On health and healing

Stressful. Today seemed like nothing but. Craig and I endured so much stress separately at work today that we had almost no patience left for each other by the end of it.

At our job we both were working as temporaries for a while, me from last February till August and Craig for a whole year until September, we're finally hired on as full time employees now. So we FINALLY got health insurance in January! Just in time. Our health insurance through work is really neat. It's Kaiser insurance and as long a you stay in network any procedure, surgery, prescription, and appointment it $10, and prenatal care is free. A coworker of ours just had her baby boy at 27 weeks so he was in the hospital for a long time receiving a lot of care and medicine and she didn't have to pay a penny. Another co-worker has a wife with cancer who just went through a series of procedures that cost 102,000 dollars, and he paid ten. It doesn't cost too terribly much annually either, we've been pretty content and excited about it.

Well our site announced last month that starting in May we're switching insurances to United Health Care, to be like the rest of the company. Now I don't know hardly anything about insurances, i knew nothing until just recently, so I can't judge that this new one won't be better but I'm still pretty bummed. Having this new insurance was just so comforting and easy! I wasn't excited about switching especially since May was going to be the very middle of my first pregnancy. Anyone who has been with the company for years and years will have to completely switch doctors because Kaiser clinics don't accept anything but Kaiser insurance. I think the worse part of it all right now is that today we just got charts and information about our choices for our new plans, and honestly, they looked not so great compared to what we're used to. We can't know for sure yet because the consultants from our parent company haven't come yet to give us the very specifics, people are mostly speculating, but EVERYONE is freaking out. I had to listen to everyone in my department yell about it while Craig was elsewhere listening to all the crazy ladies in his department be upset about it too. Through the day my worries grew about spending a fortune on insurance if there was never an emergency and then spending another fortune if there ever was an emergency. I've never been a doctor goer in my life, until this last month I hadn't gone since a child. But now I've learned what crazy things can suddenly happen when you're trying to start and raise a family and I don't want to just keep going through my life without medical insurance and security and hoping nothing too terrible happens.

On the way home I tried to share my irrational female worried with Craig. He'd already endured plenty of irrational female worries from OTHER females already today but I still wanted to discuss the possibilities one on one. We don't have all the facts yet and there's no way he could come up with solid answers for my hypothetical scenarios [I'm so bad, always coming up with the most ridiculous "what-if" scenarios and then worrying myself sick about them, I've really had to work on it for him]. I'm a woman though, sometimes I just need to talk. He's my man and his first response is always to fix it but he's learned to ask if I just need to talk or if I need solutions. Tonight though HE wanted the answers. He's felt so helpless regarding my health problems this last week and this felt like just more of the same thing. We just don't have the answers but we have the questions and it frustrated both of us to the point of anger. On arriving home I stalked off and went to our apartment's gym and ran bare foot on the treadmill [I'm cringing about it now, yikes] because I only had flats with me. He drove around to cool down. When he came home he told me to come with him and we got in the car to drive to the ocean. This was almost two in the morning now, and here we are holding hands, saying sorry and going to the ocean. It's times like this when i really really truly know that my life is beautiful. I have a faith that is growing all the time and keeps me grounded, I'm in love and happy and I know we can make it through anything. Even a really tragic, heart-breaking miscarriage. Even my body responding in bizarre and negative ways and being slow to recover. Even having to wait to hold our first baby girl until much later than we expected. Even work being rotten and miserable sometimes. Even uncomfortable and scary changes. Even fights. Because we can drive to the ocean, we can go for a walk, we can watch Futurama and eat chili, we can hold hands and know families are forever. My family is forever.

I found out I lost my first baby on Valentines day. Her name is Sable Songbird Will. And I know she would have loved the ocean, just like her mommy and daddy.

This first picture is from when Craig took me to the ocean for the first time last summer. It was magical. The rest are from our honeymoon in Florence at the sea lion caves, my third favorite place in the world.