepid explorer swearing on camera that what they experienced was real to the max. Some argue that a video is physical evidence.  I'm sorry.  Perhaps I lived in the 'show-me' state of Missouri in a past life, because even with all that's happened to me I still have to see things with my own eyes to fully suspend disbelief.  I am much more comfortable with concrete evidence.

These compelling videos make me gasp for a flash point of time and exclaim, "Hell, yeah!" until I remember that  Hollywood has made Superman fly, E.T. phone home and Thor make my heart go pitter-pat in triple time.  Making a seemingly irrefutable video?  Yeah, totally within their capabilities.   But if there really are mermaids coexisting with us on this largely unexplored earth, would I want one captured just to satisfy everyone's curiosity and my own skeptical nature?  Positively not. If by some miracle they do exist below the deep blue they need to be left alone to just . . . be.  The same right every human counterpart on land wants.  If they are there, I will paraphrase Tiny Tim's famous line; God bless them all, each and every one.  May they stay safe and untouched by mankind's destructive tendencies until if or when we are evolved enough to share our planet with them in peace.   Later, all!