Lists

Toroweap Overlook at the Grand Canyon

Probably the worst injury I have from my brain injury is memory loss. I can still remember things about my childhood and most of the years after that, but I cannot remember much about the five or ten years before the accident. I cannot remember anything about the work that I did in my five years at Callier Center. I cannot remember names, places, US states, cities, TV or movie actors, countries, and lots of things like that.

Through my rehab I have been learning many ways to help me remember. For instance to remember the state of Illinois, where I lived when I worked at State Farm Insurance, I can remember the city of Chicago, a city I have visited several times in my life, both from work and from family vacations (see photo above – not Chicago, but from a vacation.). And when I think of Chicago I can easily remember its state, Illinois. So when I want to remember that state I just think of Chicago. Another tool I have been using are lists. Fortunately I have been doing that most of my life.

As a child I made lists of what teachers I had for each class each year, especially after I got to junior high and high school, where I had multiple teachers each day. Like most boys – and probably girls, too – I kept lists of the people I dated or wanted to date, including when we went out, where we went and of course a rating system for each girl. At first I did this in a printed calender, but eventually bought a “little black book” to keep records of that. I don’t have that list any longer because just before Jean and I were married, I destroyed my black book.

But I kept making lists. About our vacations and the places I traveled for work, all the cars I have owned, all the places I worked, my salaries, the places I have lived, the cell phones I have owned, my bank and credit card accounts, recipes, musical instruments and stereo equipment I have owned, hurricanes I have lived through – eight, many of the people I worked with, went to school with, and from my college fraternity. And for some of these lists I kept pretty good details. For instance my list of cars also has the make, model, year manufactured, dates purchased and sold, whether they were new or used, purchased or leased, paint colors, engine size, cylinders, horse power, even the EPA estimated rating when available, where I bought it and how I disposed of it – sold, traded in, or handed down to my son Evan or my brother-in-law Bill.

Early on I used paper and pencil to make these lists, but in the 1970’s when I started working with computers, I used those to keep my lists. In the 80’s I started using personal computers and in 2003 I got my first smartphone, which I have been using ever since.

All of that was long before my brain injury, so it was easy for me to continue doing that. While I was at the Centre for Neuro Skills (CNS), even though it took me six months before I could remember enough to use my phone, I kept lists of my therapists, neuro rehab specialists, roommates, even the meds I was taking. I also made lists of thing I needed to remember like US states, countries around the world that were in the news, all my bills, my medical accounts – Blue Cross, COBRA, Medicare, Social Security, Fidelity (the holder of my five retirement funds – Oncor, John Hancock, Sabre, Nielsen, Hewlett-Packard), unemployment, and of course the ACA Marketplace (obamacare)!

So as you can see I was prepared for brain damage long before it ever happened. There area still may things I have trouble remembering, but now I have plenty of resources I created throughout my life to aid in my recovery.

Brian White

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Brian was my counselor at the Centre for Neuro Skills and he helped me immensely. Like all the other therapists and teachers at CNS, he spent a lot of time when I first arrived there testing me to determine how much I had suffered from my brain damage. He gave me a raft of tests to measure my thinking abilities, but like others at that time he soon discovered that I could not read. I also could not remember very much and so soon realized that I could not answer many of the questions he had for me. That was okay because he was not measuring what I knew, as they do when you are in school, but rather how much I had forgotten.

Brian was a wise and gentle man who, like me, was a computer geek, a libertarian who understood that drugs should be legalized, and that there probably was no god. What we found out through his testing was that I could not remember any of the companies for whom I had worked, the states where I had lived, almost nothing about the countries of the world, and not even any of the streets or towns around Dallas where I lived. Geographically and historically my mind was a blank slate.

