Another vocabulary change that ought to be made

I wrote earlier about wanting to change “Caucasian” to “white” and “African-American” to “black” to keep up with the times. I have written my tech guy to see if this can be done with some kind of mass word replacement code or something. I am waiting to hear back from him.

Another thing along those lines I ought to do is change “prostitute” to “sex worker” and “prostitution” to “sex work.” That’s another shift I’ve seen in the vocabulary about them. A lot of people and media outlets still say “prostitution” but I have noticed it’s gradually changing. I suppose it is because the term “prostitute” is stigmatized in a way “sex worker” isn’t.

Certainly there are a lot of sex workers on Charley. Very risky profession. Because of its illegal nature it must be clandestine, and also you’re going off alone with people you don’t know. And so many people turn to sex work to pay for their drug addiction which of course increases the risk.

Anyway, I hope I can get these changes made without having to do it by hand because as I said in my previous entry on the subject it would take forever and be very boring.

Insurance woes

Yeah, so I’m breaking in with one of “my life as a mentally ill person” stories. Because I do want to educate people on the difficulties. And also to vent, because I’m extremely annoyed.

Back in September I told my social worker (the guy who fixed my door) I needed to fill out the form to renew my insurance. He said no, I didn’t need to fill it out till October. In our last meeting, which was in October, I asked about the form again and he was like “it’s easy, they just ask you if anything has changed in the last year.” Then he left and I will probably never see him again cause that was when I “graduated.”

Well, maybe the renewal form is easy, but it turns out I should have filled it out in September. By October I was late and had to fill out a form which was difficult for me. I was going into all sorts of conniptions, worried I’d get something wrong and be brought up for perjury or something. I filled out the form, submitted it through the online portal and waited. And waited. And waited.

Eventually I got tired of waiting and called them to ask where is my new insurance card? And they told me the form was incomplete and I still needed two documents. I got the documents and tried to submit through the online portal but wound up somehow locking myself out of it. I had to physically drive to the office with the documents. By this point I was in tears from frustration. The lady at the desk who took the papers from me didn’t ask why. I expect she knew.

I waited some more.

Then I ran out of my medication, while still waiting for the insurance.

My new social worker that I see through tele-health might have been able to help me. This is the kind of thing social workers are for. But when I tried to log into our tele-health appointment, they wouldn’t let me unless I paid $150. I canceled the appointment.

On Wednesday I went to see my therapist. I wasn’t sure they would let me see her, but they did. Even though this is not her job, once she heard what was going on she put on a social worker hat and called the insurance company on my behalf. The entire appointment was spent on the phone with insurance; no therapy was done. In the end we were assured that my insurance had been activated and I could go to the pharmacy and get my medications. This was Insurance Person #1 telling us this. By then I’d been without them for two weeks.

I went to the pharmacy immediately after leaving my therapist’s office. The pharmacy was like, “Yeah, you don’t have insurance, we can’t give you these, sorry.” I immediately burst into tears. It was very embarrassing. I called the insurance company again and spent an hour and a half on the phone, mostly on hold. The person I was speaking to, Insurance Person #2, was also on hold; she occasionally broke in to tell me she was waiting too. The pharmacist was worried especially after I told her I have bipolar disorder and hadn’t had my meds in weeks.

“Do you need some behavioral health intervention? Do you need a doctor or anything?” she asked. I told her I was fine, just very upset, because the insurance company had told me I would not have a problem and now I did. While still on hold, I had to leave the pharmacy to pick my husband up from work.

Finally Insurance Person #2 came back and told me that although my insurance was active, I had no benefits under it and she had been trying to figure out why. She still didn’t know why. She suggested I might want to file a complaint against Insurance Person #1 because, she said, “this isn’t a good situation” and that what he had told me and my therapist was basically a pack of lies. She was very nice and I could tell she really wanted to help. She said she’d talk to the pharmacy and convince them to give me a few days worth of meds and that the situation might be fixed “within 48 business hours.” I dropped my husband off at home and went back to the pharmacy and they gave me three days worth medication, free of charge.

So that was Wednesday. I came back to the pharmacy today in hopes that “48 business hours” might have passed and I might be able to get the rest of my meds.

Nope. Still in limbo. So now I have no meds again.

I called my psychiatric clinic, as my therapist had requested I call on Saturday to let them know if I could get my meds or not. When I told them I could not, the clinic called the pharmacy to ask if I could get another three-day supply. The pharmacy said no.

My therapist said she would speak to something called ClaimAid on my behalf; ClaimAid helps people with insurance companies. It’s in the psychiatric clinic’s best interest to get me insured since they haven’t been paid for my therapy appointments in a month and once I’m insured they’ll get paid.

