Grace in Small Things – 287

• Hearing back from one of the LINC managers regarding the possibility of my getting some experience TAing by volunteering. I’ll go fill out an application tomorrow, weather permitting.
• Getting a call back from the woman to whom I sent my resume yesterday for a simple service job.
• Spending much of the day immersed in curriculum design and organizing my resources.
• Being safe and warm and not out in the snow storm.
• That my sweetie is okay after a close call.

Grace in Small Things – 285, 286

The sun was shining even more brightly today than yesterday. Following the first of these Ten Tips for a Mindful Home, I have been trying to inch my wake-up time earlier each day until I am back to the time I normally rise when I have a job.

After my bath and a bowl of oatmeal, I sat on the mat and reflected on the nature of my mind. Ego gives me a lot of trouble. Well, I don’t think it gives me as much trouble as it gives many people, but I know that whatever trouble I have comes from that little mind that I call ego. No self, no problem.

As I was sitting and doing my best to focus on my breath, pulling my attention back again each time it became re-entangled in the chatter of ego, I got a message. The message was, “If you are at all worried or stressed, it means you have failed to understand the true nature of things. If you fully understood the true nature of yourself and the Universe, you would relax.”  I sat there and invited the truth of that to sink into me fully enough to make me relax.  These days, because I am not accustomed to being so out of control in my own life, there has been an undercurrent of worry that rests like a thin glaze over everything I say, think, feel and do.  I know how good it feels when Truth washes over me and relieves me of worry. I was feeling in need of just such a respite…if even for a few minutes.

The message that had come to me is a hard one to swallow. Our logical brain wants to fight it and prove it wrong with things like, “Aw, come on! I’ve got problems, here! My house just burned down!” or “I can’t get a job” or “My husband left me” or “I’ve just been diagnosed with cancer” or any number of facts about so-called problems, large and small, within the human framework.

So since my mind could not wrap itself around the truth of that message, yet some part of me very deep inside knows that it is true, I decided to accept it on faith alone.  My whole body then relaxed and I smiled.

A very similar message is one I found on one of your blogs recently (which one?) saying, “When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.” — Buddha

There is a part of me that already knows this is true. But there will always be a part of my mind that resists it or pulls me back into the realm of ego. Rather than wait for the next wave of enlightenment to find me, I decided to just take the Buddha’s word for that. Just as the smile was creeping across my face, the sun began to crest the top of the building I was facing. Within seconds the sun was blazing in through the glass doors illuminating my whole form, which then materialized in front of me as reflection in the glass doors. I saw myself sitting erect on the cushion, beaming.

That put me in a great frame of mind for meditation.

When I was done sitting, I tackled my list of things to do and got all but one thing accomplished. I:

• Sent emails to two agencies in town inquiring about opportunities to volunteer as a tutor or teaching assistant in their LINC program, saying if I did not hear back by then, I would follow up by phone before the end of the week. Isn’t that clever how I trapped phone-phobic me into making a phone call by saying I would and setting that deadline?
• Completed the application form for my TESL Ontario certificate, gathered all the sealed transcripts, etc., and mailed these off via registered mail to Toronto…with some money, of course!
• Mailed Mary’s book to Suki.

What did I fail to accomplish? I still haven’t put air in my front tires, which look a tad low to me. I should have, too, because today wasn’t very cold and tomorrow probably will be. Oh, Kelly!

While I was writing the emails to the LINC managers about volunteering, I received a call from an employment agency regarding a voice mail I had left them a month ago! Seems they are now interested in seeing my resume regarding a very menial job that doesn’t pay much…but, hey…I just need SOMETHING to help pay the bills until I can get in somewhere as a T.A. or teacher.  Menial is not beneath me.

Now, having finished a bowl of basmati rice and those root veggies I cooked up for the week, I am about to go over to watch yet another Oscar nominated film with my sweetheart.

Grace in Small Things – 284

• What a difference 24 hours can make. I awoke this morning NOT tangled in a heavy net of anxiety, not feeling weepy or lethargic or any of the yucky things I was feeling the day before. And then it came to light that it had all been hormones. Gah! I’m reaching that age where it’s not like clockwork anymore and I can’t just look at the calendar and say, “Oh, right…it’s THAT day.”
• I finished the front side of my page for Mary’s book (ArtShine Traveling Sketchbook project), and expect to finish the back tomorrow. Photos to come.
• I used the stairs instead of the elevator twice in an hour today, both times from the basement, so that’s 7 flights twice. Yay!
• A very good shift at the hospice tonight. The woman on door duty came back to the kitchen and helped me all night long since the door bell wasn’t buzzing all that often. She wasn’t the overly chatty type, so I enjoyed her company a lot.
• Sunshine! Glorious, beaming, life-giving, mood-lifting SUNSHINE!

Grace in Small Things – 282, 283

I finally heard from the Y today–one week and two days (and two attempts to follow up on my part) after I was told I would hear either way within 2-3 days. Another candidate was chosen. The HR person who called me was nice enough to say that I had been a strong candidate and she encouraged me to try again, as they anticipate more openings of a similar nature before too long. She also said that the candidate they chose had more teaching and TAing experience than I.

So there’s that out of the way.

Counting my blessings is something I really need to do right now to turn my focus to the positive. So here we go.

