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Category: Insurance

No A1C Test for a While

Chris Stocker 4 Comments

Not having insurance for some time really sucks.  Sorry to be so blunt about it, but it does.  For those of you in that boat, you know what I mean.  I was insured the entire time I was diabetic, so I had no clue how it would actually feel.  I could only imagine, but now that my COBRA should be kicking in soon (fingers crossed), things may be getting better.  I have not had an A1C test done or seen my doctor since October.  I was seeing her on a regular monthly schedule.  The very first thing that I am going to be doing when I get that confirmation letter that I am covered again is schedule an appointment with her.

I know that my A1C is not going to be good this time around.  I am not even going to try and make myself believe that.  Over the last month, my overall sugars have been crap!  Below are snapshots of my 7 day, 14 day, and 30 day average levels, respectively.  As you will see, not that good.

7 day blood sugar avg

14 day blood sugar avg

30 day blood sugar avg

The 7 day average is mainly due to two bad sites and being sick.  My last A1C was 6.9.  I was happy with that at the time because the one before that was 7.1, so it was declining.  Unfortunately, that is not going to be the case.  At least one of my top 10 goals of 2010 should get accomplished.  These elevated blood sugars can be explained with two simple words: diet and exercise.  Actually, those words may not be as simple as we think.  Let’s get into details.

Diet

If you do a search in the dictionary for the word diet you come up with 11 different varieties of the word.  Yea, 11!  You can choose whichever one you want, but I have decided to go with this one:

“a particular selection of food, esp. as designed or prescribed to improve a person’s physical condition or to prevent or treat a disease: a diet low in sugar.”

That sounds exactly like what I am trying to do.  I select certain foods to make me lose weight and keep my blood sugars normal. That part seems easy to do, but it’s the management of it that gets me every time.  I feel that I don’t have the time to make a healthy dinner every night.  Well that’s just BS because the time that I spend sitting in a restaurant or waiting in line at a fast food joint, I could have spent cutting up some veggies and grilling or boiling some chicken.  One tip that has helped me in the past with this is to just put my laptop next to the grill and do some of my consulting work while the food is cooking.  Getting something accomplished while making a good, healthy meal.

The next part that ruins my diet every time is the cravings.  One craving will kill a whole week’s worth of dieting.  I always get cravings for Chinese food, which is my number one craving.  I used to crave Taco Bell all the time, but I fought that one off, so I know it is possible to do it with this one as well.  A good way to fight off these cravings is to cook up some veggies myself, grill some pork loins and then make my own stir fry with brown rice, there’s my craving fix.

The final struggle to my diet woes is portion control.  Even when I do cook a healthy meal, let’s say for example that stir fry I just spoke about.  It doesn’t make it healthy when I eat 3 plates of it when I should be eating only 1, maybe a half of a second plate.  The way  I always justify it to myself is that, well it’s healthier than eating 3 servings of Chinese food, which that logic needs to go, which I know this, it’s just the fact of actually doing it.

These 3 things are what are killing my diet, but I know what I need to do and will need to work harder to stop doing these things and I should be ok.

Exercise

This one is simple and easy to explain, laziness.  I make way too many excuses because I am so busy.  I work 3.5 days a week on site at Volvo Aero Services and then am doing about 50-60 hours a week worth of consulting or web design work, so there is very little time to fit things in.  I also have season tickets to the Florida Panthers so there are nights that I can’t exercise because I don’t get done working until about 5-5:30 and have to leave for the game at 6:30.  So that gives me one hour to either cook a good dinner or exercise, and typically neither one of those even happen.

I am sure that I share these same problems with everybody.  If it was simple and easy, I’m sure we could all get over these hurdles easily, but they are not simple and easy.  It makes it a lot easier however having the supporting cast on here that we all have.  Every day that I am living with being overweight is just hurting me in the long run.

It all comes back to my 3 words of 2010 and getting it done!

How Diabetes Created My Business

Chris Stocker 1 Comment

Growing up I always had dreams of owning my own business in New York City in a big high rise building. When I was hit with the diagnosis of diabetes when I was 19 those dreams still were there. After a few years of having diabetes and realizing what the insurance side of diabetes was like I started to become discouraged about owning my own business. How would I get insurance if I owned my own company. These are still my biggest concerns.

Diabetes introduced me to blogging which led me to social media. I started blogging everyday, going on social media sites, started working on design, started learning about search engines and how they work and different marketing techniques. I started to think to myself damn this is awesome, I would love to do this for a living. But, how will I pay for insurance.

