Summer.

I haven't written in about two months. It has been a crazy summer. Where to start . . . oh yeah the Wallow Fire.

Wallow Fire

The Wallow Fire started during Memorial Day weekend. Cam and I drove our kids to Farmington and met my mom so she could take the kids to her house early for our annual family trip. On the way home we heard on the radio that a fire had started in the mountains south of us. Cameron has been saying for at least the last five years or so that if they didn't clean up the forests in that area then it would burn like the Rodeo-Chediski Fire back in 2002. The fire grew immediately. It was called a viral fire. In the first week it had eaten up thousands and thousands of acres. With the department I work for part of our job is to assist the Emergency Management Team in certain ways. For the fire we ran call center that provided fire information for both Navajo and Apache Counties. We started the call center on June 2, 2011. It is the first time that our team has activated the call center. We took calls from many concerned citizens and tried to give out the most accurate information on the condition of the fire. It was very stressful. Several communities had to be evacuated and there were 32 home and 4 commercial properties lost. The truly amazing thing is that there were only 16 injuries, most were only minor and no lives were lost. It was the largest fire in Arizona history, burning 538,048 acres. It is sad that we lost so much of our beautiful forest, here is AZ we don't have many more to lose.

 

Family Vacation

During the fire I was lucky enough to be able to take a trip to my mom's house. She had taken the kids and we had to pick them up. It was so much fun. My mom and Bruce, aka Pops, got an above ground pool. The whole family really enjoyed it. We had BBQ's and went to Bananas, it is a great place with go carts, bumper boats, a whole place with jumpy houses and slides, laser tag, and tons of video game. It really is fun for the whole family, especially if your family is a crazy as mine. We also went fishing; the kids that fished all caught fish and even Cam caught a little catfish, really little ha-ha.

 

Reunions

When we got home the Bond family, courtesy of Odessa, had a fun reunion. I unfortunately had to miss the majority of it due to working the call center. The kids and Cameron got to enjoy a long weekend of fun and food with his family. I made it just in time to be in the family picture. Thanks Odessa.

My family all got together over July 24th weekend. It was so good to see most of my aunt and uncles. It was a fun time. I got to spend almost the whole week with my aunts Shayla and Lisa and their kids. We had BBQs and spent lots of time at my Grandma's house. On Saturday Morning I was woken up at 6:10 am. Brenna wanted to run in the race, she got herself up and ready and Cam and I took her, she got signed up for the 5k with her cousin Alex. I have to say I am so proud of my family. My Aunt Lisa, her husband Brad, and her daughter Lizzy, my cousin Jacob all ran the 10k. My aunt Shayla, cousins Jaclyn and Ben and Alex and Brenna all participated in the 5k. We also went to the parade, Cam rode a horse for the Sheriff’s Posse and CJ rode with his Cub Scout troop. It was a great weekend.

 Surgery

All of my paperwork was submitted to the quality control person at my doctor's office. She called me and told me that I had one more thing to complete. I know . . . right. It was only lab work, easy peasy. I went to my doctor's office to have blood drawn for the test; they did not have all of the needed stuff for the test, so I went to Show Low. I went for a separate appointment and thought I would just swing by the office of the lab that the Dr. had written the order for. They were closed. I went to the other lab, they did not have the right test that I needed, they sent me to the hospitals offsite lab, they again did not have the tests that I needed, the tech called the hospital lab and they did have the test I needed, unfortunately it was a fasting test and nobody told me to be fasting. So I made and appointment and went to the hospital the following week. It was interesting, the front desk couldn't read the orders, they had been faxed to my doctors office and weren't very clear. So the surgeon's office re-faxed them to the hospital and they test were different on the new order, the lab and I decided to just do the tests on both forms to cover all of the bases, so 13 vials of blood, one urine dip, and an h. pylori breath test later I was done. No, I was officially completed and ready for insurance approval. Seriously, done. I had to wait a week for all of the test results to go to my doctor, but I am done!

Insurance

I actually know very little about how insurance works. I go to the doctor, pay my co-pay and the insurance does the rest. In some cases I have had to enlist my HR department to urge the insurance to pay what they are supposed to, but generally that is how it works for me. I have learned that insurance is a complicated world of pass the buck. I pay the insurance and they pay some else to do what I would consider their job. I have learned that my insurance uses a separate company to pre-approve on stuff like surgeries. Stupid if you ask me, the insurance has the information, right? Well because of this I was denied for my surgery. No really! To hear that you have worked for 2+ years, made sure to cross your Ts and dot your i's. I was devastated. I wanted to cry when I found this out. It seems that I was not covered long enough by the insurance company for them to approve. I was dumbfounded. I have been on the same insurance for nine years, seven and a half under Cameron and one and a half under my own policy. So wait, this is where it gets me, the other company that does these pre-authorization, was not given the information from Cameron's coverage, yes if the insurance would have just done this themselves they would have had this information.  It only took 2 phone calls and a couple hours of waiting, but come on. I did finally get the approval. That was the only thing keeping me back. So yeah!!!! Now just to schedule.