Getting hammered

In my absence, a lot has happened.  It's winter on a tiny farm, so it's not that we're busy weeding or putting up any big harvests.  I've been gone because Abe got hammered, and not the kind where too many homebrews sneak up on you.

Last week we cut a giant hole in the back of our house (obviously by "we," I mean Abe and a couple of old construction buddies. I was supervising with the cat).  It's a cold time of year to install french doors, but we had a set that Abe salvaged from a construction site that we couldn't stand to waste.  The demolition of the wall and the installation went smoothly.  But the next morning, very early, Abe went out to work on sealing the doors to the brick.  He had left a hammer and chisel on top of our 12 foot ladder, and when he went to move the ladder, they fell.  His head intersected their path to the ground.

He came inside and called me, and when I finally struggled awake, I saw his head wound dripping blood on the floor.  He turned on the shower and knelt to wash his forehead while I calmly found first aid supplies totally panicked and ran around uselessly.  Then I checked every fifteen minutes for signs of a concussion by asking questions about his siblings and how many fingers I was waving in his face.  Then I think he wished he had a conc@#$ion so he could be blissfully unaware of my bothering him.  Then eventually he stopped bleeding.

So it turns out he's fine.  And I have almost recovered, too.  We are really, really lucky.

It's been a year since we had health insurance. Abe and I were both covered under his company's insurance plan until he was laid off. We didn't know if unemployment benefits would come through, so we trimmed our spending down to the bare essentials.  COBRA (the law that would have allowed us to keep his insurance temporarily, minus the employer's contribution) was way outside of our budget - especially for something we figured we could do without for a while.  We used the internet to self-diagnose sinus infections and we googled home remedies for sore throats and yeast infections (and conc@#$ions). Now I realize we're one chisel away from being completely screwed. I don't know how much the bill would be for a head x-ray, MRI, or Emergency Room visit, but I do know that we can't afford it. It's time for us to find insurance.

So I've developed a plan.