So while still working for that old company I began to do some consulting, giving advice to people on how to rank better in Google and then teaching them about Twitter and showing then how Facebook = easy money. So then popped up CSI Marketing Solutions, LLC.

Right now I have insurance through Cobra for the next 18 months so the insurance part of owning my own business is not as much of a concern. So this is how diabetes has led to me owning my own business. If it wasn’t for diabetes who knows if I would have created a web design an search marketing consulting company.

It’s times like this that make me thankful to be diabetic.

Have a great weekend everybody.

How Many Hours in a Lifetime Wasted On Hold with Insurance Companies?

Chris Stocker 2 Comments

You know how there are all these studies out there and all these dumb little facts?  Well I have one for somebody to figure out.  The average amount of time in a lifetime that a diabetic waits on hold with an insurance company.  I’m guessing I can save pretty much half of my life this way.  Today was worth the wait however.  I had to first call my insurance company and find out the phone number to my mail order pharmacy.  My insurance had switched in November, the day before I was fired, and I still have coverage through them, so I wanted to get an insulin re-order before that time.  It took the guy on the phone 20 minutes to basically just give me the phone number to the mail order pharmacy.

Once I called them it became better.  I spoke to a lady who walked me through the whole process.  She recommended that I have my doctor call in my prescription because she said, “in all honesty, the fax will get tied up in an incoming box until probably tomorrow.”  For once, somebody at an insurance company told me the truth about something.  She will probably lose her job for saying such a thing.  She gave me a phone number, fax number, what exactly to have the nurse say to the person on the phone, everything.  After having a nice discussion with her, I then called my doctor’s office.  I explained the situation to her and explained why I missed my last visit and why I don’t know the exact date of my next visit.  I will explain that here tomorrow, it’s kind of interesting believe it or not.  Anywho, I asked my doctor’s office to call and leave me a voicemail once this was all completed, well I received the voicemail, so I am happy.

The only scary part is that I am going to PA next week, so I asked for the insulin to be delivered there.  Which now I regret because I have enough insulin for about a month, so I could have just had it shipped here and stored in the fridge.  Now I have to have it shipped into the freezing cold weather, and then bring it back with my on the plane.  It goes into my carry on, so it is going to take up a pretty fair amount of space on there, so we shall see how that turns out next Sunday.  Well, time to sign off for the night again.  I need to try and get my posts done in the morning again instead of 10:00 p.m.

December 1 Already, Seriously?

Chris Stocker

I can’t believe that today is already the first day of December.  How crazy is that?  I am so glad that NaBloPoMo is over!  Like I said, I’m still going to try and do it, but at least there isn’t any pressure to get a post done.  Well, my diabetes has been talked about a lot lately, so I am going to get back into that starting today.  I have put on a lot of weight since I have been laid-off, probably a good 10-15 pounds.  It hasn’t affected my sugars that much, but I know it isn’t helping them at all.  I have been getting no exercise at all, just walking from parking lots to stores and walking from my car to the entrance of the Bank Atlantic Center for the hockey games, that’s about it.

I am going home for the holidays, well the day after Christmas, and my goal is to lose 10 pounds before I go up there.  That gives me 26 days to do so, and 10 pounds may seem like a lot, but it’s not.  One full week of exercise and I can guarantee this weight will be gone.  Although I have been posting blogs, I have not logged into my Twitter account in almost 2 weeks.  So I don’t really know what is going on in everybody’s world.  I am going to spend some time this weekend catching back up on all the blogs that I have missed in that time period.

As of today my insurance has ran out. I was not able to get blood work done before the insurance ran out because of some scheduling conflicts on my own part.  My own fault.  I am awaiting to receive paperwork on my Cobra insurance.  I need to get that as soon as possible so I can fill it out and get it submitted as soon as possible, that way I don’t some how go beyond that almighty 63 days of continuing coverage.  If that happens then the insurance companies will send out a rep and put a big red stamp on my forehead that says “Pre-Existing Condition”.  All insurance execs should have to go through what the guy in Saw VI went through, that’s how I feel.

Well, until tomorrow, have a good one.

