When it rains, it pours... I'll always remember 2013 as the year from Hell

Sorry, but I'm back.

It's really hard to believe it's only been five months since everything happened with Andy; it feels more like five years and I feel as though I've aged fifteen years.

Fate just seems to be piling on this year. I keep waiting for a break that never comes.

I think the last time I updated the other thread ('Andy in the hospital') our house had just been sold but the new owners wanted to keep us as tenants.

Are you sitting down? 'Cause this is going to be long. Really long. As the subject line indicates, 2013 has shaped up to be the year from HELL.

After badgering us about how long a lease we'd be willing to sign (they were pushing for two years) the new owners shoved an eviction notice in our mailbox 5 days after they closed on the house. Gave us a sob story about their son lying in a hospital bed in NYC and not being able to keep the house (for which they paid cash) because of the medical bills. I guess they didn't realize that their Facebook pages are open to the world and I could see them posting pictures of themselves with their kids in San Diego as it was happening. I could also see from the tax assessor's website that they are 'flippers' - they have multiple properties throughout the Valley. So - proven liars right off the bat. This being the case, I saw no further reason to communicate with them; I had nothing to say to them and no interest in what might come out of their mouths. This was August 5th.

From the 5th onward, the wife was harassing me via phone... 4, 5, 6 phone calls a day. They wanted us out by September 30th but they were also demanding a security deposit on our way out the door. They were also acting as though August's rent was our problem; we had already paid August's rent to Fannie Mae's property manager on July 18th and the check was cashed on July 30th - the day the new owners closed. As far as I was concerned, not our problem that she didn't perform her due diligence in that regard.

On August 8th (three days after receiving the original eviction notice) we found an apartment and put down a deposit on it. The rent was reasonable and included all the utilities. It wasn't an ideal set-up by far but the price was right and the neighborhood is VERY desirable.

On August 13th, I woke up to a 5-day eviction notice taped to our front door for non-payment of August's rent. That's when I had to call the real estate attorney.

He actually laughed out loud when I told him they were demanding a security deposit on our way out the door, and confirmed that it was THEIR responsibility to recover August's rent from Fannie Mae and we owed them nothing because we have no contract with them. So here's the gist of the letter I sent to her (certified mail, return receipt, the way I send EVERYTHING having to do with the property, including ALL the rent checks):

"We are vacating the property on September 15th. Enclosed is a pro-rata check for September 1st through September 15th. It is incumbent upon you to recover August's rent from Fannie Mae and no further monies will be forthcoming. If you have any questions or concerns please direct them to our attorney, and here's his phone number." CC: Kevin Harper, Esq.

Crickets ever since. She cashed the check August 30th. I began packing on August 12th and was pretty well finished by the end of August.

That brings us up to September 3rd, a week-and-a-half before we have to be out of the old house. Remember, we put down a deposit a month before so I'm thinking we're all set to go and just running out the clock here. The plan (ha!) was for Andy to go in and install the plumbing September 7th, one week before we move in. We didn't even bring up the electrical work to the new landlords because when I called my dialysis nurse she said as long as we had a grounded outlet for each machine we should be fine.

Well, no. Apparently 'Technical' absolutely, positively INSISTS on a dedicated 20-amp circuit for each machine (one for the dialysis machine, one for the RO). The property was built in 1959. It's a second-floor apartment with concrete slab floors. And block walls. And the electrical box is on the other end of the building. And they only have 15-amp service with no extra spaces in the electrical box. AND they now want additional deposits for the utilities since I'll obviously be using more than the last tenant (remember, utilities are included, so fair enough). And they can't figure out how they're going to drain the water since the waste line has to accommodate 2 gallons/minute and it's a 30-foot run from the machine to the bathroom sink. The upshot of it is that they are estimating it will be a MINIMUM of $3000 to do the work. DaVita only covers the cost the first time. If I ever have to move, it's on me to pay for the modifications.

This is not to mention that they would not allow Andy to do the work because he doesn't have license and insurance. If he were still with his old company he could have just gone to his boss and got a copy of each and worked under their license/insurance. Not the case now.

