While I was making other plans, teil vier

I can walk again.

Wearing a joint-immobilizing boot brace, so I lurch around with a gait even more graceless than my usual palsied semi-stumble, but I can walk. And shower. And make my own breakfast. Hallelujah!

Better news: my prognosis is good. The joint had osteoarthritic damage that may be trouble down the road, but I’ve been osteoathritic in both feet for years now without symptoms. The big good news is that the joint cartilage wasn’t damaged, so I should get full use of the ankle back.

Boot brace for three weeks, physical therapy to strengthen the ankle after that. I won’t be back in kung-fu class for a while. Still, the medical level of this saga is going as well as could be expected.

The financial level, not so much, We got socked with a surgery bill of $2,238 today. Followup and PT…I don’t know what that will cost,but it won’t be cheap.

What’s worse, healthcare.gov chose this perfect time to yank our ACA subsidy because we can’t document the regular income streams. Of course we can’t document them because we don’t have them. Which means we have to pay another $2000 to keep our existing coverage for just the next month, and the bureaucrats have told us to apply for Medicaid. Which we may not be able to get before open enrollment in January.

This means the amount of money I need to pull in without burning savings just went up by $2000 a month. Which is doing a good job of keeping me focused on getting Loadsharers off the ground. If it does well, I’ll do well, and have successfully attacked the larger problem of LBIP funding.

There’s going to be a Linux Journal article, and at least one technology-press interview. I’ve even (gasp!) tweeted about this, something that happens approximately once every other blue moon.

I have a list of 11 people who have taken the pledge. I think we need around 11,000 (mostly supporting LBIPs other than me) to make a real dent in the problem. So please, go out and prosyletize to your tech-industry friends, and ask them to spread the word. We need this to go viral.