Lack of Exercise Has Brought Weight Back On

Chris Stocker 2 Comments

In a post I did earlier in the week, I explained that I was working a lot and not really sleeping at all.  Well, along with that I have been working right through exercise time as well.  My exercise has consisted of throwing footballs and doing a little jogging at football practice when I am coaching, that is about it.  I also have not been eating healthy again because I haven’t really gone to the grocery store in a long time.  I don’t really have the funds right now to go out and by $100 worth of groceries.  Business is good, but there are plenty of other things that require my money at the current time.  Back to the subject, I have put some weight back on unfortunately.  Not a lot, I am still down a few pounds from back in September when I got serious about losing weight, but still not down to what I want to be.

I have a monthly goal of losing 5 pounds before every doctor visit, which at this time is every 4-6 weeks.  I may have to cancel my next visit that is scheduled for later this month because I may not have insurance coverage at the time, we shall see and I should have a better answer shortly about that situation.  Once again, if anybody has information about being on Cobra, I really need your help.  I’ll post more tomorrow, but I no longer work at the diabetes supply company that I worked at for 2 1/2 years.

I will get back into my workout habits again, it doesn’t take much for me to get back into the gym, it’s just making sure that I continue to go everyday, well at least 5 times a week.  I also need to cut back on my coffee intake and fast food.  Lately I have not been cooking breakfast, instead I have just been going to Dunkin Donuts and getting a large coffee and a sausage biscuit (it’s only $0.99 so that’s why.)

Here is my goal and I will keep a daily record on my blog of this starting on Friday November 6, 2009.  I’m going to look for a cool WordPress plugin, if anybody knows of one, let me know, that will put a chart or graph into my blog and I will add it into here.  But I will keep track of my daily calorie intake, as well as how much exercise and energy drinks that I intake.

A New Baby, A New Life

Chris Stocker 2 Comments

Well the Phillies are still alive and the Eagles kicked butt on Sunday.  I have missed 3 Panthers hockey games now because I have had to stay home to watch the Phillies.  As long as they win, I don’t really care.  I received some good feedback on my post about diabetes being a disability and also want to thank those that commented on my birthday, I appreciate it.  Yesterday I was a little sick and didn’t go to work because I wasn’t sure if I was coming down with something worse and I didn’t want to spread it to any of my co-workers.  When I woke up this morning I felt a little better so I went into work.

I have a lot of research that needs to be done about Cobra.  For those of you that are currently using Cobra, please e-mail me at chris.stocker – at – thelifeofadiabetic dot com.  I’m not going to go into in the blog post today, so if you are interested or have any comments on Cobra, please e-mail me.

Now onto the good news today.  I am officially an uncle as of 3:30 a.m. this morning.  My sister-in-law had been in labor for about a day, but just went to the hospital yesterday after going to see the doctor.  My brother sent me a text early in the morning.  Unfortunately, I am not able to make it up to see her right now.  Her name is Sylvia.  I will post some pictures as soon as I get them (My iPhone can’t get MMS messages).  Hopefully, I can get up there to see her for Thanksgiving, if not then I will definitely see her during Christmas time.  The baby not only brings a new life into this world, but a new life and journey for those involved.  I have a lot of work to get to now, so I will post more about the newborn baby when I can.

Diabetes Doesn’t Make Sense Sometimes

Chris Stocker 1 Comment

Sometimes diabetes just doesn’t make any sense.  As soon as you think you are understanding it, there it goes again.  Most recent example was last night.  Throughout most of the day my sugar was low, I was eating glucose tabs and Skittles all day at work because it just kept going back down.  When I got home at about 5:30 and went to the gym my blood sugar was right around 110 or so.  I ate, then worked out at the gym for 45 minutes went to Wal-Mart and Target and then came home and checked my sugar and it was up to 230 – something.  Unbelievable.  I didn’t even eat anything that would have caused it to go high like that.  Like I said, it confuses me at times.

Then there are times like Sunday when I went to Olive Garden.  It has been well documented on what happens to my body and sugars when I go to Olive Garden.  I overeat and then next thing you know my sugar is soaring over 350 just about everytime.  So I took just a little more insulin than usual but spaced it out a little more this time with a wave bolus.  Well, instead of my sugar getting up to 350, it was about 300 points lower, about 67 when I tested 3 hours later.  What the heck is that all about?  I have no idea.  Once again, diabetes confusing me.