• I got my face seen by four people at that organization.
• I got practice interviewing, which led to my creating a document on my computer called “interview questions and answers.” There I wrote out all the questions they asked me during both interviews, brief notes on what I did say plus a few notes on what I wish I had remembered to say. I’ll be better prepared next time!
• My loving boyfriend comes over just to give me hugs and make me laugh when I need that so badly.
• There is still food in the cupboard.
• There is still money in the bank. It’s not a lot, but it’s more than many people have!
• With everything that I am facing, it is still a zillion times better than staying in a toxic corporate hell that was sucking the life out of me.
• An art project waiting for me on the breakfast table.
• Being able to help out a friend today.
• Getting my transcripts in the mail from the school. Now I can send off for the actual certificate.
• Seeing how much fun Sylvain had with Excel after I taught him some cool features to use on his budget spreadsheet.

Answer #1

In response to this blog post, Tom (Honorary Newfie) asked, “How do you manage to do what you do at the hospice ?”

First I should say that I have only started the job a month ago and don’t know how I’ll feel in a year or two or more. Will it become too much? I don’t know.

The way it feels to me now, it doesn’t take any special effort. I felt called to this work not because I thought of myself as especially gifted, but because I noticed that most other people aren’t that comfortable with death or with being around people who are dying. The situation that made me aware of this I blogged about here.

I do it because someone has to, and since there are a lot of people out there not comfortable enough with death to be able to volunteer there, it creates a vacuum that naturally sucks me in. The hospice offers good training for people willing to work with those facing life-threatening illness. So it’s not as if I thought, “Oh, I’m good at that!” Rather I thought, “I am willing to become good at that, and there are not many who are willing, so therefore I should.”

One quality I have that I think make me a good candidate for the position is authenticity. Many years ago I came to terms with the fact that I am sensitive. I stopped trying to hide my tears in public. Some people who work at the hospice try to keep their hearts closed so they won’t be hurt as often. I don’t. This works for me because as soon as I feel the pain of loss, I just let it come. The painful feelings run their course and go away all on their own…until next time.

Now that I am on the inside, I must tell you that hospice work is much different from what I expected. I thought I would be working with dying people. What I’ve discovered is…I am working with people. They are just people…just like you and me. They just happen to have life-threatening illnesses. Some are sweet and some are angry. They all have good days and harder days. They are just people who happen to have an idea of how close death is, as opposed to the rest of us who don’t know yet.

Hmmm, it seems that most of what I’ve written answers “why” and not “how.” For me, the how is just to take it one moment at a time. In one moment the most important thing is to put on a fresh pot of coffee for the visitors. Pour water. Wipe down counter. In one moment the most important thing is writing down the kinds of ice cream for the person in room X who is very hard of hearing. In one moment the most important thing is remembering that D takes her Earl Grey tea in a small tea cup.

When a difficult moment arises, I just do my best to experience it. If that means crying in front of someone, then that’s what it means. The small rewards are unending and more than make up for the difficult moments. You can’t imagine how many times I get to hear people say, “This place is unbelievable,” or “We made you some brownies,” or “We’re so thankful for all you do.”

Beautiful Blogger Award

Salma has just awarded me the Beautiful Blogger Award. Aw, shucks. Thank you, Salma! I am supposed to post seven interesting things about myself. But since I have done so many memes like this one, I don’t think there are seven things left that you don’t already know! So let me turn this around and invite seven of you to ask me a question about anything you find interesting. No holds barred, I will answer anything so long as I don’t implicate myself in any crime for which the statute of limitations has not yet expired.

I have mixed feelings about passing these things on. If you’re on my blogroll, you already know I think you rock. And there are also bloggers whose blogs I love, but who might not be on the blogroll just now because they went through a period of not posting as often, or something. Then there’s the fact that some bloggers don’t like participating in these, and I might choose someone from that group while another person who does like participating didn’t get chosen. Yikes, I do overthink these things, don’t I? So, once again, I am being rebellious with the rules and saying please copy the Beautiful Blogger Award and post your seven things if you want to. Then let us know that you did and we’ll come read them. I will, anyway.

Grace in Small Things – 281

• Articles in the Shambhala Sun. They help me so much.
• Spending some time on a page for a traveling sketchbook.
• An extra shift at the hospice this week…today, actually. Sometimes the residents go downhill so quickly that one Saturday I’m laughing with them and the next Saturday their room is already occupied by a new resident. This week I picked up someone else’s midweek shift, giving me a chance to see someone one last time who was still sitting up in a chair for supper on Saturday, but probably won’t still be there this weekend. It’s easier for me if I get to see the in-between phase.
• Getting to serve up a tasty meal and seeing clean plates come back, plus one person asking for seconds on everything.
• Walking out into the slightly foggy, no longer cold night air after my shift. Breathing that in.

Grace in Small Things – 280

• Being able to look out my sliding balcony doors and see people ice fishing. One day I looked out and saw a line of three little ice fishing shelters set up on the ice, two blue and one yellow. Sylvain tells me that some people even have little heaters inside the shelters. Just look at all the gear you can buy for this sport right down the street at your local Canadian Tire. There are four people out there in the falling snow right now, no huts. Amazing.
• Today is HEDGEHOG DAY! And what could be more fitting than the news that the owners of Global Exotics LOST their appeal and the seizure of 26,000 animals will go on. This includes over 800 hedgies, four of them headed to Canada where my friend L will meet them at the border. My friend said that the operation to get these animals to their new homes was the most organized effort she had ever seen–and she has been in small animal rescue for a long time. In the case of the hedgehogs, volunteers form a chain, each volunteer offering to drive the animals a certain distance, after which another volunteer who lives close to that drop-off point will take over for another few hundred miles. All the animals are registered and their whereabouts will be monitored for the rest of their lives…to ensure they remain with responsible, capable caregivers. Yay!
• After tonight’s movie date at Sylvain’s house, I will have seen nine of the ten best picture nominees.
• Slow cooked root veggies, oh baby.
• A little note in my mailbox that the office has a package for me. I will find out tomorrow if it is a Traveling Sketchbook page!