We would meet each day in his office and talk about whatever he and I wanted to discuss. We spent many hours trying to recreate my work history over the past forty years. I could only remember two of the six US states in which I have lived. We also spent a lot of time working on my insurance needs and my plans for Jean’s and my retirement. He helped me complete the forms we needed to submit in order to apply for my Social Security Disability Income, which always takes a lot of time – in fact, it was more than a year from the time Brian and I started working on those forms that my SSDI was approved and I began receiving income. We also worked on the forms necessary for my Long Term Disability income, which was what paid our bills (but only 60% of my former salary) after the University of Texas at Dallas had fired me nine months after my injury. That was to have been expected, because even now, more than two years later, I still cannot remember anything about the software I was working on at Callier Center. It can take years for someone to recover from TBI, and I knew the university could not wait that long.

Brian also researched the new Affordable Care Act and even filled out the online forms in the Marketplace web site, so together we suffered through the agonizing problems through the early days of that process. After leaving UTD, I had signed up for COBRA – the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985, which increased our medical insurance from about $200 each month to over $1,000. With Brian doing most of the Obamacare application, our health insurance was less than half of what we were paying through COBRA (see this post for complete financial history).

Brian also got me hooked on TED, which began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues — in more than 100 languages. Even now I spend several hours each week watching fascinating contributions through TED talks and events.

Thanks for reading my blogs. Please feel free to leave a comment here or use my CONTACT ME page to send me email.

30 Days hath September

Brain damage typically results in severe memory loss. As a result of mine I had – and still have to some degree – an inability to read, count, remember words and names, towns, countries, states and many other things. One loss I felt most deeply was time and dates, especially the months. At CNS we had a van driver named April. Since I could never remember anyone’s name, I had to develop ways in which I could remember those things. April was easy because it is a month, so all I needed to do was think, “January, February, March, APRIL!” There, that’s her name!

I got my first job in the computer business at Computer Language Research (aka Fast-Tax) on May 27, 1975. I interviewed a couple of weeks before that and learned that they developed their applications in PL/I, a programming language developed by IBM about ten years earlier. After I accepted that position, while I was perusing the local Barnes & Nobel, I found a book on PL/I at a reasonable price and took it home to read. That book used the function of printing a 12-month calendar as its way to teach the language, so my first education in writing computer software was to understand how calendars worked and how to design and print them.

One of my first software programs was developing a way to take a year, and develop how to organize and print that calender. First I had to determine on what day of the week January 1st fell, and for each subsequent month whether I needed to print four, five or six rows in a given month. For instance, for next year 2015, February only needs four rows, May and August need six, and all the rest need five. By the time I left Fast-Tax and went to work for Lone Star Gas, I had learned how to determine the start of any year going back to 1752, when Britain and her colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar, and developed a method to print the calendar as 12 months on a page or larger versions with each month filling a single page and leaving room on each day to write notes.  I had even begun adding the ability to include most holidays – even Easter, which requires being able to determine the paschal lunar year and its full moon, and then the Sunday after the paschal lunar month’s 14th day.

Another problem working with calendars was that, having been designed by Julius Caesar and introduced in 46 BC, for the next 1600 years it only used Roman numerals. And that was very different from how we figure dates today using Arabic numerals. For example to the Romans January 8, the date of my birth, would have been written as a.d. V Id. Jan. = ante diem = on the fifth day before the Ides of January. January 4, Jean’s birthday, would have been a.d. I Non. Jan. = ante diem = on the first day before the Nones of January. What I have shown is so complicated that both of these examples are probably wrong!

Anyway, with the introduction of the Arabic numerals and the use of zero, using dates became so much simpler that most of us can do most of what we need calendars for without the aid of a computer. Except for me. I still have to count the months to figure out what month this is, the same way I have to do with the letters of the alphabet.

Seeing Whoopi in New York

Whoopi with Jean and I

Over the years I worked at several jobs where I had to live somewhere far from home.

In 1994 after I left Lone Star Gas Company in Dallas, Jean and I moved to Wichita, KS, because I took a job there with USF&G Insurance, which was based in Baltimore, MD. After working there for sixteen months they closed that office and offered me a position with their life insurance division F&G Life in Baltimore. They moved me to Towson to live in a campus apartment at Towson University. After leaving F&G Life I took a job working for IBM in White Planes, New York. There I rented a small bedroom from a Jewish lady in Scarsdale.