I guess if I was wearing my CGM I would be able to catch these things a little easier.  But I’m not wearing it.  The sensors that I have are expired, even though I think that they would still work, I have just been too lazy.  I’m not going to get more sensors until next year because of the whole deductible thing.  There was a span in there that I didn’t test for close to 4 hours, so that is my own fault.  Especially when at work I test once an hour, so it’s almost like I am wearing a CGM.

Please remember to dedicate at least one blog post to getting diabetes awareness into the faces of professional athletes so we can have even a bigger voice.

Thank you all.

Top 3 Things Diabetes Related That Make Me Mad

Chris Stocker 7 Comments

Recently I started to think about some of the things related to diabetes that really make me mad.  Diabetes in general doesn’t because I have learned to live with it, deal with it and manage it.  It is usually other people that make me mad when it comes to diabetes.  Let’s start with the top 3 things, in no particular order.

Diabetic vs Person with Diabetes

I personally don’t understand all of the hype around this.  If you want to call me a person with diabetes, go ahead.  You want to call me diabetic, which I prefer, then go ahead.  I don’t really care what you call me.  Diabetic is just the term that is used to call somebody who has diabetes.  Why all of a sudden is it such a bad thing?  I think it is a good thing when someone calls me a diabetic, because I have diabetes, so therefore I am diabetic.  I guess if I hear one very good logical reasoning of the PWD thing then I will go with it.  Like I said, I have no problem if that is what you want to be called, I will call you that.  Quite honestly, I would rather call you by your first name and not diabetic or person with diabetes at all.

Supply Switching

Who the hell are you (fill in the blank with your supply company) to tell me what meter, strips, lancets or pen needles I want to use?  Do you think that I care about your bottom line figures and that you make more money off of the generic lancets than the brand name.  I don’t really care about the 200% profit you are making, I care that the lancets that I am using are not damaging and bruising my fingers constantly.  I want a pen needle that is going to penetrate my skin and not hurt when it goes in because its not sharp enough.  A few years ago when I was still using an old supplier, will not mention names, they continued to send me these cheap generic lancets when I wanted the One Touch ones.  They kept sending them every 90 days and I would call and tell them to stop, but they wouldn’t let me return them, I still had to pay for them.  They then went far enough to tell me that the One Touch ones are no longer made, they have been discontinued.  So when I was walking through Wal-Mart one day I saw them there and then went off on the company.  I called 4 times a day every day for like 2 straight weeks to make sure I got every customer service rep there.

Not the same goal in mind

There are a lot of non-profits, organizations, blogs, communities and they do not know how to work together.  What do we all want?  A cure, right?  Of course there are some other things that would be great along the way, but ultimately it is about finding a cure, spreading awarenss and giving people an arena to share and talk about, especially in the online world.  Then why can’t we just all work together and not look at other people in the diabetes world as “competitors”.  I’m not saying that everyone does that, I’m speaking of the minority on this one, but it just irritates the hell out of me.

Those are the 3 main things that just make me mad.

What are some others that tick you the wrong way?

MMM….Insulin

Chris Stocker 1 Comment

MMM….Insulin.  That’s what I said to myself today around 10:00 a.m. when a co-worker came up to my desk and said, there’s a package downstairs for you.  I was starting to get extremely nervous because about 20 minutes before that, my pump beeped and said “Low Reservoir” and I was completely out of insulin.  I am supposed to get a phone call when my insulin is shipped, but I never received a phone call, so I was really worried because it was Friday and I knew it wouldn’t be delivered on the weekend.  I finally received that call about 3 hours after the insulin was delivered, what good was that?

Once that new shipment of insulin came I took out 1 vial to let it settle to room temperature because I knew I would need to re-fill it soon.  I think we all know that cold insulin does not feel good at all.  I can remember the first time I took cold insulin, it was through an insulin pen, it burned like crazy.  I felt like somebody took a lighter and just put it up to my skin.  Never did that ever again. Now, into the problem that I have with my insulin company.

I have never seen a company so…ridiculous…for a lack of words.  It is the mail order company that my insurance requires me to use for my mail order services.  Last Friday I filled out the order form and faxed it in and faxed in the prescription that my doctor had just written out for me.  Not good enough for them because the prescription has to come directly from the doctor.  So, I called the doctor’s office and they then faxed it over to them.  Nope, still not good enough.  I have to fill out the order form myself, with my insurance information, billing, shipping, all the good stuff.  Then I have to fax that form to my doctor, who then has to fill out the prescription on that piece of paper, so it can’t be a separate prescription, it has to be hand-written onto that sheet.  Then finally my doctor’s office can fax it over.  So this took up until Monday to finally complete.  Then once they receive it, it takes 24-48 hours to enter the order into the system (I don’t know how it can take that long).  Once the order is in the system it takes 3-5 business to process the order (once again, no idea how it takes that long), but oh don’t worry they ship it overnight for free.  Well you freakin should for taking a damn week to process it!

