Greetings, I am still here. Our son passed a large kidney stone this morning after struggling with it for a week. For this we are very grateful and relieved. He joyously canceled several medical appointments. We still have no idea how much of his expenses his medical plan will cover. For the past week, his bank account account has been hemorrhaging; now he is able to return to work and reverse that.

Right now our internet access is set on a path that will only deteriorate. Earthlink is our ISP; its signal travels on Qwest lines. Because we are so far away from the station source of the Qwest line, our service is deteriorating and will continue to do so as more customers are added between us and the station source. There is a new station source which is less than half the distance of our current source and has upgraded lines. Qwest is willing to switch us to the new station source but Earthlink has to approve and will not do so. Unless we can personally negotiate something with Earthlink to use the new station source, our only option is to find a new ISP which will probably be through Qwest. If so, the transition will be extremely rocky. Qwest insists that we must disconnect from Earthlink before they will connect with us and there is no guarantee that it will be very quickly. We are not certain that Earthlink will forward our e-mails for any period of time after we disconnect from it. I want to scream.

Right now a higher level customer service person within Earthlink is checking possible options for us. She knows what we ideally want and what we have been told. I really hope she can find a way through this morass for us.

I continue to deal with health and health care issues. It seems that there are fewer and fewer primary care doctors, not just in the clinic we prefer to use but throughout our area and probably into the US as a whole. I am being sent out to specialists to deal with issues that my primary care provider used to deal with. My primary care provider maintains office hours two days a week; the scheduling office insists that she is double booked and cannot see me before the beginning of December. Meanwhile, I have scheduled appointments with two specialists according to her request but I have no statement from her about what she wants the specialists to examine and cannot schedule an appointment with her to do so prior to both apppointments. Do not get me wrong, I know what the general issue is in both cases but there is more information that she should have but I do not know what it is. I have copies of all the lab work plus a CT scan on a disk. I guess that I will take everything to each appointment and lay it out with an explanation of what led up to each appointment allowing them to each decide where to go from there. That seems to be all that I can do. I feel like I am being fragmented between specialists with no one to look over me as a whole person.