In 2003 when I contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome and was in recovery for nine months. I then got a job in Tampa, FL, with Neilsen Media Research, the company that measures what people watch on television (ratings) so the networks can determine how much they can charge marketers for advertising. There I found an apartment where I could walk just 200 yards to the nearest bus that would take me to Neilsen.

Whoopi Goldberg grew up in the Chelsea area of Manhatten New York, but moved to California before she was twenty, where she worked at the San Diego Repertory Theater, and with various groups developing her skills as a stand-up performer. This was also when she adopted her name “Whoopi.” In 1984 under the direction of Mike Nichols they created Whoopi Goldberg, her one-woman show, which opened October 24, 1984 at Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre.

For that highly successful show’s twentieth anniversary, she and Nichols decided to do it again with a brand new show based on the original creation – a one-woman show featuring several of her character creations: Live on Broadway: The 20th Anniversary Show. Because I had worked for her a few years earlier, she offered Jean and I free seats if and when we could get to New York. So we planned a trip to meet there – Jean from Tulsa and me from Tampa – the weekend of December 3 – 5, 2004 to see Whoopi at the Lyceum Theatre! You can see the photos I took here. Also check out my Whoopi web site.

Two years of therapy later

RAN (Rapid Automatic Naming) Module

Yesterday was the second-year milestone of the day when I was taken to Parkland with a brain injury. I want to let you know about the status of my recovery and what I expect for my future.

Two years ago I spent two months at Dallas’s Parkland and Zale Lipshy, followed by eleven months at Irving’s Centre for Neuro Skills, seven months as an inpatient and four outpatient while living at home. I then spent a couple of months in the Baylor Institute for Rehabilitation (BIR) Outpatient Services clinic in Garland, and for the past year I have been at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) Callier Center, Richardson, where I plan to continue my rehab into next year.

When I first began my recovery I could not read at all. In fact, I could not say or read any letters on the alphabet. I spent many months reading the list of letters (see the RAN page above). One of the last letters I had problems remembering was “K” which really caused grief for my reading teacher Kimberly!  The situation was pretty much the same for numbers – I could not count to ten or do any arithmetic. I could not remember where I had worked or what I had done at work. I could not remember where I had lived – even six months later I could only name four of the seven US states in which I have lived. I remember a time when I would try to talk about Oklahoma, where I had lived for ten years from 1997 through 2007, by asking Jean, “What’s that state just north of Texas?” Even now, two years later, when I hear a mention of “democrats” or “republicans,” I have to think a second before I can remember which party is which. And remember, at the time I was in a coma in Parkland, we had the 2012 election for which I had been a CANDIDATE!

While my ability to read is still at about a 4th grade level, I never lost my ability to write. About six months into my rehab at CNS, my counselor Brian wanted to see what my writing skill was – since I had such trouble even reading at all, no one had bothered to check my writing yet. He asked me to sit down at his computer and type something, so I did and quickly typed, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.” I could type that completely in less than one minute! But I still had difficulty reading it, even after I had written it! Apparently two different  parts of the brain control reading and writing. Similarly with math, after struggling with that for two or three months, I simply awoke one morning able to easily do basic addition exercises like 6 x 8 = 48 and 9 x 7 = 63. Just a few of weeks earlier Kimberly had given me a page of 100 arithmetic problems to do and after struggling through seven or eight problems, I put down my pencil and said that I could not do it. She looked at what I had done and I’d only got one or two correct. So after I told her about suddenly remembering arithmetic, Kimberly gave me that test again and I completed the rest of the page in less than twenty minutes and got all the rest – about 92 problems – completely correct!

I am also still working on my memory. Originally I could not remember the names of states, countries, people or anything else. My favorite person at CNS was Nicole, my Neuro Rehabilitation Specialist. It took me six months to be able to remember her name, and even today, it escapes me more then I’d like to admit. Some names I have no problem with: Jean, Evan and even Mirjam, but most names I still have trouble remembering.

