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Move prep


Third load of stuff given to charity as I work on my move to Virginia. 

Stuff I sent with mom to store. 

Even though my move to Virginia had to be moved back, I’m still very actively working on getting ready to move. Part of me is a little glad for the delay as it gives me time I really need to get ready. When I thought I was moving in July, the anxiety about how to get organized in time was getting a bit much!!!

This past week my mom has been visiting me from Colorado. While I have given away three loads of things to various charities, I do have some things that are sentimental enough to me I hate to get rid of them, even though they are not exactly practical for living in a smaller place in Virginia.

I’ve spent the past few weeks packing things like the nested tea pot Peter gave me when I visited Hong Kong years ago. It is one of those items that just sits on a shelf and looks pretty. Since I won’t have an office when I move, I need the shelf space for more practical things. Still, to get rid of it would have broken my heart. I treasure it. Or, there’s the East German border guard uniform I bought off an East German solder when the Berlin Wall fell…or my yearbooks, journals, photo albums etc.

Mom is taking those sorts of things and will store them for me. I doubt that I will ever see them again. I have no idea how she would ever get them back to me. Yes, I know U-Haul etc. but what people don’t appreciate is that it just isn’t that easy. Colorado is a very long drive from Virginia. Moving these items would be very expensive and I doubt with all my medical bills I will ever be able to afford it. Even if I could, I will never be able to afford a place big enough for all of this stuff in Virginia. It isn’t like I am a college student moving there to start a career. It isn’t like suddenly one day I’m going to make more money and be able to afford a better place etc. Okay, maybe not impossible, but realistically highly unlikely.

Still, it makes me feel a little better to know the items aren’t lost, and that if something happens to me, someone who cares about me has them.

I didn’t cry all week until the morning my mom left. Even then, it wasn’t so much about the stuff as it was about the situation. There have just been so many losses over the years. I have always wanted to live in the DC area, but was never able to get a job there.

If you don’t have health issues you can do things as a young person to take a chance and make things happen. You can live in a little room and eat ramen noodles until you land something. But, when you are a person like me, someone who has had hundreds of dollars of out of pocket medical bills your entire adult life, you just never had that ability to go out on a limb.

I was always terrified of losing my medical insurance. Now, with the Affordable Care Act, insurance cannot hold pre-existing conditions against you. Before, however, if you ever had a gap in coverage, suddenly everything became a pre-existing condition. You either couldn’t get coverage, or if you could, it was VERY, VERY expensive. I could barely afford my medications and medical supplies with insurance. What would I do without it?

The items I needed were not things I could just do without for a while. They were 100 percent necessary to maintain life. It was so scary to live that way.

At any rate, now I am moving to the place I always wanted to live, but it is such different circumstances. It won’t be like living there as a healthy person.

My mom mentioned that taking Finley might mean that I can’t do a lot of things I would like to do when I live there. This is partly true, however, now that I am on oxygen, things are very different. I can’t just get on the metro and be gone for hours. Everything has to be planned. I can’t just go spend the night with friends nearby. I need my “mother ship” oxygen machine for night time. To be able to get a “portable” machine for night means three weeks of advanced planning to get the equipment. It just isn’t the same.

So, my tears were not so much for losing things as they were about just feeling frustrated with the whole circumstances of the situation.
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