I'm so upset and irritated right now that I don't know if I want to scream or cry. I will probably do both before it's over. I'm so over Obamacare and "Affordable" health insurance. We have been paying $683 a month this year for coverage for our family. That's more than one of our truck payments. Insurance through my husband's job would be $1200 a month, which is more than one of his pay days. We've had to struggle just to survive and put food on the table and keep some sense of normalcy for our daughter. We are living in our camper, semi moved to another state for his job, rented out our house, cut every non essential bill we had. We did everything you are "supposed" to do and we still can't afford it! How did anyone back this plan? How does anyone think this is affordable? In all of Obamacare there is only two good points. 1. Kids can stay on their parents insurance until they are 26. (Personally I think this should only apply to students and if you are married, have kids and filing your own taxes then you should have your own insurance.) 2. Insurance can't turn you down for pre-existing conditions. The rest of it is crap. When they decide whether or not you get premium help, they only care if the employee can get affordable insurance through their job. They don't care at all if you can't afford the family plan so that your spouse and kids can have insurance. I guess they just want you to get that penalty at tax time.
As most of you know, we have been trying to get pregnant again for almost three years now. I had another miscarriage in August and now I have made an extremely heartbreaking decision. Since we can't afford this "affordable" health insurance, we are going to have to go without insurance next year. The penalty is a little more than what one month's premium would be, so obviously it's WAY cheaper to take the penalty. A little over $12,000 cheaper actually. Since short term insurance doesn't cover maternity and according to the state my husband makes too much money even on unemployment to get state health insurance, that means I can't get pregnant. There is no way we could afford prenatal care and labor and delivery costs out of pocket. We both want another child so bad and I really can't explain how mad it makes me that any chance I had (and my chances were already slim) is taken away from me by this stupid insurance law. It's not like we didn't already have everything going against us when it came to having a baby. It took five years, two miscarriages and so many doctor visits to have our daughter. It's already been almost three years and one miscarriage since we've been trying again. Then throw this on top of it. I wish so bad that I could put into words what I am feeling, but none of the words that I can think of seem to do what I'm feeling any justice. Just suffice it to say that I'm mad and a I'm mad as hell!
That's not even the best part. The job that my husband came back to in Ohio is more than likely only going to last about three more weeks. Then he will laid off again. For the third time this year. It will be about a week before my daughter's birthday and two weeks before Christmas. Being that it will be the end of the year and cold, most jobs won't be hiring. My stress level is going through the roof. I am losing my grasp on my hope. Family is supposed to be the foundation of everything and our country has made it so that it's easier to get help and get insurance if you are single rather than a family. There is NO help for a working family. What is happening?
This year has absolutely been the worst year for us. I hope and pray that next year is better. If it gets any worse I honestly don't know how we'll make it. We could really use some prayers, good thoughts or whatever you believe in coming our way.
Showing posts with label laid off. Show all posts
Showing posts with label laid off. Show all posts
November 15, 2016
November 11, 2016
Blessed
I'm sitting here at my table, looking out our sliding door, and do you know what I see? A drilling rig that recently went up across the road from us. Specifically, it's a drilling rig from the company my husband got laid off from back in January. Every single time I look outside or walk by my door it's there. Every time I go down the road, I have to drive right by it. It literally feels like a slap in the face every time my eyes land on it. I want to be mad about it and I was pretty irritated at first, but I am forcing myself to look on the bright side.
After my husband was laid off the company cut per diem and that was a really good chunk of the pay. I'm not sure we would be able to afford for him to work there with no per diem. Had he not been laid off, I may not have felt the push I needed to get my photography business off the ground. Things are by no means okay yet and we are still struggling, but we may be in a better position now than we would have been. I am trying to count my blessings and not stress so much about the things I can't control.
Even though we are far from home, we are still surrounded by family. We are lucky enough to have my sister in law and her husband on one side of us, my step-dad on the other side of us and the guys all work together. I know it may not last long, but for now it's enough. I am learning to take things one day at a time and one step at a time. I am a very impatient person and I am a planner. I feel the need to plan for everything and make lists all the time. When I don't have control of something it makes my anxiety go crazy. I have my days where I just want to sit down and have a good cry, but I will not lose hope.