There were a couple of injuries resulting from being hit by that car that were never identified during my time at Parkland. At CNS they knew that I had some vision problems and they suggested that I go see a brain injury specialist about it but because of the costs involved I never did that until last month. Dr Poonam Nathu found that I needed some exercises to strengthen my vision and also wanted me to switch to bifocals to improve my reading. She called Diane, my therapist at Callier to work out a program of exercises I needed. About the same time I had some x-rays done which found that the accident also caused a fracture in my coccyx which was mostly healed. I think that may have been why I had so much trouble on my wheelchair at Zale Lipshy and kept wanting to go back to bed in my hospital room all the time. Anyway, since the fracture has pretty much healed over the past two years, and the pain is mostly manageable, I will probably get by with just using a coccyx orthopedic comfort seat cushion – also known as a donut pillow.

But even when I do struggle with some parts of my rehab, so much else is coming nicely. Two years later I am happier, stronger and healthier than I have ever been in my life. I have gotten into the habit of daily exercise, learned to eat everything (even all the things I used to hate), lost over a hundred pounds and retired from working. And I am now signed up for Medicare, which starts January 1. I love it!

 

Dedicated mass transit rider

Early DART suburban bus

I have used transit on a daily basis for over 37 years, in cities all over the world including Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Washington D.C., New York, Tulsa, Chicago, San Francisco, Cleveland, Boston, Atlanta, Toronto, London (England) and other cities.

After spending two years in the mid 1970s at Fast-Tax learning to develop computer software using PL/I, I took a new position with the consulting firm Cutler Williams in order to work at Lone Star Gas Company, north Texas’ natural gas utility. Most companies at that time wrote their in-house applications in COBOL, which had been based on work by Grace Hopper, commonly referred to as “the mother of COBOL.” Very few companies used PL/I, a programming language developed by IBM in 1966. Since that was what Fast-Tax taught me to use, working somewhere else meant I was limited locally to only a few other companies, specifically American Airlines, Rockwell and Lone Star Gas. Working at LSG also meant I would be working in downtown Dallas, just a few blocks from the Federal Reserve Bank where my father worked for more than 30 years. One benefit of working downtown was being able to ride the bus to work. Mass transit in those days was operated by the city and was known as Dallas Transit System.

Back in 1977 DTS only served the city of Dallas, not any suburbs. That meant I needed to drive five miles from Carrollton into Dallas to the nearest bus stop. (Soon my riding the bus would allow us to not need two cars and so Jean often drove me to the bus stop; eventually DART would bring mass transit to the suburbs so I would be able to walk to and from a bus each day.) In the 70s the only way to ride the bus was to pay in cash each time I rode. Six months after I began working downtown DTS started offering a monthly pass which cost about 90% of what it cost on a daily basis, and Lone Star Gas, through a program offered by DTS, covered another 25% of that.

Then on August 13, 1983 voters in Dallas and several suburbs created Dallas Area Rapid Transit to build a regional transit system. Soon express bus service (see photo above) began running between downtown Dallas and the new member cities of Addison, Farmers Branch, Flower Mound, Glenn Heights, Irving, Richardson, Plano, Rowlett and Carrollton! Then I only had a 2-mile drive to the nicer, larger, much more comfortable express bus.

Jean had a cousin Beverly Davidson who also worked downtown. We often talked about her riding the busses that now came out to Carrollton, but like most people she could find many reasons not to use them. Then one day she had the battery stolen from her car while it was parked downtown. That night she called me and asked if I could teach her how to ride DART. The next morning we met at the bus stop in Carrollton and caught the bus for downtown. This happened to be a day in the 1980s when Dallas had a not-rare-enough winter ice storm and the bus was not able to use the I35E expressway, because so many cars had slid around to block the roads. Instead we came down Harry Hines Blvd. Even with that alternative route, it took us nearly two hours to reach downtown. Beverly and I were sitting near the back of the bus and after more than an hour in the bus, she – along with a lot of other riders – was at the point where she needed a bathroom break. Even though she was very shy about going up to ask the driver, her need was great enough to require the effort. Understanding the situation the driver pulled over at Walnut Hill Road to allow riders to get out to use the nearby 7-11 for relief.

Not confounded by the bizzare circumstances of that bus trip, Beverly continued riding transit to work for many years after this.