In other words, they were freaked out by how much work is involved and it's completely unworkable from everyone's point of view, including mine. But wait! They have a HOUSE for rent right around the corner - 2 bedrooms and a den.

It's gorgeous. (With the notable and GLARING exception of the bathroom - the original shocking pink and turquoise tile from 1947. I despise pink and actually screamed out loud and involuntarily covered my eyes the first time I saw it.) The bathroom sink is right on the other side of the wall from the bedroom closet and the plumbing is exposed on the closet side. The wall and floor measurements I need for the entire machine/secretary setup is so exactly precise you'd think it was built with my dialysis setup in mind. There's both an attic and a crawl space, and extra slots in the circuit box. It sits on a acre of land... grass! and orange trees! It is double the square footage of the old house, so we wouldn't have to walk sideways around all our furniture.

However.... however. There's always a however in my life. The rent is more than double what we've been paying in the old house and half-again more than the apartment we'd been planning on/deposited on. That means additional deposits and a radical reworking of the budget to see if we can do it... not like we have much of a choice with ten days left to get out of the old house and the new landlords bending over backwards to accommodate my dialysis setup. Honestly, you should have seen expressions change on peoples' faces when you told them you needed to modify their properties for dialysis. You could actually watch the walls go up in their eyes. Dialysis complicates everything. EVERYTHING.

(Sorry, I know I'm not supposed to mention dialysis in this section but I can't really talk about moving and what's going on with Andy without doing so. I hope the mods will let it slide?

)

We can swing it assuming Andy continues to work full-time. Which is a pretty big assumption these days. Actually, a pretty asinine assumption now that I think about it. I'm not comfortable going into a house that's more than I can cover with just my disability alone but our backs were pretty well against the wall on this one.

Andy has been missing work left and right. He's always scheduled to work 40 hours but has been missing at least a day a week for the last six weeks. I'm actually shocked they haven't fired him. He acts like it's no big deal and gets pissed off at ME for getting upset about it. I can't seem to drill the seriousness of our situation into his head. I mean, it is dire, he has really put us into a very deep hole financially and there is no guarantee we are going to be able to hold onto this new place. And after all the BS we had to go through to get into the damned house.

(I need to add here that going to work and coming home is literally - LITERALLY - the only thing Andy has to do. ONE. THING. Who did all the packing, stacking, numbering of boxes? Reserved the truck? Found the new house? Found the helper for Andy? Moved over the utilities? Arranged for the modifications to the house? Dealt with the old landlord? Frantically re-worked the budget 80 times over? Still cooked, cleaned, shopped, ironed, did laundry, did dialysis? And yet on moving day, GOOD LORD, stop the presses, I've made Andy do 80% of the work.)

I have pulled out every stop. I cashed in all the change we had lying around in tins. I withdrew whatever I had in repayments at Kiva. I sold the unused gift cards I had from the last two Christmases. I got the car refinanced through our credit union and the first payment put off till October 21st. I got the new landlord to agree to accept the additional security deposit in three payments. And then, I did the unthinkable.

I accepted $1,000 from my mother. I did not ask, she offered, but I said 'Yes'. And promptly opened my own bank account with it. (Finally!) I figured, okay, a thousand bucks... that will cover Andy missing a day of work every single week between now and October 1st, plus it will cover those little unexpected expenses you have when you move. And it would have, yes, indeed it would have...

... if the alternator hadn't died on the car, leaving us stranded on the side of I-10 during rush hour, on our way to sign the new lease and pick up the keys. That ate up more than half of it right off the bat.

Since professional movers were out of the question with or without the $1000, I had to hire someone at an AA meeting to help Andy. Someone who turned out to be touchy-feely, wanting to hug me when all that was called for was a handshake or a fist bump. Then today at dialysis - nine days after the move - I get a text from him: Hey, you. Hey, me, what? WTF are you texting me for? I didn't reply, but did block his number. I mean, wtf? I don't need this sh*t on top of everything else. How would he feel if some man texted HIS girlfriend? (Yeah, he's in a relationship.)