Also, I want to clear up something that might have been ambiguous on my last post. Sylvain did not get us tickets to a movie, he got us tickets (using a credit we already had with the Fox Theatre in Detroit) to see a Prairie Home Companion live. Since NPR has been my radio home for over 20 years, this is very exciting for me.

Grace in Small Things – 279

• Interesting dreams last night/this morning. One dream was about Elspeth, one was about rabbits, and one was about the man who came to my dreams the night he died.
• Getting out of the apartment today to get food.
• My crock pot! Time to eat winter root veggies. I got parsnips, turnips, a rutabaga, red onion, and sweet potato. I already had a yellow potato and a head of garlic in the pantry, plus half a head of red cabbage in my crisper, so I threw those in, too. Oh, and I added an Ontario Crispin apple that had been in my fruit crisper for a long time. Why not? I chopped up everything and tossed the pieces in olive oil, then splashed in a bit of balsamic vinegar followed by a little sprinkling of brown sugar.
• Success helping my TESL classmate understand noun clauses. You really don’t know if you thoroughly understand something until you try to explain it.
• Sylvain got us tickets to THIS! (We are using the credit that the Fox Theatre gave us when Sylvain’s hospitalization prevented us from using our Leonard Cohen tickets last year.) To understand how exciting this is for me, you have to know that I’ve been listening off and on for twenty years. AND I saw the movie, of course.

Notes on Compassion

I awoke this morning with a heaviness pressing on me, which is not surprising considering that a) it is winter, b) I am not a morning person, and c) I need a job. I didn’t want to sit on the mat and meditate, even though I know that there are huge short term and long-term benefits to my meditation practice, both for me and for the world of which I’m a part.

To coax myself onto the mat, I decided to sit there with my new issue of the Shambhala Sun and just read an article, then see if–by the end of the article–I was more ready to meditate for a bit. I read “Making the Right Choice” by Daniel Goleman. It was a fascinating article that left me wanting to know more. And indeed, when I finished reading, I was able to sit for a while.

Later in the morning I brought the magazine over to my laptop to find out more about the subject of socially and ecologically responsible buying. What had really gotten my attention was a passage that talked about some products I have come to think of as “green,” but which Goleman points out are not all that virtuous when you consider the entire life cycle of the product. For example, an organic cotton tee shirt is better than one that was made with cotton treated with pesticides, but cotton requires more water to grow than many other textile crops and is hard to dye, resulting in a lot of runoff of chemicals linked to high rates of leukemia among the Chinese children who live around the factories that do the dying.

I learned from Goleman that there are methods being developed that allow consumers to know the whole story using rating systems that take a much larger scope of factors into account. For example, where is the tipping point beyond which it makes more sense to buy a stainless steel water bottle over buying plastic bottles of water? How many times must you be planning to use that stainless steel bottle before the ecological impact of manufacturing it is the more responsible choice over using plastic bottles?

Hungry to understand more, I watched him and listened to him on this TED Talk.

I also bookmarked the Good Guide and  Good Guide Blog so I can educate myself to make more informed decisions when I spend money.

I know I am not a 100% virtuous consumer who makes all earth-friendly choices. I am, however, taking a “start where you are” approach, always trying to stop and think before I buy. My thanks go out to Daniel Goleman for furthering my education today.

Kreativ Blogger

Olivia has awarded me the Kreativ Blogger award. Thank you, Olivia! The rules are:

1. Thank the person giving the award.
2. Copy the award to your blog.
3. Place a link to their blog.
4. Name seven things people don’t know about you.
5. Nominate seven other bloggers who you admire.
6. Place a link to these bloggers.
7. Leave a comment on their blog notifying them of the award.

It’s pretty hard coming up with seven things you don’t already know about me since I’ve already participated in truth or lie guessing games and other games of self revelation. Here goes nothing.

ONE

The most fun I ever had in a job was one of the times I got to build a database. I was at a mid-sized insurance company that was running an ancient DOS-based system. They were mid-conversion to a new Windows-based system on a much bigger server, etc., a project that was taking closer to five years rather than the projected two to three. In the meantime, the IT department was only allowed to spend 20% of their time on other things…like responding when you had system issues. They were absolutely not allowed to take on any new initiatives, nor permitted to spend any time or energy enhancing the dinosaur that was on its way out.

There was a business process in our department that was in dire need of automating and it was not handled by our DOS-based system. So it was being done manually with a bit of help from MS Word. With my supervisor’s permission, I built a little MS Access database to handle that business need. Oh, my goodness, I had fun. The most exciting part for me was making it absolutely dummy proof. One of the reasons this solution was needed was that this particular process was only done a few times a month and our supervisor insisted that when one came in, we should rotate who would do the next one. We tried telling her that one of us should specialize, but she was not in agreement. That meant that each of us only got one of these tasks every month or 6 weeks and we would forget how to do the process. We were forever messing them up and cursing. There were just too many ticky steps to remember.

