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Facing COVID19 Without Healthcare [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-02-10

The last five months have been … well and truly extra.

October was Cardiapocalypse Averted. The combination of post Lyme stuff, the leftovers of an August bought of COVID19, and a thirty year old car crash injury that has long troubled me on the right side suddenly popped up on the left, mimicking heart attack symptoms. My insurance was suspended and I have a lovely $5,400 bill to pay. The only good news is the COVID booster a couple days after the event cleared up all the lingering crud.

We all have some November memory. I put Reinventing Collapse front and center on my Substack.

I didn’t say so much in December, but it was the beginning of an endless day job slog cleaning up a both a server and some client PCs. This intrusion was nearly a death blow for two small businesses that provide a dozen jobs combined. The very last of it resolved around sunrise this morning.

January was just peachy, I worked about 160 hour the last ten days of the month, the crunch time for the cleanup that started in December. And this being the beginning of the Trump years, the precedent setting 1st Amendment suit in Texas with my name on it resolved … the original $1.3m judgment meant to punish the federal informant who filed it was reduced to ...a. whopping $197. My lawyer filed a notice of appeal, then withdrew. I again have initiative in the matter, but it’ll require a 1A ninja willing to sue the DOJ in Texas on a contingency basis. That’s not impossible, but it will take some leg work.

And for February the image gracing the lede was about an hour ago. I am facing my third COVID19 bout in ten months. I raided my end of the year pay off my doctor fund to get through January, one of those aforementioned small businesses owes me a tidy sum, but it’s unclear how quickly they’ll be able to pay, and my insurance is AGAIN suspended. The two previous times I had COVID19 I had Paxlovid on hand. I tried to get a refill in December, but no luck. I am scared.

Other than prosecuting that endless 1st Amendment matter I was not around here for much of the last fourteen years. Some of you still remember 2010, when I built Progressive Congress News, which a group of Kossacks used to eventually reach 23% of all Congressional staff with daily policy news. We finished in the top five among 700 applicants for the Knight Foundation News Challenge in 2011, and had we had a neutral name that $400,000 grant would have been ours.

I’ve done some stuff since then, but other than whomping Iran’s PressTV last June, almost all of it has been unsigned. The reporters in my chat rooms all vanished the first week or November, and now I’m just an oracle, dispensing varying degrees of technical defensives advice via Subtack.

I greatly dislike asking for help in any case, and that goes double now, when so very many are in need. But I am legitimately in pretty dire straits here. If I have to do this without the benefit of the Paxlovid I had for my first two bouts, I am fragile enough that this could very well be my final post here. *gulp*

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/10/2302799/-Facing-COVID19-Without-Healthcare?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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