I live, write, and garden in the PNW with my husband of 30 years, disabled daughter, autistic son, and my 85-year-old mother. We have paid off $250,000.00 worth of debt (if you include the interest) in the last fifteen years and as of 6/12/2020 are 100% DEBT FREE!!!!Murphy struck in threes three times, for a total of nine in the last nine months. Not that I really believe in that sort of things, but we have had a real string of broken things, which is why our Emergency fund is $1010 and not $15,000. The most recent thing that broke was my daughter's adjustable bed.
Now she needs this because of her special needs. Because she has ideopathic intercranial hypertension and it is pretty bad, she has to sleep with her brain elevated above her body or else the build up in spinal fluid can kill her. But because she also has a tendency to swell because she is on prednisone for her secondary adrenal insufficiency, she has to keep her legs elevated (just not above her head) and wear compression socks, which can force fluid towards her brain. Without the bed to keep her in the right position, she can have serious problems and even death.
She can't stop taking prednisone because her pituitary gland is dead and she doesn't make cortisone. One dump of adrenaline and she's in serious trouble. Two and she's most likely dead. Even with the prednisone, she has to carry two emergency shots with her at all times. So we can't take her off the prednisone to stop the swelling.
So new bed frame. It couldn't just be a cheap bed frame off of Amazon, either. It has to be a special medical bed frame that keep her in exactly the right position and most of the ones available don't keep the feet high enough, just the head. So lots of fun there and they were all expensive. We ended up getting one of the bariatric ones even though we didn't need it for weight, just because it did the right heights for head and feet, but they are extra sturdy as well. They just cost a lot more than the cheap ones from Amazon.
The new one arrived today and will get put up tomorrow. The old one is stuck in the proper position at least. It makes it difficult for her to get in and out of, but my husband will need my son to put up the new one, but he has his session with his physical trainer and didn't want to risk messing himself up before that, so they will do it tomorrow after supper. It wasn't even supposed to arrive until April 4th.
All that to say our EF is now dangerously low and it is still going to be a while before we can seriously contribute to it, because we are still saving up for fixing that bathroom. We had to stop for a while, because we've had a ton of medical expenses so far this year.
It still bugs me that we had a black mold problem and the insurance wouldn't pay up anything. If my mother would have just stopped talking everything would have been fine, but she has a tendency to go, "Well, it could have been this or this or this or this or this that caused it." She's super talkative and has never met a silence she could stand. Sometimes less is more.
The mold remediation guy said exactly what caused it, but my mother had it in her head what caused it and she was determined that everyone was going to know that what she thought was right even though it wasn't and that is what lost us the claim according to the adjuster. He thought the remediator was just saying what we wanted him to say. The man has a highly qualified reputation. He wasn't going to just ruin it for us. I mean, come on. The company just didn't want to pay a huge claim. Not for the remediation and not for any of the replacement costs. So we got nothing. We appealed on the basis that mom was 84 at the time and on powerful medication that altered her thinking, even had a notarized letter from the doctor, but still nothing.
Oh, well. You lose some, you lose some, you lose some. And then hopefully Murphy is well and truly gone and you start to win some.
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