As usual i'll start out by apologizing for how long it's been since i've given an update on Amanda's cancer treatment because it has been months.
Bad
news today. LA hospitals remain completely overrun with Covid cases, so
they are still not scheduling surgeries. We had been told in December
that they were expecting to start scheduling again on February 1, and
her surgeons are pushing to expedite the process as quickly as possible;
she is supposedly among the first three patients that they want to see
when things open up again. Being as February 1 is now six days away and
we still had not heard a confirmation, she called this morning to follow
up on that. They are now saying no sooner than February 22. We have now
watched the surgery date slide from end of December to beginning of
January to beginning of Feburary to now end of Feburary.
Surgery
was supposed to take place between 1-2 months after the end of chemo.
She finished chemo October 20, which puts us over 3 months out already,
and now looking at another month at minimum. Meanwhile, the tumor has
felt bigger again, and she's experiencing more new pain associated with
it. We have concern that it may be growing, and the delay may be causing
it to spread again, possibly into more lymph nodes. She was expecting
hormone treatments for the next 5-10 years, starting after surgery;
they've begun those already in an attempt to keep this under control
until surgery happens. She's been on them for three weeks already. They
can't give her any more chemo.
She
had a breakdown as soon as she got off that phone call. Chemo all
summer, for what?? Self-isolating, not going to work, not seeing a n y b
o d y , not going anywhere for the last 10 months, for what?? It's
hard being this far away from our support network but it's not safe to
travel and it's not like we could see all of our friends and family if
we came back to Wisconsin anyway. Wisconsin is handling the pandemic
worse than California is. The only reason their numbers aren't as high
as LA's is because of population density.
I
suggested trying to go elsewhere for surgery but it's basically
impossible. Our health insurance is only good in California, and even to
try and go someplace less Covid-ridden for surgery would face other
slowdowns. They won't operate unless they have an existing
doctor-patient relationship, which would involve finding a new surgical
team and having new consultations and probably redoing testing and
basically starting over. Which logically should take a lot longer than
waiting it out for LA hospitals to become available but at this point
frankly i don't know. They say LA county's numbers are going down but
the hospitals are still in pretty bad shape. Who knows how much longer
this will take.
As
if that weren't enough bad news for one day, i checked my EDD account
just now. I had posted a couple weeks ago that, after ten months of
calling unemployment, sometimes up to 50 times a day, being told every
time i actually talked to a human (6 times) that a specialist would need
to call me back because of the complexity of my situation, and that
specialist never calling back, and being told 3 times that all record of
my having contacted them or created an account had been lost, i finally
got the claim at least filed. Finally. In January of 2021. And they
were backdating it to Feburary of 2020. Well, today i found out that my
entire claim has been denied. Not only are they denying me regular
unemployment, i am somehow not even eligible for the pandemic
assistance. They sent me a separate denial for each week of the claim.
The ones from the weeks where i actually worked say "denied because you
were employed full time this week" (which, i mean, i expected to get
partial or no benefits for those weeks) and the ones from weeks where i
didn't work just say "denied" with no explanation. All of the messages
say "your maximum eligible benefit has already been paid out." They have
paid me exactly $0.
We
are grateful to everyone who contributed to our GoFundMe over 2020,
you're truly the reason we stayed alive. Other than that we've just been
eating into what we had saved for retirement. This whole time i didn't
feel like it was that big of a deal, because what we took out of there
wasn't more than i had expected to receive when my unemployment finally
came through (as i was expecting more than just the pandemic
assistance), and i figured we could just put it back. Now it looks like
it never will. Obviously i'll try appealing the decision but given the
way this whole thing has gone so far i'm not optimistic.
So
that's where we're at. It sucks and there is nothing we can do about
it. The helplessness is the worst part. Fuck cancer and fuck
coronavirus.