So I built data filters into all my input fields so that the user could not possibly mess things up no matter how hard they tried. One field, for example, if you tried entering an amount over $200,000 would give you a pop-up message, “The maximum that can be converted is $200K. Please try again.” There were tricky computations that the staff used to have to do on their calculators that I got the software to calculate automatically.  The software even prompted you to load a certain kind of paper into the printer before printing the policy certificate. It also created invoices, reminder letters and policy lapse letters.

To go with this database, I created a call-intake form to ensure my coworkers remembered all the questions they needed to ask the customer while they still had the customer on the phone. I put the questions in a heirarchy so that if you got “no” to an early question, you would know to discontinue the call and not waste the customer’s time on the rest of the form. The pieces of information that could be looked up in the system later without the client on the phone were put at the bottom of the form below a line and the words END CALL, cutting the time the client had to spend on the phone with us.

That project made me so, so, so happy. I love deciding where buttons should go and how to make an interface as intuitive as possible, which reduces the chance of human error. If you design a screen right, there is zero possibility of human error. To the extent possible using the Access platform, I did succeed in designing an application that shoe-horned the user through the process with no possibility of error. (The one exception was a bug inherent to Access.)

The other thing I really like doing when I create a database is making it so that I–the creator–am dispensable after the fact. For example, I had a drop-down list where you could choose the associate responsible for keying in the data. But that list would have to be updated whenever new staff came on board. So I put a button on the database maintenance menu for updating the list of associates. And so on.

I also like to put every document associated with the process in the database so it’s one stop shopping, nothing ever gets misplaced or lost. So one button on the menu takes you to the How To manual or to an INSTRUCTIONS screen. One button allows you to print out those intake forms I talked about.

I was very proud of that baby.

Later in my employment with that company one of the VPs asked if I would be interested in going to school at night to learn ASP. Frustrated with how long the IT Dept was taking to build a website, he said, “if you were the one we had asked to do it, it would be done by now.” What a compliment.

TWO

I have a dent in my right ear that my mom says was caused by forceps.

THREE

I am allergic to penicillin, or at least I was when I was a child and was treated with that drug for a case of pneumonia. I broke out in a horrid rash all over.

FOUR

When I was a kid, I never managed to learn to do a cartwheel, though I tried.

FIVE

When I was young, I sometimes wished for an older sibling.

SIX

My favourite scent is patchouli. Although I stopped wearing fragrance several years ago out of consideration for people who are sensitive, if I catch a whiff of that essential oil in public I will often follow the person wearing it up a store aisle or down the street just to continue smelling it.

SEVEN

When I was six, an adult neighbour taught me how to catch bees. He said that bees never sting in the dark, so if you come up behind them and catch them between your cupped hands, you’ll be fine.  He told me just to be very careful to get them in the dead centre of my two cupped hands, because if I missed and the edge of my hands touched them and pressed down, they would sting. I used to get a kick out of showing off this bee-catchng talent…until the day the inevitable happened; I didn’t line up my capture properly. Ouch. My hand swelled up like a mango, and that was the end of my bee-catching adventures.

TAG, you’re it!

Like Olivia and Jane, I am not keen on selecting some bloggers over others. I think you are all creative and wonderful! But I will make some sort of effort to follow the rules, with my own twist. If you are listed below and do not like being tagged for these kinds of things, just disregard. No hard feelings at all. And if you’re NOT tagged but want to do it, by all means…grab the badge and go for it! Oh, and if you don’t have a blog, you can do it in the comments area.

• Honorary Newfie (Tom). I admire him for the way he keeps on finding ways of doing things after a brain injury, which definitely takes creativity!
• Any reader with a birthday in the summer
• AbitibiSouth (Sylvain). I admire him for his positive attitude in the face of so many life changes and transitions.
• Any reader who is on the other side of an ocean from me. Or more than one ocean!
• Bliss Fruit (Patti). I admire her for the way she tunes into beauty and peace all around her.
• Art by Serena (Serena). I admire her for being friendly.
• Any reader who loves “Talk Like a Pirate” Day

Grace in Small Things – 278

• My sweetie came over for Sunday morning breakfast.
• Last night he said he had a favour to ask me and sweetened the deal by mentioning that it would involve using tools. Did you know I love using tools? Oh, I do!  The 12-year-old central vac at the house he shares with other family members had finally died, and his mom had bought the new one, but it would cost another $100 to have someone install it. That’s where I came in! I got to use so many of my favourite tools: a level, a power drill, and even a saw– since the dodo person who installed the last one glued PVC pipe together. I let Sylvain strip the insulation off the old wires cause he deserved to have a bit of the fun, too. Next time, though, it will be MY TURN to use the wire strippers. I got to hear the words, “F___, you’re smart” come out of his mouth at one point. That made me grin.
• Receiving a Kreativ Blogger award from Olivia. I’m going to do that next. What fun!
• Lots of fun today exploring whole brain teaching websites after Karyn’s tip in her comment on a previous post.
• Looking forward to a Skype date tonight with a TESL classmate so I can give her some more feedback and support as she gets through the last of the assignments.

Grace in Small Things – 277

• My practice. I would be a basket case by now (since the YMCA did not call to let me know EITHER WAY as promised on Friday) if I did not have mindfulness practice and meditation as daily (hourly, minutely, secondly) practices in my life.
• Mindfully cleaning my little meditation bell this morning. I used linseed oil on the wood, rubbing it in with my fingers, and a gentle solvent on the chime. Perhaps I was just imagining things, but the bell seemed to ring louder and more crisply after the cleaning. I enjoy taking good care of things.
• Being back in touch with one of my first cousins after a long period of only secondhand news of her and her family.
• How quickly Sylvain got on top of the execution of several financial decisions that have resulted in giving us some breathing room.
• A good shift tonight at hospice. I met two new residents, one of whom asked for second helpings on everything.

