A tiny burial, and a big appointment (with a lot more expensive ones lined up). Sales and shares very much needed.

Photo copyright Aji, 2018; all rights reserved.

Dear god, what a day. It ends now with a blinding headache and sheer exhaustion.

We buried Opal today. She didn't go alone, unfortunately; when Wings swept the snow off the deck, he found a tiny male Cassin's finch that had apparently hit the window and fallen, stunned, and frozen to death beneath the snow. We sent them on their journey together, in the usual way.

The whole morning was fraught, thanks to the snow and the mud and the bitterly cold wind and the need to bury small spirits and feed too many starving ones. I couldn't really start anything substantive, since I had a midday doctor's appointment, and that took a lot longer than anticipated. We have a new plan of action (and a hell of a lot of new and expensive appointments). I said earlier, elsewhere, that between Wings and me, we have six or seven appointments stacked up over the next two weeks, but I forgot about the testing, so it's actually eight or nine ::cringes at the expense::. We are now proceeding on the assumption that there may be multiple things going on here that just all happened to come together in a particularly unpleasant way in the left side of my chest last November (and continue to do so). So now it becomes a process of elimination, and we're beginning with the possibility of a hiatal hernia somehow aggravating both my esophagus (an expected effect) and my coronary artery (frankly bizarre). At any rate, I'll be going for an ultrasound soon, and also for a specialized chiropractic appointment designed specifically to deal with such hernias. If that is indeed a part of this, we should know in the course of the latter visit. 

Or not.

Depending on the results of those two, I will probably wind up down in Santa Fe for a CT scan (less expensive there than here, with a better team). The idea is to do the less expensive stuff first and see if we can isolate anything; if not, then we go looking for other enlargements or herniations or, Spirit forbid, masses. Along with a few other things, but those are the big ones for now. I honestly no longer know what to hope for; they're all terrible. And while I'm happy to have some forward movement, I frankly feel terrible, too, so the rest is cut-and-paste.

I'm setting two separate goals, as outlined below, because they're both dunning me steadily now. The overall goal is my $25K+ in emergency medical bills. I've been trying to raise an initial $1,700 to take care of two specific bills: the local ambulance and one hospitalist's fee. We're $145 of the way toward it. Those are now covered (thank you, thank you again). The next goal is two-fold: One is the cost of the ambulance when they transferred me down to Albuquerque, which is $2K; the other is one of the Lovelace doctors, which is $1,500. That's $3,500 total, and the next phase of all this with regard to the new platform. Then I can turn my attention to the really big ones, which are the hospital bills themselves (Lovelace in particular is going to be bad, because, well, cardiac cath). A caveat: I have a lot of kinks to get worked out yet, but PayPal is now theoretically linked to the progress meter on the site. I say "theoretically," because I've just discovered that I apparently have to set up at least one other page to make the subscription "purchase" possible. Eventually, if you subscribe via PayPal (it's a monthly thing like Patreon), it will show, although for now the only way to do it is to hit the PayPal "Subscribe" button. I'm hoping to get that figured out and fixed tomorrow. I also need to figure out how to pin it to the main page, so for now, the only way to access it is here. Please share this link around on social media and elsewhere. I still need to raise the $3,500 as fast as possible, because there are thousands' worth of hospital bills stacked up behind it. It also means that we need sales and I need to get my subscription platform up and running (and you can still subscribe via PayPal even now). So here are the links: 

• Tonight's post elsewhere (the way, even when our perspective is too shot to see it);
• A way to buy me coffee (which actually goes to She-Wolf's & my medical bills, and now Wings's too);
• Wings's direct PayPal link;
• Wings's site, for sales;
• Amazon wishlist, which mostly consists of food for the half-feral pack;
• Wayfair gift cards, to replenish all the furnishings that the RV has destroyed in one way or another.
• Partial registry #1, from Bed, Bath and Beyond. There are new kitchen-y things on it now, stuff that I didn't realize we'd need to replace (either because the RV ruined it or because we gave it away when we had to downsize).
• Partial registry #2, from Wayfair. There are some things left on both registries that I thought by now I might be able just to buy outright, but medical bills (mine and She-Wolf's both) have to come first.

Please check out the new platform, share the links, get your friends to participate. I've got a long road ahead of me, just in terms of diagnosis and, I hope, eventually treatment. Being able to pay off the medical bills will go a long way toward keeping me as healthy as possible in the meantime. Thanks, everybody, from both of us.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.