If Its Not One Thing...

... its everything.  

(If you'd rather not read a whiny post about the ridiculous hurdles before us as we try to get to India, bail out now!)

Before 8am this morning I found out that our drug insurance will not cover the cost of all of our medications for 3/4 of the coming year.  The many many medications which we have, here in our home, in bulk, enough to prevent malaria, cure infections and do many other happy things for 4 people for a full year.  The medications we cannot do without.  The medications which we have spent roughly $7000 on.  Not covered.  If I wasn't a believer in universal health care, I sure am now!  How is it that our government can give Chris a fellowship (but not release the money until we leave the country), require him to take no appointment at the UW (resulting in a loss of our health coverage, and income), and then somehow expect us to be able to buy things like all our meds and plane tickets?  Had we known that we were going to take a financial hit roughly the size of Chris's annual income before we received any fellowship money I think we would've made very different choices about how we executed this whole project.  I don't know how people who are living on the bleeding edge of the grad student margin can afford to do such a thing.  

Alright, so after the long and frustrating conversations with various bureaucrats about the insurance I tried to tackle the visas.  The sort of visa the kids and I have to have is effective from the date of issue for exactly 1 year.  Regardless of the fact that we must be in India for one year, no matter what, or else Chris loses funding.  And regardless of the fact that it is impossible to go from no-visa to visa and then arrive in India in zero elapsed time.  So it looks like we'll end up having to try to renew the visa in India sometime after we get there.  Can't begin to tell you how excited I am to try to do that.  There just aren't words.  (OK, there are, but this is a family blog.)

Icing the cake is the infection in my thumb and resulting generalized crap-tastic haze I'm trying to work in.  Also the dissertation chapter Chris was supposed to have finished for his advisor today and the accompanying stress of that. 

And maybe toughest of all is the death of a friend last week.  Someone we hadn't been in touch with recently, but someone our whole family cared an awful lot about.  For some reason he's in my thoughts so much and the whole situation is just tough for me to come to terms with.  Hits a bit too close to home, maybe.  Anyhow, we love you Jim.  

Cheerier post to follow...  thanks for reading this far.