If you are in a rough patch in your life, please take a step back. Take a deep breath and count your blessings. Trust me, I know you don't want to hear that sometimes. It used to make me mad when people would say it, but sometimes it's what you need to do. You will still have days that you want to scream and cry and throw things and that's okay. Do it. Release that tension. Just remember that you have good things in your life too. Don't let the stress, anger and anxiety keep you down. It will only make things worse. Keep your head up. You've got this.
After my husband was laid off the company cut per diem and that was a really good chunk of the pay. I'm not sure we would be able to afford for him to work there with no per diem. Had he not been laid off, I may not have felt the push I needed to get my photography business off the ground. Things are by no means okay yet and we are still struggling, but we may be in a better position now than we would have been. I am trying to count my blessings and not stress so much about the things I can't control.
Even though we are far from home, we are still surrounded by family. We are lucky enough to have my sister in law and her husband on one side of us, my step-dad on the other side of us and the guys all work together. I know it may not last long, but for now it's enough. I am learning to take things one day at a time and one step at a time. I am a very impatient person and I am a planner. I feel the need to plan for everything and make lists all the time. When I don't have control of something it makes my anxiety go crazy. I have my days where I just want to sit down and have a good cry, but I will not lose hope.
If you are in a rough patch in your life, please take a step back. Take a deep breath and count your blessings. Trust me, I know you don't want to hear that sometimes. It used to make me mad when people would say it, but sometimes it's what you need to do. You will still have days that you want to scream and cry and throw things and that's okay. Do it. Release that tension. Just remember that you have good things in your life too. Don't let the stress, anger and anxiety keep you down. It will only make things worse. Keep your head up. You've got this.
November 7, 2016
Honoring My Angel Babies
This has been a hard year for us. My husband has been laid off twice and we've moved back and forth between two states trying to figure out what to do. Every time we think we are okay again, something else gets thrown at us. The stress of dealing with how we are going to pay our bills and be able to survive has been tremendous. This has led to discussions of dropping our health insurance. I'm not totally comfortable with that idea, but we honestly can't afford it anymore. To top it off, the paper I received today says that they are quadrupling our deductible, lowering what they pay and raising our premium almost two hundred and eighty dollars. We would be paying almost a thousand dollars a month if we kept this policy. Of course the Marketplace website is down, so at the moment I can't even look to see if there are any other plans we could switch to. I seriously doubt I will find a plan that is worth what we would be paying though. It looks like we would be better off taking the penalty at tax time.
The biggest reason I'm nervous about dropping insurance is my health problems. They are always lurking in the background. My daughter might get sick once a year, but even then she has only been sick enough to go to the doctor once and the medicine they gave her didn't even help. It just had to run it's course. I had another PAP come back positive for cervical changes again this summer. That makes the third one in about eleven or twelve years. The last one was just last year and the biopsy came back such low grade the doctor didn't even count it. This year I managed to get away without a biopsy, but she did do cervical curettage inside my cervix. That was more painful than I was expecting and worse because it takes longer than just snipping a piece off. Luckily, that came back negative for pre-cancer. I'm worried that my luck is running thin and feel that I need to eliminate a lot of my risk and have a hysterectomy. We've been trying to get pregnant again for almost three years now. I did finally get pregnant in July, but my levels quit doubling and I miscarried again in August. I think if I don't get pregnant in the next year that I will move forward with the hysterectomy. It's a scary and heartbreaking decision, but I'm tired. I'm tired of being terrified of every PAP. I'm tired of having horrible cramps. I'm tired of the pelvic pain that I have pretty much all the time. I'm tired of temping, tracking, waiting. I want my daughter to have a sibling. I think that is such an important bond. Someone to always have your back and someone you have when once the parents are gone. I don't want her to ever feel truly alone. She is growing up and the time truly goes way too fast. I don't want to spend any of her childhood stressing out about getting pregnant. I just want to enjoy it. She very well may be my only baby, so I need to soak it up that much more.
