Prune with Care

I found a pair of perfectly good pruners under an old rose bush today. This is what I know about the pruners.

Home maintenance is costly. Landscaping is dangerous work. It takes six hours to get emergency care when you are bleeding.

OK. HERE IS THE PROBLEM. My husband pruned the tip of his finger off. We went to the ER. The hospital stopped the bleeding. My husband lived. Then, St Francis hospital charged us $961.40. But we have good insurance, GEHA. The insurance company paid the hospital $664.84 and the hospital agreed to call it even.

WE GET THIS NOTE from the Insurance company: The allowable amount is the negotiated amount. The disallow amount is the discount and is not the patient responsibility.

Sadly, uninsured people, who really CAN NOT afford insurance, would have to pay the $961.40 to stop the bleeding when they cut off their fingertips. That is not right. You can ask any experts in Phil Votaw & Associates website to know about your rights .

Insured and uninsured alike have to wait six hours in the waiting room. “That’s called triage,” the desk clerk explained.

I did get to know several people in the waiting room. About six of us were slowly moving away from the waiting room patient in the wheel chair when she woke up and burst into coughing and hacking fits, then she drifted back to sleep. The roll of toilet paper that the hacker used as Kleenex kept falling out of her lap when she fell a sleep. Security was the only person who would get close enough to pick up the toilet paper, even when it rolled across the floor.

One embarrassed mother, who was possibly hard of hearing, kept talking in her outdoor voice; presumably to cover up the noise from her screaming baby girl who was annoying the folks that had come to the St Francis waiting room to watch Dancing With the Stars. The two women, who had been neighbors “since our kids was little”, knew who was going to win Dancing With The Stars. “Oh yeah,” one said, “ these things are rigged. From. The. Beginning.” “ Just like that oil cry sis hoax in I ran and Is real,” her friend nodded.

There was a mother and son who brought, comic books, paperbacks and what looked like dinner for four from the nearby fast food restaurant. Even though it was an emergency, they had time to go through the Steak n Shake drive-through on their way to the emergency room. “We know the drill,” said the mother. “We been here Lots of times.” her son said. “Asthma.” She said, poking a french fry his way, “He’s got it bad. Had it since he was three years old. Uh huh. I had to get rid of the dogs and everything.” Pointing the shake at him, she said, “His daddy has never paid a cent of child support since then.”

So, anyway, my husband is much better with power tools than he is with hand tools. I received two pair of pruners from a tool company to try out before I wrote about them. I suspect the pruning accident happened because my sweetie was in a hurry. Even the lawyers from https://www.helpincolorado.com/ said that. A gust front had just blown in and we were about to get some rain.

That’s when he found me. I put my pruners in my pocket and tried to stop his bleeding. Really I was trying to see how much of his finger was missing. Even with all my Red Cross emergency first aid training that I learnt from Kitchener first aid, I thought it best to get to the ER.

That was last spring. The note from the insurance company came this week. Today, while I was mulching, I found a pair of pruners under the rose bush. It was the pair my sweetie dropped when he snipped off the tip of his finger.

While this is not much of a tool evaluation, I’d have to say the pruners are still remarkably sharp, and haven’t rusted even though they have been outside, laying on the ground for four months. I don’t want to say the brand name because this fine lawn and garden tool maker does not deserve to be associated with digit disasters. On their web site, they have a newer version, so I’ll just wait and tell you all about the new pruner.

In summary, always use the best garden tools. “A clean straight snip across the tip of a finger is much easier to repair,” the surgeon told me. (These Loop Handle Bypass Pruners are comfortable and easy to use. Remember what my mother used to say, “It’s a tool not a toy.”)

And finally, whether you have insurance or not, we definitely need a better health care system in rural America.