Exploring Colours Around Me

Two weeks ago…or was it three? Anyway, one of Brandi’s Joy Rebel Missions for Mission Monday was to pick a colour and notice it all around you. Photograph it or paint it or whatever.

I was hoping to have 9 samples of at least one colour, since 9 makes such a nice little matrix collage. I couldn’t decide on a colour and ended up instead with fewer than 9 samples of each of a few colours. Instead of waiting, waiting until I have nine of each, I am going to go ahead and post what I have now. This project was fun. Oh, and I’m sure you will notice that not all of the photos were taken this winter. I also had fun mining through photos taken long ago. As you can see, I was not able to line these up in a cute little matrix and I refused to get the software that would have done it for me.

WHITE

GREEN

BROWN

PURPLE

Grace in Small Things – 276

• Something FUN! Clearly I need a job. I justified spending time learning this since it might make a great Friday afternoon activity for an ESL class. Vocabulary: corner, mountain fold, valley fold, nose, tail. Grammar point – imperative form of verb.
• Something beautiful. Glancing out the sliding glass doors to see a very fat, full moon rising over the lake and four swans swimming through the reflection path on the water. My goodness, this is a beautiful world.
• Something funny! Suki asked her blog readers: is there a song named for you or are you named for a song? If so, post it and let her know. Sure, there is a Kelly song. I’ll bet you know it.
• Getting snail mail today… on Letter Writers Alliance stationery, no less! I have the coolest friends in the world.
• Frugal date night. I’m going over to Sylvain’s to watch a movie.

Grace in Small Things – 275

• This news story.
• A beautiful, sunny but very cold day that I enjoyed from the warm side of the sliding glass doors.
• I spent over an hour on Skype with a former classmate discussing projects and assignments. After listening to what she had put together, I assured her she was on the right track and doing a great job. She thanked me about a zillion times, said she was calming down and feeling more confident after our talk.
• A good visit tonight with Sylvain. Instead of going out for date night, we just talked and worked on the unemployment budget spreadsheet together so he can be prepared tomorrow for his meeting with a financial adviser. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. I was proud of myself. I usually can’t make it all the way through a discussion about money without crying or shutting down emotionally. I did neither. (Hey, boys and girls, can you say that? Shenpa! Sure you can, I knew that you could!)
• Designing cards for Sylvain’s parents for when his dad undergoes cataract surgeries in March. See, the doctor gave them this chart to help her with the schedule of eye drops for 3 different medicines for each eye over a period of five weeks. But the process is way too confusing since his right eye will be on her left, and since week 1 after surgery means the week of March 4 for the right eye, but means the following week for the left eye. In other words, you’ll have to use one band of the chart for one eye and another band of the chart for the other eye at the same time. Way too open to error. So I’m making up a series of 39 cards, one card for each day for 39 days.

Thursday, March 11
	Right Eye	Left Eye
Time	Medication	Medication
Before Breakfast	Vigamox, wait 5 minutes	Voltaren, wait 5 minutes
	Maxidex	Vigamox
Before Lunch		AT HOSPITAL – SURGERY
Before Supper	Vigamox, wait 5 minutes
	Maxidex
Before Bed	Vigamox, wait 5 minutes
	Maxidex
NOTES: Nothing to eat or drink before surgery. Okay to take pills with a small sip of water. Night: eye shields on BOTH eyes, taped, no gauze pad. Do not shower.

How to Get Your Travel Insurance Claim Paid

This post, aimed at Canadians, is something I couldn’t write while I was employed as a claims examiner. Now that I am not, I am eager to share the tips and tricks that can help you avoid some common mistakes people make when it comes time to use the insurance they take out to cover them while traveling outside their home province.

There are two ways you can obtain travel medical coverage. You either already have it as part of a group insurance plan, such as through an employer, union or association of some kind, or you shop for your own via the yellow pages, internet or a broker.

Tip #1 – If you do not already have out-of-province travel coverage through a group plan and are looking to buy a plan for yourself or your family, I highly recommend that you go through a broker. The reason I recommend having a broker is that if you run into trouble down the road in getting a claim settled, the broker is someone you can call up and say, “Hey, you told me that X company was the way to go, but they are giving me problems with my claim. Help me.” The broker will then gather information from you about the situation and will call the underwriter or third party administrator (the company contracted to adjudicate the claims) to advocate on your behalf.

That said, not all brokers wield the same leverage with the claims department. At each of three insurance companies where I’ve worked, we in customer service and claims were made very aware of the names of the top producers. The producers who bring in the most clients are very valuable to the insurance company, and so the carrier wants to keep them happy, doing whatever they can to cultivate and preserve that business relationship. Where I last worked, we called them our Platinum Brokers. I kept the list of their names on the wall of my cubicle. If one of them called me up to ask for a favour, I dropped everything I was doing and said, “Yes, Ma’am!” or “Yes, Sir!”

If you want that extra edge at claims time, first gather some phone numbers of travel insurance companies, which you can do via the internet. Call them up and just ask them who their top broker is in your area for travel insurance. Then call that broker and say, “I want you to be my broker.” If they shop around for you and steer you to a different carrier for your policy from the one who gave you that name, call that carrier’s travel claims department and ask, “Is SO AND SO one of your top ten producers?”