If you read my last post, then you know that I recently started a photography business. I really wanted to do something to honor my angel babies. It's not fair that I will never know who they would have been or get to have pictures of them. I made a picture that is very special to me. This picture has all of my babies in it. It's my precious daughter, my rainbow baby, surrounded by the siblings she'll never know. It isn't perfect, but I love it. I plan to do a few more and I really want one with me and my husband in it too. It will be the family picture we were robbed of. I have always wanted to be able to have some kind of reminder of my lost babies. I don't want it to be like they never existed and I don't other people to forget either. Some people get tattoos (and I plan on that too), some light a candle every October and there are other ways to remember them. I just needed something that made them more real, more tangible and for me this does it. What do you do remember your lost ones? Check out the picture below and I hope you all have a great day!
The biggest reason I'm nervous about dropping insurance is my health problems. They are always lurking in the background. My daughter might get sick once a year, but even then she has only been sick enough to go to the doctor once and the medicine they gave her didn't even help. It just had to run it's course. I had another PAP come back positive for cervical changes again this summer. That makes the third one in about eleven or twelve years. The last one was just last year and the biopsy came back such low grade the doctor didn't even count it. This year I managed to get away without a biopsy, but she did do cervical curettage inside my cervix. That was more painful than I was expecting and worse because it takes longer than just snipping a piece off. Luckily, that came back negative for pre-cancer. I'm worried that my luck is running thin and feel that I need to eliminate a lot of my risk and have a hysterectomy. We've been trying to get pregnant again for almost three years now. I did finally get pregnant in July, but my levels quit doubling and I miscarried again in August. I think if I don't get pregnant in the next year that I will move forward with the hysterectomy. It's a scary and heartbreaking decision, but I'm tired. I'm tired of being terrified of every PAP. I'm tired of having horrible cramps. I'm tired of the pelvic pain that I have pretty much all the time. I'm tired of temping, tracking, waiting. I want my daughter to have a sibling. I think that is such an important bond. Someone to always have your back and someone you have when once the parents are gone. I don't want her to ever feel truly alone. She is growing up and the time truly goes way too fast. I don't want to spend any of her childhood stressing out about getting pregnant. I just want to enjoy it. She very well may be my only baby, so I need to soak it up that much more.
If you read my last post, then you know that I recently started a photography business. I really wanted to do something to honor my angel babies. It's not fair that I will never know who they would have been or get to have pictures of them. I made a picture that is very special to me. This picture has all of my babies in it. It's my precious daughter, my rainbow baby, surrounded by the siblings she'll never know. It isn't perfect, but I love it. I plan to do a few more and I really want one with me and my husband in it too. It will be the family picture we were robbed of. I have always wanted to be able to have some kind of reminder of my lost babies. I don't want it to be like they never existed and I don't other people to forget either. Some people get tattoos (and I plan on that too), some light a candle every October and there are other ways to remember them. I just needed something that made them more real, more tangible and for me this does it. What do you do remember your lost ones? Check out the picture below and I hope you all have a great day!
January 26, 2016
Good To Bad To Worse
Today started out normal enough. I got up and fixed the little one some cereal, checked Facebook and emails, checked my business page...the usual. Then I started thinking about this summer and going to the beach. We didn't get to go last year, so we decided that we really wanted to try to go this year. We have some money saved up and I talked to my sister in law about going with us, so that we would have help keeping an eye on our rambunctious two year old. I had a few minutes before I needed to start fixing food so it would be ready when my hubby got up, so I pulled up the website of our favorite place to stay at the beach. Wouldn't you know it? I found the exact room we wanted for the exact dates we wanted (Mustang Week) for about three hundred dollars less than what it was the last time we checked. I saved the page and had a little extra pep in my step now that I could almost taste the salt air.
Fast forward an hour and we have eaten a pretty awesome meal of kielbasa with banana peppers, blueberry pancakes and eggs. I had told him about the reservation I found and he agreed that I could go ahead and book it. The cancellation policy got me some brownie points since we could cancel at least a week before we got there and only lose thirty four dollars of our deposit. There have been talks of a lay off at his company for months, but in the oilfield there is ALWAYS talks of a lay off. This new round of lay off talk had us in a discussion about whether or not we should take our camper home. My vote was that we should take it home because we would save a lot of money. He had changed his vote to leaving it so that we weren't pulling it as much and our daughter and I could still come to work with him. Well...my vote won, but not because he saw the light or anything like that. I happened to sit down at the table and see that he had gotten an email. I almost just trashed it because it didn't look like anything interesting, but opened it anyway and got a lovely surprise. It was an email from his company stating that sometime between March 1 and March 14 he would be laid off permanently.
