Mortality, Man...

 Been feeling ... well, old lately.  

I do authorizations for a health care provider.  Which means every day I am asking your insurance company if the therapy your doctor says will prolong and improve your condition of life will be paid for within their rules.  

And every single call I make or web site I use requires me to listen to or accept the notice that an approved authorization request does not promise my employer will be paid.  It simply increases the odds that we will be paid for the medication and supplies - and sometimes nurses, too - that we send to you.

While I see a lot of kids due to the particular market I'm primarily assigned to monitor, I do see older folks.  I see some folks born in the 1930s, which does make me pretty happy - some of these treatments can be pretty harsh, and so when we're putting someone who is in their mid-80s through it, that does bode well for them and their families.  

I also see a lot of people who have birthdays in the late 1950s, through the late 1960s.  Being an early 1960s baby, I'm regularly snarked at by my lovely first wife, who reminds me we're of different generations, her being about 3 1/2 years younger than me.  I've always been told that a technical "generation" was twenty-five years - that being the amount of time it usually took for the average baby to reach the point where they were changing diapers on a baby of their own.  If one considers the dreaded "baby boomers" as those being born after mid-1945, that would carry, in my brain, the total baby boom generation to anyone born from mid 1945 to mid 1970 - that is, a 25 year period.  

I'm contradirected on that as most folks seem to put the kibosh on the baby boom generation to occur in 1965 - which splits us.  Fine by me.  I'm still here.

But my recent health scare, compounded with my approaching 60th birthday, and a few other random events, have me feeling a little more wintery and older than I used to feel.  I would often joke about "when I grow up" or "when I get to be a real adult" - but that ship may have been in and out of the harbor.  

I've lived through some things I really never expected to see.  I've lived through some things that, apparently, I am the only one to have gone through in my friend group.  Now, that does not mean I'm the only survivor.  Others may have found ways around it, or choose not to note the events in question.  It is what it is.  I can wish things turned out differently, or I can move forward.  I can grumble, or I can put my head down, get to work, and fix the problems.  It is what it is.  It's not the life I would have preferred, but it is the way this life has gone.  

I do not anticipate having the luxury of retirement.  I lost that opportunity when I rather foolishly bought a questionable home at the near peak of the previous real-estate bubble in 2001.  The home we purchased for nearly $200,000 was worth less than $160,000 when we lost it, and the recession that caused that and ate my whole retirement savings and pretty much every other dollar and other asset I had also put me in a fair amount of debt I'm still trying to work through.  It's something I have to do.  It's not a question of running off into the sunset after a bankruptcy.  It's not that kind of debt.  It's the kind you pay back.  Regardless.  And I will.  I am finally reaching a point where my income is closing in on where our joint income between my wife and I is nearing what it was, in dollar amounts, back when I bought a house.  Sure, there's the small matter of having inflation involved, so a gallon of gas isn't the same number of work minutes it used to be, but it is what it is.  God willing, and all those other plan things, I'll continue to hold a decent job for a good firm that will continue to pay me for my eight-plus hours a day of brain work, not the back-grinding physical labor I doubt I could do now that I did for a few years for my previous employer.  

At a rate that started at a little over a third of what I make now.  Granted, my wages did double from day 1 to day last for them, but that was primarily because my starting wage was, that's right, minimum wage.  And the labor market tightened.  I know folks who still work for that employer who are making about the same as most of the new hires - because they really can't value long-term employees.  There's little value in it.  The job is not particularly technical or mentally difficult - it just requires a lot of energy and a whole lot of effort.  It's a young-person's field, honestly.  I was fortunate to get a job there when I did, and I was exceptionally fortunate to meet the person who kept trying, and finally succeeded in getting me into her employer - where I am now.  

Just gotta keep on keepin' on...  And fill in the hole I made, so I can move across and contemplate the future.  It is what it is.  I'm here because I was fortunate, and I'm not going to change the past.   I can control my future.  And I will.

So here comes yet another Monday.  Beats the alternative.