So at this moment, if Andy works 40 hours next week and we don't spend ONE PENNY (and I do mean not one

) we have thirty-six cents to live on till my SSD is deposited on October 3rd. (I'm not including the little bit I have left in my account, I'm acting like that's not even there.) Andy keeps asking whether his check has been deposited, AS IF he can start spending again once it has been. He just absolutely cannot go any length of time without spending; he gets extremely agitated when he can't. I fear I'm going to have to get me to the credit union first thing tomorrow and get that money into my own account, pronto, or we're going to be evicted before we can even pay off our security deposit and I've never been evicted from any place for cause. EVER. I'm not about to start now.

I should mention here that I've been doing in-center hemo for almost two weeks now. It was only supposed to be for one week but the lab LOST MY WATER CULTURES. This is something they specialize in (losing what's sent to them, that is, this is far from the first time and they always try to blame it on the sender). So they had to be re-drawn and re-sent and I can't dialyze at home until they come back. Boy, am I feeling it. My fingers look like overstuffed sausages and my eyes are so puffy in the morning I can barely see out of them. I'm completely wiped out on dialysis days.

It continues to be back and forth, back and forth with Andy. He'll be completely his loving self for two weeks or so and then, BAM! A self-absorbed pr&ck who treats me like I'm something he just scraped off the bottom of his shoe. I haven't pinned down the source of the mood swings but I suspect it's related to his refills. However, I am not keeping track of his medications because quite frankly, I am sick and tired of playing mommy and not wife. But from what I CAN see, he is demonstrably worse when he is taking any of the benzos... whether the ones prescribed to him (Klonopin) or the ones he steals from me. Yeah, who knew, apparently I now need to hide any of my own medications as well or he'll just help himself and then lie about it.

Oh, the lying! Why lying, all of a sudden, after sixteen years? And about the stupidest, most inconsequential things. Things so easily proven to be lies, too. As in: if I get a refill of 60 Xanax and in a three-week period I take 8 of them but there are only fifteen left? Why, it must have been the pill fairy, because Andy didn't take them!

Need I say nothing, absolutely nothing, makes him happy even if he said it's what he wanted? After pissing and moaning for months that "they haven't had me welding yet, I still haven't welded yet", he came home last week bitching about "having to weld on the ground in the heat". After bitching for three years about how we had no backyard at the old house and were only 10 feet from the house next to us (all true), he coolly surveys the acre of grass this house sits on and promptly declares, "there's no backyard".

Meaning, "it's not my mom's place". Well, no place is. We live in the middle of a city, FFS, not Bumphuck, NJ.

He doesn't know what he wants, he just knows that he's not happy with whatever he has. Even if it's what he says he wanted.

I forgot to mention that in the midst of all this I had to go for a mammogram because I discovered a strawberry-sized lump. It turned out to be benign (if large), but they also did an X-ray of my foot there and discovered a giant bone spur right above the arch of my right foot (if I had arches, that is). It's so painful it keeps me awake at night - let alone walking on the damned thing - so I'm pretty certain I'm going to be forced to have it removed.

And one more hit, just in case there wasn't enough salt in that wound: the very first piece of mail I get in the new house is a certified letter from the IRS saying that I owe them $1300 on my SSD from 2011... even though the work sheet I did at the time showed it wasn't taxable. That means they'll probably go after me for taxes on disability for 2012, too, because I didn't report that, either. I mean, corporations are hiding billions offshore and you're going after dialysis patients? Really? Obviously I can in no way afford this, or even payments right now, so I'm living in fear that they're going to grab my disability check and then I'll be REALLY screwed. HA!

When my mother offered me that $1,000 she gave me an alternative: a plane ticket to Virginia. My parents have just moved themselves - sold their old home and bought a new one - and they offered to outfit the guest quarters for dialysis and fly me out to live with them.

I find myself wondering more and more often these days whether I made the right decision.