 

9/11/2001

American Airlines home office

The September 11 attacks were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks launched by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda upon the United States at the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon near Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. The attacks killed almost 3,000 people. On that day I was working at the American Airlines center at 3800 N Mingo Rd Tulsa, OK 74116.

I had moved to Tulsa in 1997 to work for Commercial Financial Services, which went out of business a couple of years later because of fraud perpetrated by part of senior management. After that I worked for several companies as a contractor, including American Airlines (!), The Nordam Group, Oklahoma Central Credit Union, and eventually Sabre, which was a subsidiary of American Airlines. I was hired as an employee, not a contractor, in May of 2001, just before American Airlines outsourced their entire IT organization to Electronic Data Systems (EDS).

My responsibility at Sabre/EDS centered around maintaining the inventory of American Airlines’ aircraft engines, which FAA regulations required to be overhauled periodically. My function was to keep up with which engine was on which aircraft. Planes would be brought into our Tulsa center and engines would be removed for overhaul and replaced with other already overhauled engines, thereby keeping the planes flying as much as possible.

On the morning of September 11, because an American Airlines aircraft, Flight 11 from Boston’s Logan Airport heading for Los Angeles, was the first aircraft flown into the World Trade Center,  all of the employees at the Sabre offices became glued to the available televisions and online news programs to see what was happening. I saw our Flight 11 soon after it had hit the North Tower (1 WTC). That was quickly followed by United Airlines Flight 175 that, too, had left Logan Airport en route to LA, when the hijackers flew into the South Tower (2 WTC). Next, American Airlines Flight 77, which had left Dulles International Airport in Virginia, also en route to LA, was flown by hijackers into the Pentagon. Finally, United Airlines Flight 93, which had left Newark International Airport heading to San Francisco, as passengers attempted to subdue the hijackers, the aircraft crashed into the ground near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The attacks resulted in the deaths of 2,996 people, including the 19 hijackers and 2,977 victims. The victims included 246 on the four planes (from which there were no survivors), 2,606 in New York City in the towers and on the ground, and 125 at the Pentagon. Nearly all of the victims were civilians; 55 military personnel were among those killed at the Pentagon.

I still go to therapy class

Lisa, graduate student at Callier Richardson

It has been over 22 months since I suffered a traumatic brain injury, being hit by a car as I walked across the street to work, November 1, 2012. After a couple of days in Parkland Memorial Hospital the doctors determined that my brain was swelling too much and needed immediate attention. During surgery a chunk of my scull, about the size of my hand, was sliced off and placed into a refrigerator for a couple of weeks to allow my brain to complete its swelling and return to normal size. During that time I was in an induced coma so I have no memory from the time I was walking across Inwood Road until I slowly started waking up seven weeks later in a hospital bed at Zale Lipshy, UT Southwestern Medical Center’s neurological diagnostic and treatment centers, adjacent to Parkland.

I was only at Zale Lipshy for a couple of weeks, where I started doing physical therapy (which was very similar to what I had been through nine years earlier, when I was learning to walk again while recovering from Guillain–Barré syndrome). At the same time I received rehab classes with a speech therapist because I could not read – at all. I could not even remember the alphabet.

On the 2nd of January, 2013, I was moved to the Centre for Neuro Skills in Irving, Texas, for more intensive rehabilitation. CNS provides postacute therapeutic rehabilitation and disease management services for those of us recovering from acquired brain injury. I spent eleven months at CNS undergoing daily classes for educational therapy (speech, language, memory and reading), physical therapy, occupational therapy, social counseling and other problems resulting from traumatic brain injury (TBI). Much of my time and therapy was done at CNS’s apartments where I lived full-time for seven months before reaching a level of recovery where I could stay at home and ride their van each day to rehab.

At the apartments there were CNS employees – neuro rehabilitation specialists – who lived and worked around the clock seven days a week. In addition to helping us through our day-to-day activities – going to the bathroom, getting around on the wheelchairs, getting to the clinic and back each day for therapy – they helped prepare us for the essential knowledge of how to live on our own in the outside world – the world beyond rehab. That training included how to do my own laundry, make my bed, prepare meals, learn to make grocery lists for meal plans, and even how to do simple things like take a shower or use the toilet – not easy to do when you are in a wheelchair.

