Barbarians Redux

Hopefully I'm coming to the end of a long hiatus. Just a brief explanation of where I've been.

I started this blog while I was caring for my elderly father because I literally was not getting out of the house. As his health worsened I couldn't leave him alone. The blog helped me to have some time for myself and something of my own while still allowing me to be there for him without interruption.

Then he died on June 12, 2009, just 3 days after my last posted recipe. He was 89 years old and it took 3 simultaneous cancers to take him down. About 6 weeks later, I lost my dog, Rusty. She was 18 years old. Nevertheless, I returned to school in August of '09. I had interrupted my doctoral work to care for my Dad and picked that back up.

Then, yay! It turned out I had some serious health problems of my own, and getting that taken care of has meant I had to leave the state I was living in, where they considered my student loans as INCOME and therefore said I did not qualify for medical assistance. Grad student here, meaning I have no medical insurance and the school I go to provides nothing meaningful in the way of health care for its students. When I went to the local free clinic (after being on the waiting list for several weeks) they determined I needed emergency surgery, which was canceled because in that state they consider student LOANS (that's right, LOANS, which are DEBT which has to be paid back) as income and I did not qualify for medical assistance. Since the docs knew they had no way to enforce payment (I make $3k a year in actual wages), the emergency surgery was canceled.

Emergencies don't count when there's no cash on hand.

I'm now staying with my son in another state which is considerably more enlightened about getting people the help they need. Here, student loans are specifically and emphatically EXCLUDED from being considered as income when determining need for medical assistance.

I have an appointment at a local free clinic on Friday, tomorrow, and hopefully the emergency surgery I was supposed to have had in March will take place soon. Hopefully it won't be cancer (which runs in my family in this particular form) and I'll be back at school in the spring.

In the meantime, while I'm staying here with my son I'll be cooking and posting again, at least semi-regularly.

I may not exactly be back in the saddle again, but at least I've made it as far as the barn. LOL!