Now I’m not saying you can get a bogus claim paid by having a top broker in your court, but I’m saying that if you get in an iffy situation where there is some grey area, having a heavy person going to bat for you can make all the difference between a denial and having a denial overturned on appeal.

Tip #2 – Be honest when answering the application questions. I mean 100% honest. You may think you can hide things from the insurance company, but you can’t. They have ways of finding out. I’ll give you an example of how dangerous it can be to lie or even fudge a little bit when answering the questionnaire.

There was a woman who said no, she had never been diagnosed with heart disease, diabetes, a kidney disorder, blah, blah, blah through a long list of questions about her health. She got down to Florida and ended up with a very serious health crisis. As you know can happen if you have ever been treated in the good old US of A, the hospital bills were astronomical. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The first thing the claims department is going to do with any claim over a certain dollar amount is get your past medical history from your GP and any specialists to whom you’ve been referred in the past x years (usually three). They are going to go over those chart notes carefully to ensure you didn’t lie on your application.  If your claim is really high (say $10,000 or more), they might ask the province for your entire health chart going back the same number of years. This means that the insurance company will have access to records for every medical visit for which you used your provincial health card, including walk-in-clinics. They will see in the notes if your doctor recommended some medicine, action or lifestyle change and you were uncooperative, which may invalidate coverage if your claim relates to the same area of health. They will see referrals to specialists and will then ask you for a release form to seek the charts from those specialists.

If they find that you lied on any question, your entire policy can be invalidated, your premium refunded, and you can be stuck with that $250,000 USD hospital bill for the lovely bypass operation and air evac, appendectomy or whatever. The best lawyer is not going to get you out of that mess. You lied, your policy is void; sorry, Charlie.

So again, do not lie. If you are not sure whether something qualifies as “a condition” or “been treated for,” just ask the person who is having you fill out the form, or who is reading you the questions over the phone. Tell them what’s up and say, “so do I check yes or no?” Keep a log of what day and time you asked that question. If you are later nailed and told you answered incorrectly but have proof you were advised to answer that way by a doctor or sales person, you have a very strong basis for appeal. Since the company will have recorded the phone call, all you need is the time and day for them to be able to pull the audio of the sales call.

Also, there is no need to lie since you can still get coverage in spite of bad health so long as the condition has been stable for a certain period before the trip. This is all laid out in the policy booklet. One thing you can do on your own or with a broker is examine a variety of policy brochures looking for differences in the stability period for pre-existing conditions. There are also plans out there with no health questionnaires to fill out. Those usually come as riders on your home insurance policy, so look into those if a health questionnaire is something you don’t want to have to go through.

Tip #3 - Read your policy. All of it. Especially read the small print. Be sure you thoroughly understand the concept of pre-existing condition. If you don’t understand part of it, call the sales person or broker to have it explained to you. If your broker ever says to you something like, “Oh, don’t worry about that. That really just means so and so…” then you need to document that phone call or office visit. Keep a journal of when you spoke and exact words that were said. Having a recording of the call is even better.

Watch out for myths. It is not true that you can’t get travel insurance if you have a pre-existing condition. You still can get insurance for a higher premium so long as that condition is “stable and controlled” before the trip. Make darned sure you understand the concept of stable and controlled. If you read the policy booklet and talk to your broker and still are not comfortable, call the claims department and ask an examiner, “if I end up with a claim for this acting up while I’m away, will that be covered?” Some examiners are not allowed to answer hypothetical questions like that, for the obvious reason that each situation is different once it happens with all its myriad variables, and they don’t want to get caught having to pay an invalid claim because “so and so told me it would be covered.” But some examiners will have such a discussion with you. If one won’t, call back and see if a different examiner picks up the phone. Or ask to speak to the claims supervisor, who might be more willing to go into hypotheticals with you. If she/he won’t, see if you can be transferred to the Assistance Team’s supervisor, who will likely be an RN who knows the policies inside and out. Again, keep a log of when you spoke to the person, how to spell their name, their extension number, and the exact words you were told.

Tip #4 – Go over the policy again right before your trip. Highlight any things you might forget, like the deadline for filing.

Tip #5 – Put the wallet card in the wallet you’ll take with you on the trip and USE IT. In fact, if you will be traveling to an area from which it may be difficult to make a phone call, such as Mexico or a jungle somewhere, go ahead and get the email address of the claims department, as well. If you run into ANY trouble at all during the trip, call the toll-free number on the card or, if you can’t call, try to find an internet cafe so you can email. You can also call collect or, if it’s your only option, call from your cell phone and submit the bills later as part of your claim.

Most policies say that you must call in the event of a medical emergency. So know the definition of medical emergency. Some people take this to mean they only have to call immediately if they go to the emergency room or urgent care clinic, but don’t have to call for something routine like a cold or flu. Yes, you have to call for anything for which you will later be claiming. In fact, you should also call about things that you cannot claim or do not plan to claim. Keep the carrier informed every step of the way regarding what is happening with your health. This is because most companies these days employ something called managed care. They have nurses on the phones 24/7 whose job it is to help you find a nearby clinic or hospital, review why you are seeking medical care and whether the level of care is covered, warranted, etc. The assistance team is there to help you, including to warn you of anything that might not be covered on the policy. They are there to protect you from any unpleasant surprises…like a lab test or invasive procedure that may not be seen as necessary.  The treating medical team and the nurses on the assistance team will work together to make sure you get the best care possible, but they will also work to decide whether the care should take place in Canada or where you are vacationing. Even if the medical emergency is not for some reason coverable, the assistance team will still assist you all the way through the emergency, including providing live interpretation of foreign languages if necessary.  You paid for the services, you have a right to use them.