After I left CNS, I really needed to continue my rehab – I still have severe memory loss and can barely read – so I enrolled in classes at Baylor Garland, the nearest TBI therapy clinic to my home. I started there December 10, 2013, less than three weeks after leaving CNS. At CNS I was in the therapy clinic six hours a day, five days a week. At Baylor I was with a therapist two or three days a week for just an hour each visit. Quite a difference, but then I was recovering each say, little by little so that was sufficient.

Unfortunately I only got to stay at Baylor Garland for less than a month because my health plan – ObamaCare – started January 1st and I had to pay the full cost for my therapy until my deductible was fully payed. Fortunately, my therapist, Carey Hammond told me about a TBI therapy program at Callier Center – where I worked at the time I received my brain injury – that was not tied to insurance plans. As a university they only charged a small flat fee per semester because the program was designed to teach UTD graduate students to become therapists. In fact several of the therapists I’d had at CNS had graduated from this program at UTD Callier.

I started at Callier about a week after my last session at Baylor and have been attended their classes ever since. In fact the new fall semester started a couple of days ago. Last spring and this fall semester I am attending one day a week, on Fridays. Over the summer semester I went Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, just to see if I really needed that much therapy.

The rehab classes at each facility are quite different. At CNS there were six hour-long classes each day, similar to classes at high school or college, except for the group counseling sessions which consisted of a coundelor and three to six patients. We also had an hour at noon for lunch and we each brought our lunch from the apartments or from home. Most of the time while I was in the apartments I was not able to eat meals at all – I was restricted to a feeding tube because of my dysphagia (difficulty swallowing). I got off the g-tube about two weeks before I moved home, so that was the only time I had anything at the apartments with which to make lunches. After I moved home I made lunch before the van picked me up each morning.

During my brief time in rehab at Baylor Garland I had therapy sessions for one hour a day two or three times each week. Like at CNS, these were one hour sessions one-on-one with a therapist, either Carey or Theresa Welch. At Callier I had Friday therapy class from 9am until 11:30am. The first hour was a group class with half a dozen patients and as many graduate students discussing current events gathered by the students during the week for which they collected news photos to show the class. After this segment we watch a brief portion (ten or fifteen minutes) of a movie or television documentary selected by the instructor – during the spring semester we watched the movie Remember the Titans with Denzel Washington, during the summer we watched Long Way Round, a documentary about two guys riding motorcycles from the UK across Asia and North America to New York City, starring Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman.

Finally we would spend 45 minutes one-on-one with one of the students. This would be things like having me read out-loud from a book or read a story and answer question. They would also give me some exercises to strengthen my memory and recall. But the parts I enjoyed the most were just talking about things like their educational goals or my writing of this blog. To me this is the best part of my therapy sessions.

Currently my memory is getting a little better every day, but my reading is not improving as much, if at all. I do not know how much longer I will need to continue therapy, but I will see what happens this semester and won’t have to decide until December.

I’ve had over 40 jobs

My first job was working for my mother. She had gone to college during World War II to receive an education in textiles. When I was in kindergarten she found a job at Sears as an interior decorator. She took what she’d learned there and started her own freelance decorating business which she called Vesta Spreng Interiors. She would design and make draperies for friends and neighbors, and found work for home builders at first to select exterior brick and paint colors along with interior carpet and kitchen cabinets. That work soon led to taking care of the designs for model homes. That would include designing and making draperies and sometimes adding furniture, art, towels and other items to make the homes look attractive and lived-in.

My mother would work with the builders and decide what needed to be done with the houses and she would make the draperies, purchase the furniture and equipment necessary for hanging the window treatments, and on Saturdays my father and I would load up our station wagon and we would take everything to the houses we were working at and handle the necessary installation. At first, I was only a “gopher” handing my parents the tools and materials they needed, but by the time I was 12 or so I could handle the same work they did, including hanging drapes, installing furniture and hanging pictures on the walls. We did this nearly every weekend until she retired when I was 35 years old! We used to tell people that I had 25 years of experience as a decorator!