Well, as you see here, my insulin is in my possession, finally, and I am very happy to see it here.  Time to now put it into the fridge and let it stay there until I need it.  Luckily I won’t have to go through this in December when I re-order because the prescription will be on file.

Well, it’s 8:00 p.m. Friday night, I need to go.  Good news today, my LLC finally went through, official company name is “CSI Marketing Solutions, LLC”

Doctors, Deductibles, Diabetes, Contract Work – OH MY!

Chris Stocker 1 Comment

Doctors and deductibles.  Both have things in common, but also a lot of differences as well.  You don’t want to have a high deductible, just as much as you don’t want to have a high doctor.  Your happy when you meet your deductible, hopefully you are happy after you meet your doctor.  But then comes my discussion and dilemma, which I know a lot of you share with me.  Do you skip or hold off on visits because you have met your deductible and then in two months it sets back to zero and you have to start all over again?

I need to go to the dentist because it has been almost a year and a half since I last saw my old dentist back in PA.  I don’t want to go right now because I haven’t met my calendar year deductible.  So why not just wait until January 1, right?  My endo was fine with that decision except that I said the same thing last year as well, which is exactly why I haven’t seen a dentist for as long as I have.  So then I started to think, is it just a lame excuse to not go and see the doc?  I also need to go get my yearly eye exam.  I do believe, however, that I went for a check-up earlier this year because I needed a new prescription for my contacts and needed new glasses.

Now, some of you may be thinking, how in the world have you not met your deductible this late into the year?  I got a new insulin pump in January, I have infusion sets, reservoirs, transmitter and sensors for my continuous glucose monitor (CGM), but they were all billed from an out-of-network provider, so that ate up my out of network deductible, but didn’t touch my in-network.  All of my doctors are all in network with the type of insurance that I have.  And of course the money that I pay every 90 days for my insulin does not go towards my deductible, why would it?  So that leaves me with only one thing going towards it and that is my doctor’s visits.  So until I meet that deductible, there is no co-pay, it is strictly going towards the deductible.

I started seeing my new endo back in May or June, don’t exactly remember and I have had monthly, well every 4-6 week visits since then.  And since the insurance isn’t covering anything yet, I’m sure you know much it is costing me for these endo appointments.  So I am paying a monthly premium for my insurance, but still paying monthly doctor bills.  I guess it could be worse because I don’t pay anything at all for my pump supplies and testing strips, at least not yet.

Now, getting a little off of the deductible topic and into a more general insurance topic, private insurance.  For those of you who have been reading my blog for a while, you know who I work for, and that has been disclosed before the FTC crack down on it.  Any who, I receive insurance from them as a full time employee.  I have also created a company within the last 60 days as well.  This wasn’t really a planned thing so I will explain it briefly.  I had friends and relatives that knew I was really into geeky, cool, tech things like website design, blogging, and social media.  A few people needed help getting started on Facebook and Twitter etc.  So then I said well why not start getting paid for doing this stuff.  Then it started to evolve and had people asking me to do their PPC campaigns, (Google Adwords primarily) and also some organic SEO stuff.  Now I definitely have to charge for that type of stuff because it is not the easiest and quickest stuff to do.  Do I have to disclose when I am talking about my own company?  Well, just in case, I own Chris Stocker Inc, with 10% of all profits being donated to JDRF.  Now you know the story, here is the question.

Since I am diabetic, I feel restricted that I have to work for a corporation that will offer me insurance.  Is this new PPC / SEO business paying the bills?  No, not really, so I’m not looking for this to be a full-time gig or expand it into something large with several employees, then in which I would be able to get some group insurance.  This is just something that I am extremely passionate about and love to do, so I do it on the side and would love for my career path to follow this way.  The only problem with that is a lot of work in this industry is done on a contract basis, and there’s no insurance in contracted jobs.

So what am I to do?  Are there any of you out there now that do this type of thing or any contracted work?  Or own your own business?  Like I said before, at this time there are no plans to expand to the level needed for insurance.  I would really appreciate all of your help on this.