I found out that the urgent care clinic that I had been going to for a decade… no longer takes my insurance.

So there’s that.

Strangely enough, I am feeling better, but I did make several calls in the interim to try and figure out where I would go if I needed to go to urgent care, or where I would take the kids. Right now, we have the same insurance, just… different kinds if that makes sense. The good thing is that more urgent care facilities in this area take the kids’ insurance than do mine. I’m glad for that. The bad thing, of course, probably doesn’t need to be spelled out here — not as many facilities take my insurance. I’m sure that I’ll find a facility that does, though, even if I have to commute to one of the smaller satellite cities around this city. I might just call my insurance themselves and explain this situation to them though, as they have generally been extremely helpful making sure that I have and retain access to services in the past. Right now all my pain management clinic has been having to do is to fight my insurance to get approval on an MRI (or, failing that, some kind of scan) on my neck and shoulders to ensure that I am not developing arthritis, osteopenia or osteoporosis — this is something that I am at risk for due to necessary oral steroid use and me simply being me. I’d rather know about it now if that actually is the case (even at the “ripe old age” of thirty-six) so that it can appropriately be medicated, especially as it relates to head and neck or shoulder pain. Just tell me now.

The light switch in my bedroom had to be replaced because it actually arced out of the blue, too. So I got to dodge that — literal arcing. That was fun, and by fun I mean not fun. I came into my bedroom one afternoon and went to turn the fan on, having turned the overhead light off choosing to rely on my lamp and ring light to reduce migraine pain, and that was when it arced at me. I immediately turned it off. Several hours later, it was fixed. That could have gone a completely different direction though and actually hurt me, or worse…

A few people on the second Discord server that I joined began posting flashers in main chat, joking about “making me convulse”, and one of them had the gall to talk about how they didn’t want to get out of bed, so they were going to… take it out on other people. They didn’t want to get out of bed, so they were going to… do things that had a high risk of harming people in real life. If I actually do have seizures back-to-back in real life, this could kill me, but I don’t expect nor do I trust these people to care about the health or lives of other people at this point and I sure don’t trust them to handle doing any research on it. So I’ve decided to institute a “zero strikes and you are permanently out” policy when it comes to this sort of thing. If you know that I am epileptic and you do this, I am kicking you out of my life for the rest of your life or the rest of my life. We are no longer friends. We will never be friends. There is absolutely nothing that you can ever do to get me to forgive you. Deal with it. If you know that I am epileptic and you comment on how that will “make me convulse” as you do it, the same principle applies. I can, and I will, hold a grudge for forty years if your actions seek to hurt me in real life. Again, deal with it. Find a way to deal with it. I have faith that you can.

At any rate, these were actions that you consciously meant to take. I may have grown up with a lot of these people, but it doesn’t mean that I have to continue being in the lives of the majority of them or participating in their Discord servers or communities when their acts maliciously hurt other people… and that’s what I’ve decided exactly what not to do. I quit all of the Discord servers that these people are on or participate in even though I do think a handful of them are good people, and I don’t mind reconnecting with a handful of them, because I don’t want to be exposed to this level of drama and vitriol. I don’t want to be exposed to people who will maliciously hurt other people like this, or people who want to maliciously hurt other people like this, and I do not intend to go back on this given any circumstances. I do intend on continuing to converse with, and maintain connections with, the individual people that I have reconnected with who I do enjoy talking to and being in the lives of, but this does not hold true for the majority of them and I will not be giving “the majority” as a whole a second chance. As it is, when the pandemic finally becomes endemic (or when the pandemics finally become endemics… or in the case of monkeypox, stop, I guess I should say), this will make it that much easier for me to be around less and not have various people questioning where I am.