Last week I mentioned my years as a musician with the Caballeros. During my four summers at college I worked for a motion picture shipping company in Dallas called Central Shipping and Inspection. We loaded film containers from our warehouse onto trucks for delivery to theaters across Texas. While I was in college at East Texas State University – now Texas A&M – Commerce – I was a teaching assistant. In 1969 ETSU changed their Christmas break schedule from a couple of weeks right before finals for the fall semester to four weeks after finals and before the start of the spring semester. That gave me the opportunity to work for a month and make some money. I went to work at NorthPark Mall at Kips, where I first met and began dating my wife Jean.

We got married  in 1972 after I’d graduated from ETSU, moved to Carrollton, TX, where I started my first “real” job at Rogersnap Business Forms. From there I went to TJM Corporation, another business forms company, where I worked as a forms salesman. After that I worked for Computer Language Research (aka “Fast-Tax”) where they trained me to program computer applications to process income tax returns for accounting forms. That gave me the skills to write software with PL/I, which would keep me working for the next 30 years. From there I went to work for a software consulting company, Cutler-Williams, Inc., who assigned me to work at Lone Star Gas, Dallas’s natural gas utility. Soon I was “hired away” from Cutler-Williams to work full-time at the utility, where I stayed for over 17 years, moving through two subsidiaries before returning to the “mother” company at the end.

Cutler-Williams was only the first of six or seven consulting/IT service companies that helped me find work using the computer skills I now had. These consulting firms helped me get jobs with IBM Credit Corporation in White Plains, NY, The Nordam Group in Tulsa, Nielson Media Research in Florida, State Farm Insurance in Bloomington, IL, and others.

After leaving Lone Star Gas, I moved us from Texas to Wichita, KS, to work for USF&G Insurance. After a couple of years they closed their Wichita office (on their way to eventually closing the entire company) and I moved to Baltimore, USF&G’s home office, to work for F&G Life, their life insurance office. Then I went to White Plains to contract at IBM; then Commercial Financial Services in Tulsa (to where we moved for ten years); American Airlines; The Nordam Group; Oklahoma Central Credit Union; Sabre, Inc./EDS Corporation; Decision One (Sprint); Domino’s Pizza; Tulsa County Jail (Corrections Corporation of America); Healthcare Administration Technologies; and Genesis10. During my time in Tulsa I also worked for Fellowship Bible Church Tulsa, Christ for Humanity, Carol Publishing (Everything Rosie), Whoopi Goldberg and writing for Network Magazine (CMP Media’s Data.com website).

In April of 2004 after nearly a year recovering from Guillain–Barré syndrome I moved to Tampa, Florida, to work for Nielson Media Research. This was another PL/I consulting position which ended in January 2006. I was able to quickly segue into working at State Farm in Bloonington, IL, but that only lasted about five months, after which I moved back to Tulsa. After a couple more failed attempts at consulting positions, I decided to move back “home” to Garland, Texas, and attend A+ Texas Teachers to obtain a Texas Teachers’ Alternative Certification Program classroom training which allowed me to take and pass the TExES Exam #131: English, Language Arts and Reading 8-12 and the TExES Exam #139  Technology Applications 8-12 teaching certifications. I am also “highly qualified” in Mathematics with 35 hours of college credits, 27 of which are upper level, which gives me the state’s teaching certification in Math. After teaching at DeSoto High School for a couple of weeks, I quickly learned that, as much as I wanted it, I was not cut out to be a teacher.

Looking for something else to do using that education, I got a job at the University of Texas at Dallas’s Callier Center for Communication Disorders. This is where I was working when I was hit by a car while walking across the street to work, November 1, 2012.

In all, I have had more than forty different jobs, in 13 cities over 55 years. Do they give out awards for that?

Paying for rehabilitation

I worked at the University of Texas at Dallas Callier Center for a little over five years. As a part of the University of Texas school system, employees had very good insurance. I usually signed up for the lowest cost options because I rarely got sick. The UT insurance system, unlike most businesses, was based on the school calendar. That is, instead of our calendar year being from January through December, it was from September through August. That meant the annual insurance deductibles were due starting in September.

