Today is the last day of the list’s at home. Tomorrow we leave for vail in the evening and our day tomorrow is already pretty jam-packed with stuff. So, today we’re running around like crazy getting what we can get done. Getting some movies on the laptop, picking up a book, doing my last work related task for a week (logging hours). And just arranging whatever we need to. And here I am doing a little homework.
And here’s the packing montage.
So we are officially new apartment renters. We signed a lease tonight for a duplex in Old Colorado City. Its a funky older place that we are really excited about. It’s on the ground level, it has hardwood floors and a really cool room for Becca’s new office. We are moving at the end of November!
This coming Tuesday, Lord willing, Becca will be getting her hip repaired and she will start the long process of recovery. It’s been a long 7 months since all of this started, and we have learned a lot in that time. One of the areas that we had the most to learn about was how the health care system works. This is an incredibly relevant topic if you go by what I see in my news feeds. Just a couple years ago we started having our first experiences with health-care as adults, and I have to tell you it’s absolutely confounding to approach it unaware.
I originally thought that health-care worked like any other commercial industry where you go to a service provider, they quote you a price for a service, and you decide whether you want to get that service there. I was suprised to find out that getting a price out of a medical provider is nearly impossible, I felt like the medical providers expected us to trust these poorly understood entities (insurance companies) that will take care of things.
The role and nature of health insurance is not at all immediately obvious. The details of insurance policies are confusing and take a while to get your mind around. Having a high-deductible plan means that I essentially have to pay for everything out of pocket up to a certain amount every year. Finding out if a medical provider even accepts your insurance often takes too much work. I felt like we spent too much time worrying about the rules and procedures of navigating the system.
Some providers have been helpful, and the customer services agents at the end of the insurance company phone number try to be as informative as they can be. Unfortunately the pressure and frustration builds too quickly in overworked medical care providers and in the bewildered patients and family like me.
One way I think we can address some of the issues is through clear and open communication. And, I feel that the best way to facilitate communication in the modern era is through the internet. Apparently there has been some push to get the medical industry to digitize their systems in the next few years. I have my doubts about how well they will make that transition considering e-mail has been in use for 20 years and not a single medical care provider knows how to use it! They still *fax* papers to each other! And trying to get two different medical providers to share information with each other, or with you is nearly impossible. “Oh, you want a lab at a hospital to send results to a doctor 300 miles away? You need get that doctor to call us and give us their fax number so we can send it. No, you cannot tell us what it is, we need to hear it from them.”
The potential efficiency and control offered by Google Health and Microsoft’s Health Vault seem like a fantastic idea. Let each person manage a central repository of their own information. This would let us each grant access to add or retrieve medical information from our personal files, as we see fit. This system stores medical images, prescriptions, immunizations. Everything is on paper records right now! I’d love to see more doctors utilizing information technology.
Anyway, we have many things figured out now… I think. If you spend enough time on the phone pestering enough people, things will eventually get done. It’s a strange system. I don’t know that the government would be able to actually make things any better, but I encourage someone to do something, anything! Because the system that we have now, is less than optimal. I have sensed this frustration from other people I talk to. I wish I knew the right way to make it all improve, but all I can really offer is the perspective of someone who has just recently been introduced to the world of health-care, and found it bewildering.
Tim is preparing for some heavy lifting, originally uploaded by sirtimbly.
Becca is testing out her new shower chair, originally uploaded by sirtimbly.
God has been doing an amazing work in our hearts over the past year and a half. We have felt convicted that missions work is where God is leading us, and that we should seek to serve His Kingdom. We have been hearing a lot of encouraging and motivating words from our Perspectives class, and also found many great words from famous and inspirational missionaries. We are going to start posting some of these to this blog when we come across them. We’re starting with this from Elisabeth Elliot. God has been working to help us surrender all of ourselves this year, and every time we encounter another area that God wants us to give up, we find encouragement and freedom.
Sometimes I am asked to speak to young people who are toying with the idea of being missionaries. They want to know how I discovered the will of God. The first thing was to settle once and for all the supremacy of Christ in my life, I tell them. I put myself utterly and forever at His disposal, which means turning over all the rights: to myself, my body, my self-image, my notions of how I am to serve my Master. Oswald Chambers calls it “breaking the husk of my individual independence of God.” Until that break comes, all the rest is “pious fraud.” I tell these earnest kids that the will of God is always different from what they expect, always bigger, and, ultimately, infinitely more glorious than their wildest imaginings.
But there will be deaths to die. Paul found that out—daily, he said. That is the price of following the way of the cross—of course. If our object is to save others we must be clear that we cannot save ourselves. Jesus couldn’t either.
This scares people. Yet what is there to fear when Christ holds first place in our lives? Where, other than in the will of the Father, shall we expect to find significance, security, and serenity?
Hello friends and family! I’m hoping to update you all through this website while we are doing the whole surgery thing in Vail during the first week of November. Please remember to bookmark or whatever so we can keep you all up to date with what’s going on without needing to write a bunch of emails. And if things go according to plan we should have videos! Exciting! At the very least we will try to update this with some photos and a quick message every day or so. Things are going to be crazy there, as we know from Becca’s sister’s prior experience, but we hope to keep you all in the loop somehow. So, to start things off here are some of the milestones we have already reached.
We’ve still got stuff to do, calling, confirming, cleaning, and most of all packing, but we are starting to feel like the big stuff is going OK. The one thing I’m really not sure we’re gonna get to is giving each other hair cuts… I’m starting to look a little shaggy.
Anyways, it’ll be great to have Becca walking again, so this is still more exciting than intimidating right now. Thank you, everyone, for your help and your prayers.
Planning for surgery, originally uploaded by sirtimbly.
Iv’e created this binder for planning out the weeks before, after, and during Becca’s upcoming hip surgery. Custom printed sheets from the DIY Planner site. And now I have custom sheets for packing checklists, medication schedules, rental car milage logs, shopping lists, and important numbers. We’ve been told this is a massive whirlwind of information and stress, so I’m making a project out of preparing for it. We only have 3 weeks to bring this whole thing together and I’m hoping this will help out. There’s really no equivalent reliable solution for this other than the iPhone and I just can’t rely on it for battery life and network issues in the same way that I can rely on a binder full of dead tree data capture sheets (they tell me it’s called paper).
Get yer stinking paws off my cupcake!, originally uploaded by sirtimbly.
This thread on the ubuntu message boards was extremely helpful for me. I’m using a server with Ubuntu 8.04. The short version of what I had to do was install libmp3lame-dev from the http://debian-multimedia.org/ repository (follow the instructions there) because it couldn’t be found in the Ubuntu repositories despite assertions on the message board that it’s part of multiverse. So, you get that installed. Uninstall ffmpeg. Then follow these instructions to compile ffmpeg from source (I didn’t do the x.264 stuff since I’m only encoding to flv). After all the install stuff is done, I still had to copy the newly installed ffmpeg binaries from /usr/local/bin to /usr/binin order to get the web app I’m using to find it. Best of luck to you all. It took me about 3 hours to get to this solution. Yay.
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