Tag: Rural Life

Medication Delays – A Poem

Posted on by Lo in Personal Blog, Poetry
Content Warning: This poem addresses the current situations resulting from USPS delays on medication deliveries.

My spouse and I are okay; we stand in solidarity with those currently struggling and fighting to obtain their life sustaining medications.

We are a household that requires medication for daily survival. Without it at least one member of our household will not survive. While we are able to pick up our life-sustaining medications at a drive through pharmacy in town, many people do not have that option. This may be because they are in a rural area, or because their insurance only covers medications from a mail-order pharmacy, such as in the case of the VA. In the state of Montana, the United States Postal Service is the primary resource for delivering critical medications to rural communities that make up the majority of our state.

United States citizens are dying due to USPS delivery delays.

USPS is a critical service and is in serious trouble. There are too many sources available for me to cite them all here; that means you can find them yourself easily. I’m worried that this time, buying stamps is not enough.

Photo by Dan Dennis on Unsplash

Medication Delays

I spent the weekend cleaning
To keep our fears at bay
As tracking notifications continued
With each ping – a new delay
As ICUs are filling; filled
Don’t call 911–
Nowhere you can go
Homebound isolation burial
As medications fail to show
So many insurance companies
Require mail-order specialty
90 day supplies
[Won’t pay otherwise]
But ours only does 30 day
And the postman might not show:
How many people are going to die?
I don’t have tracking notifications–
No pings, nor badges
For human suffering.
I’ll focus on cleaning;
What I can control:
A clean and comfortable coffin
In which to hold each other
Before we go.

If this poem inspires you to get involved, what you can do is call your representatives and let them know the situation with USPS is critical.

A tool I like using is https://resist.bot/ – through a text based prompt it helps you generate a formal letter that is sent to all of your state representatives in Washington, DC. Here are their terms and privacy policy.

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Short Story Announcement: “Waking Up” Part 1 “The First Day” and Life Update

Posted on by Lo in Announcements, Publication, Short Story, Writing

My first multipart series is upon us! It went live on Monday, but I’ve been preoccupied with this whole coronavirus thing and writing book reviews.

This first part is short.

I didn’t mean to time the release of a story related to waking up in a hospital with a pandemic. Today is Day 17 of a fever of ~100-101 F (37.7 – 38.3 C). I have ice on the back of my neck as I write this. There will be a delay in the release of part 2.

It’s all surreal, right?

I grew up among hardy people that believed in staying put when the hurricane came and destroyed the town (this literally happened and I was out of school for 2-3 months in high school while we rebuilt the town). One of the places I lived was almost wiped off the map by the 1918 Influenza pandemic. Entire families died – their bodies buried in mass graves next to their homes by the brave neighbors who ventured into the houses later. The houses and all of their belongings were either burned or were left to rot until us, curious, mischievous rural kids with nothing better to do broke in and wandered around those unwired houses like the generations and generations of kids before us. Look but don’t touch. The objects are cursed and haunted by the disease. Even then the belief was that the ghost of the disease persisted and could kill.

On that note, stay tuned for a short story exclusively posted here since I’m taking a week off. Don’t expect it to be edited well because, frankly, I feel like s***.

Take care and I hope everyone is staying well. As always, thank you for reading. Without you I’m writing words into a void.

UPDATE (26 March 2020):

Today WaffleHouse closed 365 of its 1,627 US locations. That thing I mentioned above about being from an area that was regularly destroyed/impacted by hurricanes and my town was DESTROYED by a hurricane?

Check out this thing called the Waffle House Index – it’s used by FEMA to determine how bad a natural disaster is in the United States based on the number of Waffle Houses still open in an area. I’m not joking. It’s a real thing. Waffle House is historically known for being open 24/7/365 and has called itself a “trucker shelter” during inclement weather.

We live in interesting times.