Within just a couple of hours my day went from one extreme to the other. Now we are trying to think of what job he could possibly do. The only thing he knows and the only thing he is trained for is the mines and rigs. In case nobody noticed, the oilfield is crashing hard and coal is basically non-existent in southern West Virginia now. I know we will figure something out because we always do, but it's just so frustrating. The little town we live in is almost dead. It's so sad to see our whole county and many around us slowly dying. It affects everyone in every job. The people that lose their jobs are having to move out of state to find new jobs just to feed their families. Those people moving means there isn't anyone to spend money at the gas stations, grocery stores, hair dressers, etc. These families have been in these little towns for generations. Some of them, like my family, have been there since these towns were founded. It's more than just a home or just a place to live and they are being forced to leave. I really don't know what everyone is supposed to do and my heart breaks for them, for us and for my daughter.
By this time I should have already had the camper packed up and cleaned so we can head home tomorrow, but I've spent all evening job searching on the internet and talking to some people that may be of help. At this rate I'm going to be up all night trying to get everything situated to leave in the morning. It would be easier if we could take the camper with us tomorrow, but the snow still hasn't melted off from the blizzard. We will have to come back for it in a few days when the rest of it should be melted. If it's not moved by Monday we'll have to pay rent for the lot it's on again.
To top the day off, I just found out that a beloved family member passed away today too. Seems like everything gets you at once. I don't do this very often, but please keep my family in your thoughts. *Baby Dust*
Fast forward an hour and we have eaten a pretty awesome meal of kielbasa with banana peppers, blueberry pancakes and eggs. I had told him about the reservation I found and he agreed that I could go ahead and book it. The cancellation policy got me some brownie points since we could cancel at least a week before we got there and only lose thirty four dollars of our deposit. There have been talks of a lay off at his company for months, but in the oilfield there is ALWAYS talks of a lay off. This new round of lay off talk had us in a discussion about whether or not we should take our camper home. My vote was that we should take it home because we would save a lot of money. He had changed his vote to leaving it so that we weren't pulling it as much and our daughter and I could still come to work with him. Well...my vote won, but not because he saw the light or anything like that. I happened to sit down at the table and see that he had gotten an email. I almost just trashed it because it didn't look like anything interesting, but opened it anyway and got a lovely surprise. It was an email from his company stating that sometime between March 1 and March 14 he would be laid off permanently.
Within just a couple of hours my day went from one extreme to the other. Now we are trying to think of what job he could possibly do. The only thing he knows and the only thing he is trained for is the mines and rigs. In case nobody noticed, the oilfield is crashing hard and coal is basically non-existent in southern West Virginia now. I know we will figure something out because we always do, but it's just so frustrating. The little town we live in is almost dead. It's so sad to see our whole county and many around us slowly dying. It affects everyone in every job. The people that lose their jobs are having to move out of state to find new jobs just to feed their families. Those people moving means there isn't anyone to spend money at the gas stations, grocery stores, hair dressers, etc. These families have been in these little towns for generations. Some of them, like my family, have been there since these towns were founded. It's more than just a home or just a place to live and they are being forced to leave. I really don't know what everyone is supposed to do and my heart breaks for them, for us and for my daughter.
By this time I should have already had the camper packed up and cleaned so we can head home tomorrow, but I've spent all evening job searching on the internet and talking to some people that may be of help. At this rate I'm going to be up all night trying to get everything situated to leave in the morning. It would be easier if we could take the camper with us tomorrow, but the snow still hasn't melted off from the blizzard. We will have to come back for it in a few days when the rest of it should be melted. If it's not moved by Monday we'll have to pay rent for the lot it's on again.
To top the day off, I just found out that a beloved family member passed away today too. Seems like everything gets you at once. I don't do this very often, but please keep my family in your thoughts. *Baby Dust*
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