So again, call as soon as you know you’ll be seeking medical attention. You may be in Mexico, where it is a real hassle to make international phone calls, and think seeing the hotel MD about your sniffles is no big deal, you’ll tell the insurance company when you get home. Wrong. Go ahead and do your best to call (or email) as soon as you can. One reason is that you never know what that cold might develop into later. You want to have the assistance team in the loop from the get-go. If you can’t call before being treated, call or have someone call on your behalf as soon as possible. This is really important for getting your claim paid.

Tip #6 – Follow the instructions of the Assistance Team. They will guide you through the whole process step by step as your medical emergency unfolds and will check with you as you start to feel better to make sure any medication is working. They will advise you whether any follow-up visits are covered and what to expect next. They will tell you when and how to file the claim, either on a paper form that they are mailing out to you, or online. They will remind you of any claims filing deadline. If they don’t, ask.

If at any point you feel the assistance team member is not acting in your best interest or is not providing you with a good service experience, do not hesitate to ask to speak to the person’s supervisor. I know medical emergencies are stressful, but do your best to stay calm and speak respectfully to the supervisor when you outline the ways in which you feel your case is not being handled well. You might be able to request a different examiner or assistance person.

If you really are having trouble seeing eye to eye with the assistance team, bring your broker in the loop.

Tip #7 – Follow instructions to the letter when submitting the claim. This means filling the form out completely and honestly and filing in a timely manner (some policies have a 30-day window, some a 90-day window for claim submission). Some companies start counting when you get home, some start counting from the date of incident. It means filling out the forms properly and fully. It means submitting ORIGINAL bills and, for annual polices, proof of your departure date.

If there is any part of the form you don’t understand, call the claims department and ask to be walked through it. That’s what they’re there for. Go over with them everything you are putting in the envelope and ask, “Is that everything?” A quick call of this type can save you the unpleasant experience of having it all returned to you to redo.

One mistake a lot of members make is thinking that direct billing means they don’t have to file. Often the Assistance Team will be able to convince the doctor’s office or hospital to bill directly so that you don’t have any out-of-pocket expense at the time of the emergency. This does NOT mean you don’t still have to fill out the claim form. You do. Direct billing just means the bills will be sent directly to the carrier for adjudication.

Tip #8 – Don’t take no for an answer. Let’s say you messed up and didn’t send in your claim form by the deadline, so your claim was denied. Or let’s say you forgot to tell the sales person about that little asthma attack you had two weeks before departure, which they are now saying constitutes your pre-ex not being stable and controlled. There are many things you can do to mount an appeal to a denied claim.

1. Call your broker and ask for his/her intervention. Often this is all you will need to do, as the broker will help you through the appeal process. In fact, it may not even get as far as a formal appeal. Depending on the size of the claim, one phone call by a star broker might be all it takes.
2. If you don’t have a competent or helpful broker, call up and ask what the process is for appealing a claim decision. Ask the advice of a claims examiner. Say, “If you were mounting this appeal, what would you include?” Most claims examiners are people like you and me. They enjoy being able to approve claims and don’t like having to deny them. Most will help you out, feeling more sympathy for you than for the corporation they work for.
3. Read over the policy again to make sure the decision made by the claims team is 100% supported by the wording of the policy. If the policy doesn’t clearly spell things out, the denial should be overturned. Never assume that the claims department or assistance team understand the policy better than you do. They know what it is supposed to communicate, but you know how it sounds to you. I can’t tell you the number of times we examiners disagreed on the true underlying meaning of a clause versus what it actually said. If we couldn’t agree, then there is definitely room for appeal!
4. Ask yourself what went wrong and why. Is it your fault, or did someone mislead you? Here is where those notes come in handy regarding who told you what at what time on which day. Insurance and sales companies record phone calls, so pull out those notes and ask to have the tapes pulled. Are there extenuating circumstances you feel should be taken into consideration? If so, write out why.
5. Get supporting documentation for an appeal. If the carrier is telling you that you lied on the application by saying you did not have a heart condition, a letter from your doctor stating that a bundle branch block is not “a heart condition” can go a long way toward having the denial overturned. I remember a case where a family was going to lose their house because their little girl had had an upper respiratory infection within the 90 days prior to their trip and got down to the US and had a situation that turned into a hospital stay with lots of costly intervention (those MRIs and CT scans add up fast). It had never occurred to them that a cold was a pre-ex. Fortunately, they turned to their family physician for help. This kind doctor wrote a letter that not only mentioned the horrible financial situation this unpaid claim had put the family in, but also testified that the child could easily have picked up an entirely new bug on the plane or at Disneyland. One was not necessarily linked to the other and there certainly was no medical way to prove that the second crisis was a continuation of the first. I was the lucky examiner who got to call the mom and say, “your appeal has been approved, the denial overturned.” She lost her composure right there on the spot. We both needed tissues!
6. Don’t hesitate to remind the company of your standing as a customer. If you have been a loyal purchaser of this brand of insurance for 5 years or more and this is your first claim, say so.
7. If you need further advocacy beyond your broker, contact the ombudsman for life and health insurance in your province. In Ontario, that’s http://www.olhi.ca/. In fact, sometimes just saying you are about to contact the ombudsman will get results.
8. If the claim is large enough, consider retaining a lawyer.

