Update January 25, 2021

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.