Knuckle Update

The honeymoon would appear to be over. The fact is, spending an hour's worth of work time, even late on a Friday afternoon when the average middle-aged daughter is brain dead anyway, getting shunted from Wellcare's shared services center (today's rep claimed to be in Santa Domingo) to Medicare's steely customer service (yes, it is an oxymoron) agent only to be reassured that while they believed I was my mother's daughter, they still cannot help me help her with a change of address. (Social security, meanwhile, managed it in two seconds.)

Medicare would send the Knuckle an authorization form...to the house she left 4 months ago...and when that is returned, they will talk to me. The problem is, by the time we got to that point in the conversation, I'd pretty much forgotten why I'd been transferred to them.

oh, yeah, authorization. well. i'd actually called Wellcare to follow up on the few items Rep. Jennifer from the Utah center promised she would do:

1. ask Enrollment to call and clear up the pesky matter of having the Knuckle listed as a Wellcare Choice client but issuing a summary of benefits labeled Wellcare Select, a much better policy, frankly, but not the one they're paying on. So....how were we to know this?

2. the previous calls to change her address to a new county that somehow didn't trigger the bell that new county=new policy so she was still on an old one which meant that if she needed service she'd be considered out of network. Despite assurances, and yes, Frank in Santa Domingo did say the request had been made, Wellcare had not sent the new stuff yet. but i don't know what the Knuckle is getting down there in Clearwater cuz I'm up here in Atlanta and I'm not quite sure she's telling me everything she's getting. Except irritated at my sister-in-law when the woman doesn't snap to.

The Other Fun Part

As noisesome as it is to recite my social security number and date of birth in an open cube work environment next to a wise-ass co-worker pretending to memorize my most private data and parrot it back to me (by way of easing the tension), what's really fun is working through those old issues about Mom's inability to spare me her pent-up irritation at people she really needs to be grateful to. And I'm not even counting me. Hell, I'm just staff.

Somewhere in the back of that crafty mind, she's snarky laughing. After all, if you don't make a choice about where you want to go after you can't live in your own house and Plan A (die) doesn't work out for you, then whoever has to do your worrying for you, well, they have to do your worrying for you. The Knuckle didn't have a Plan B so we created one for her. Since it's not her Plan B, she is free to complain about all she wants, and hint, maddeningly, that if she'd bothered with a Plan B, it would have been a lot better than this.

I'm sure she was handling her own affairs much better without us, but then, after the fall, was it possible she could handle them again? She's not saying and I simply do not know.