Christopher Schmidt

8:30am: Drive Jess to therapy.
9am: Call Gastro number that Mt. Auburn gave us and insist that they give Jess the appointment they promised they would try to give her tomorrow.
9:45AM: Accept defeat, and deal with the fact that her appointment will be on Tuesday instead.
10AM: Take Jess back home from Therapy.
11AM: Drive north to get the kids from Jason's.
1PM: Return home with kids in tow. Presumably having stopped at McDonalds or the like on the way home in order to pacify them.
2PM: Go into work in an attempt to make up for lost time.
2:15PM: Get call back from Gastro person telling me that they can fit her in today after all
2:45PM: Take Jess to doc
3:00PM: Get told that it was really just a mistake, and they'll have to see her tomorrow.
4:00PM: Curl up in a ball and whimper.

Jess got a CT scan. They found nothing. She had an extremely rude doctor who didn't consult her chart tell her that there was nothing wrong with her and that the pain medication she was on was unnecessarily strong. (This, when the morphine wasn't even able to alleviate the pain? Thanks.) He talked to the gastro department, which promised an appointment for tomorrow or the next day when we call tomorrow. Which means next month, based on past experience, but whatever.

As a result of the CT scan, we had Jay keep the girls overnight, so I'll be going up to get them tomorrow. We eventually got home around 6:30 after arriving at the ER at 1. Not the worst ever. (Better than staying overnight, in my opinion, since the drugs they were giving Jess weren't helping anyway.)

I crashed out for a couple hours -- didn't get much sleep last night -- and then went out to Cindarella's for a late dinner. Which was damn good, although my stomach disagreed and decided to get rid of it as soon as I got home.

Since then, I've just been dicking around online. I did get some good news about presenting at FOSS4G this fall, and was able to book hotel room with a coworker on Friday, so I'm excited about that.

Nothing much going on other than that.

Over the past week or so, I've been getting bills for my hospital visits last week. There were a whole bunch of seperate bills, for the different times I was there, but most of them came last week.

This week, another one came. Different color, but non-inclusive with the other ones. I called the number, and found it was for the physician's time, and that the hospital/ER time is billed seperately. She asked me if I had health insurance (no) if I wanted to apply for Free Care (I don't qualify) and when she found the answers, offered to pass me off to someone who might be able to get me a discount.

Cool. She did. I got a discount. I gave my credit card number to pay, transferred over to the hospital department to pay that bill. Needed to get a call back from the manager. While I'm waiting, Sarita, from Mt. Auburn calls me back and tells me that some woman just called up and tried to pay my bill. Confused, I ask Jess. Not Jess. Call Jess's mom. Not Jess's mom. At this point I'm really confused, because I only got the bill about 20 minutes before -- how the hell could someone else have had the account number from the bill I just got? Call the hospital back to tell them to just forget about random benefactor, and pay my bill.

Me: "I have no idea who it was, so we can just ignore that."
Her: "Okay, I won't run the card then."
Me: "Sounds good. So we're all set now, right?"
Her: "Yep. Did you want to pay today, while I've got you?"
Me: "Uh. I just called and gave you a card number, right?"
Her: "When?"
Me: "About 10 minutes ago..."
Her: "Oh God, so that was you. I'm so sorry."

Turns out that the woman who called up wanting to pay my bill was... you guessed it, me!

Ah well. Everything's paid off now. (Well, put on credit, anyway.) So I don't have to worry about it. And hey, I can write the medical expenses on itemized deductions next year!