In July of 2012 when I signed up for the 2012-2013 school year, I looked through the new insurance options and decided that at age 62 maybe I should add long-term disability (LTD) to the products I signed up for. I really don’t know why I did that, but it turned out to be a very good decision.

When I was hit by a car on November 1, 2012, and taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, I did not know what was happening. I remember nothing from the time I got off the DART bus on my way to work until about December 17 about the time I was moved from Parkland to Zale Lipshy, where I began waking up from the coma. Even after waking up, it took many weeks for me to understand where I was, how I got there, what was happening to me, and particularly how I was paying for everything.

BC/BS of Texas payed for my first two months, though I’m told the insurance carried by Maria Reyna Paculba, the lady whose car struck me, payed some of it. Her insurance covered only $30,000 – the minimum required by Texas law. I’m told I received about half of that, with the other half divided between Parkland and the doctors who took care of me. During my time at Zale Lipshy I was interviewed by people from various rehabilitation companies in and around Dallas, including Pate Rehabilitation, Centre for Neuro Skills and others, apparently because I needed therapy not available at Zale Lipshy.

On January 2, 2013, I was moved to CNS, where I vaguely remember signing a bunch of papers agreeing to donate my son and add CNS to my will – just kidding! I guess they told me then what the costs would be, but I don’t remember any of that. I do remember they told me to immediately begin filing for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which I did, by telling my wife to find out what to do – I was in no condition to do anything. I had no idea at the time – even though I was probably told – how much any of that was going to cost, or how it would be paid. I do remember being told sometime in May that my Short-Term Disability from UTD had ended – it covered the six months from November 1st through the end of April – and that I was getting the LTD for which I had been paying. What I learned much later, is that while short-term disability pays 100% of your salary, LTD only pays 60%. So my take-home pay dropped from almost $3,300 to less than $2,700 each month.

However on the insurance side, things were good. My Blue Cross was paying 100% of my rehab at CNS, which was a lot. For the nearly seven months I lived at the apartments at CNS, the insurance costs were about $75,000 each month. After I left the apartments and moved back home, CNS would pick me up at my house and took me to the Irving clinic five days a week for another four months. That was costing BC/BS of Texas just $45,000 per month.

In July UTD ended my job at Callier Center. What that meant for me was I lost my insurance. Fortunately, the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (COBRA) is a law passed by the U.S. Congress, that mandates an insurance program giving employees the ability to continue health insurance coverage after leaving employment. What this law did was allow fired workers to get the same insurance they had received from their former employer by paying its full price, without the benefits provided by the company. In my case, instead of paying about $200 each month, I could get the same insurance for about $1,000 a month. I had come across COBRA several times in my career up to then, but had found it to be much too expensive to be useful. Now however, it was a bargain. In August of 2013 I signed up and began paying for my insurance through COBRA. This allowed me to continue my rehab at CNS. I had forgotten about the deductible that restarted each September 1st. I had to pay CNS for the $3,000 deductible (which I am still trying to pay now, and will probably keep paying until sometime in 2017, when it will be fully repaid).

In the fall of 2013, our federal government began offering (requiring?) the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. With a lot of help from Brian White, my Counselor at CNS, I looked into Obamacare and found that, compared to my COBRA options, I could get pretty much the same health insurance for half the cost, after figuring in the subsidy. So I signed up and got coverage nearly identical to what I had before. What I did not consider was that this new insurance is on a calendar-year basis, that is, I had to pay the deductible again on January 1st. Because the TBI rehab I was getting at Baylor Garland (after leaving CNS) cost $242 a day, and not being able to afford that out-of-pocket, I had to quit rehab. Paying that was not an option I could afford.

Thankfully, Corey Hummel, my therapist at Baylor Garland, told me about another TBI rehabilitation program available at Callier Center, where I had worked before! This program did not require any insurance – the program existed as much for the masters program students, as for the patients – it only cost $150 per semester. So I have been attending rehab there for two semesters this year (spring and summer), and plan to keep going there through the fall semester.