In all the time I worked as a claims examiner, I noticed one trend over and over. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. People who appealed politely but firmly got the best response, followed by people who appealed less politely but still with firm and rational grounds behind the appeal. There was even one man who was not polite and actually should never have had his claim denial overturned, but managed to get a small concession simply through persistence. He was eventually told that if he continued to call, it would be considered harassment and we would have to start hanging up on him, but before it came to that, he did manage to get a couple of bills paid that really were solid denials.

A final note about brokers: although I highly recommend having one, in my experience they are not the ones who really know the policies inside and out. I had many, many cases where the client, when caught not having followed proper procedure to ensure full coverage, said something to the effect of, “But my broker said I didn’t have to call first unless….” or “my broker said I was covered for everything,” or “my broker said I could just send everything in once I got home.” Remember that the broker is trying to make a sale and sometimes will sugar coat some processes to make things sound easy-peasy, please just sign on the dotted line. When in doubt, call the claims department or assistance team yourself to verify what you’ve been told by the broker.

For more tips on how to mount the most effective appeal, have a look at these articles, with which I agree wholeheartedly:

How to Complain and Win

You vs. Customer Service: How to Complain and Conquer

If you have found this article to be helpful, I hope you’ll leave a comment to let me know. Cheers and happy travels!

Grace in Small Things – 274

• Rising early and sitting longer than I usually can manage on the yoga mat. After a long night of spinning, spinning crazy head, my mind finally settled down.
• Playing with paints some more.
• Feeling at peace about either outcome…whether I get this job or don’t.
• A good, good evening at Windsor Meditation Group tonight. I am getting used to the new monk who comes over from Detroit to teach us. Tonight he told us about growing up in an orphanage in Sri Lanka.
• Helping out a friend.

Grace in Small Things – 273

Oh, my. SO much good stuff today.

Well, except for being about to go for a swim and discovering I didn’t know where my bathing suit was. I pretty much have a place for everything, and the bathing suit lives either in the gym bag, in miscellaneous drawer of my chest, or hanging on the back of the bathroom door. It occurred to me that I had probably left it hanging in the locker room shower last time I swam. I ran down there to check if it was still hanging in the shower, but it wasn’t there. That’s understandable since my last swim was several days ago. I checked with the office to see if anyone had turned it in. No such luck.

I am reminded of the first few times I had things stolen after moving to Canada. The first time my wallet went missing, I called to cancel the bank cards, order a new driver’s license and so forth. Two days later I found the wallet. It had fallen between the driver’s seat and door in my car.

The next time something was stolen…um, yeah…I found the item.

And the next time… yeah. Eventually I got it through my thick head that in my new country, the stolen things always turned out to just be lost.

I emailed Sylvain to give him the good news (good interview) and the bad news about the swimsuit, apologizing to Sylvain for being careless with the suit he had helped me pick out. It had not been cheap.

Anyway, back to the good stuff…

First, I had a good second interview.

Next, I found THIS VIDEO via Elspeth’s blog; it had me sobbing from the plain Truth of it.

I did some reading today in some of the watercolour books from the library. When I got to the part of one book where the author recommended practicing drawing every day, I sat down in front of the little lamp table by the window and drew the collection of vases and dried wildflowers.

I stared at the clouds over the water. I am so blessed to be able to sit in my own living room and look out on gulls, geese, ducks and so much water. From this vantage point I can’t even see the other shore.

Then I got an invitation from my friend to join this seminar.

And I got another really nice compliment on my dragonflies.

Oh, and I found the swim suit. It was in the OTHER gym bag.

Grace in Small Things – 272

I awoke in one of those moods. Little energy, a blanket of pessimism, anxiety and fear pressing down on me. I sat on the yoga mat in front of the view of the water, sat with the feelings, held them like a baby. I could hear Thich Nhat Hanh’s voice in my head as I said, “Breathing in, I know that I am sad and anxious. Breathing out, I am taking good care of my sadness and anxiety. It seemed to be a mixture of two things: a bit of a natural landing after getting so high on painting last night, and worry about money as Sylvain’s job offer has evaporated while I still don’t have anything lined up to allow me to resume paying my own rent.

To get myself moving, I thought to drive up the street to my local library branch to get some books on beginning watercolour. What a treasure libraries are. We are so lucky to have them. I found three good books and sat down on a comfy chair in the library to start reading one of them. Hey, I remember some of this stuff from those summer days I spent bugging my mom while she worked up in her studio. I remember the day she tried to get me to make swatches of tints and shades of each colour. She wanted me to understand the concept of value and how to achieve different values by lightening and darkening the paint. At that time, I didn’t have the patience for the fundamentals. My middle name should have been “Miss Instant Gratification.”

The neat thing about starting with Linda Kemp’s demo this past weekend was that it whetted my appetite for watercolours. Now I know how much fun you can have if you learn to use this medium, and I feel motivated enough by that carrot dangling out there to invest time in the fundamentals. So, Mom, I’ll be making those swatches after all.

After I got back from the library and was working on something for Sylvain’s parents, I got a call from the YMCA. I have been invited to participate in the second round of interviews. Mind you, the position is a very, very short contract, but that’s okay. Just to get my foot in the door would be awesome. Did that ever buoy my mood! Yes, it did. Or as my grandpa used to say, “Yessiree, Bobcat!”

I have now added the final layer of colour to the painting that was at the end of this post. I really like this one. What fun!

The biggest blessing of all is that I was called back to this artistic medium now, while my mom is still with me and still willing to share her 70+ years of knowledge of experience (she will be 80 this year).