Now, many of the people who read my blog are extremely kind and might feel tempted to send me money to just pay for the medications out of pocket. I request you not do this. The medications cost a lot and I am convinced these insurance companies intentionally screw up all the time so that we will give up and pay out of pocket and therefore they will not have to pay out the benefits we are entitled to. As it is not an emergency (I am not suicidal, manic or psychotic), I absolutely refuse to raid my small savings, or Charley Project donations, to pay for something that the insurance company should be paying for.

This has just been so awful, though. I have no idea how I would manage if I didn’t have people helping me with this. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be for people without help, with more serious disabilities than mine, to navigate this broken system.

I wish I’d filled out that stupid form in September.

Etan Patz case going to be retried

I had written back in July about how the murder conviction against Pedro Hernandez in the 1979 disappearance of Etan Patz was overturned. Well, there’s more news on that front: the prosecution has decided to re-try Hernandez on the same charge as before.

This will be Hernandez’s third trial. The first time, the jury hung. The second time he was convicted but then that got overturned.

I feel bad for Etan’s family, having to go through this all over again. And I don’t think Hernandez did it.

MP of the week: Keely Beaudry-Culver

This week’s featured missing person is Keely Christabel Beaudry-Culver, a 26-year-old woman who was last seen in Bagdad, Arizona (yes that is the correct spelling, it’s not like Baghdad in Iraq) on July 1, 2015. She’s white, with brown hair, blue eyes and multiple tattoos; I have photo of the tattoos on her Charley Project page.

Keely has bipolar disorder and was also struggling with addictions to heroin and methamphetamine. Her husband had thrown her out due to her drug use and she was homeless. Her friends said the last time they saw her she was incoherent under the influence of drugs and just walked off into the desert. Keely’s backpack turned up in the desert but there was no sign of her. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was still there.

Something that needs to be done, probably sooner rather than later

So Jennifer Marra started the Doe Network (there is a lot of misinformation that Todd Matthews founded or co-founded it, but in fact Jenni created the site by herself and Todd didn’t get involved in all that till later). And then two years later she started the MPCCN, and after a few years of that, she gave the MPCCN to me, and then I changed it into the Charley Project. Jenni started the Doe Network in 1999, and the MPCCN in 2001, and in 2003 I got it, and in 2004 the Charley Project was created.

I have kept the writing style pretty much as Jenni had it, not making too many changes towards that end over the years. But one thing I really do need to change, should have done awhile ago frankly.

I really need to change all the “African-American” references to “black” and “Caucasian” to “white”. That vocabulary was ok in the late 90s and early 2000s when all this started but it’s starting to slide into dated territory.

The issue is that I would have to do this by hand, going through thousands of cases one by one and making this change. I’ve got 17,000 cases on Charley right now and many of them are black people or white people. It would probably take weeks to change each casefile. Weeks of tedium.

It’s going to be such an enormous pain. I really do need to do it though.

This Thanksgiving I am thankful for you

I was thinking about it and I got a bit emotional and wanted to tell you guys how grateful for all of y’all’s support.

For years I had to deal with the cyclic vomiting syndrome which made it impossible to get a regular job as I could not attend reliably, and during that time it was Charley Project donations that made it possible for my husband and I to eat. And not just us. It’s cause of you guys that I’m able to feed our dog Patrick and our cats, Aria and Viola.

And this is something you guys do cause you want to, you don’t have to, all the content is out there anyway. It’s because of your guys’s support that I’ve never HAD to put up a paywall or anything.

You guys have no idea how much all this means.

I hope to keep providing regular Charley Project updates (and medical/death content posted to Reddit) for as long as I can, hopefully as long as I live. I’m forty years old and I could see myself running it for another forty.

I see things like the Charley Project as the reason the internet needs to exist: all these people collectively coming together to help solve cases. We don’t usually know each other. We live far apart from each other. But we are all working towards this goal, this World Wide Web of people contributing in their own way.

I love all of you so much.

I’m not going to have much of a real-life Thanksgiving this year. My husband and I are going to the nursing home to see his mom and the nursing home is giving a meal. I won’t see my own family.

Sometimes I feel like you guys are my family too though.

Chibok 2.0?

So 303 students and 12 teachers have been abducted from their Catholic boarding school in Nigeria. Little is known about the attack so far and no groups have taken responsibility.

I am reminded of the 2014 kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls in Chibok by Boko Haram militants. This could have happened again. But Boko Haram are not the only suspects; unfortunately there are a lot of groups of armed thugs roaming around Nigeria right now and a lot of horror.

It makes me feel grateful to live in the US, where something like this happening right now would be inconceivable. We have a lot of problems in the US of course but armed terrorist groups going around kidnapping entire schools full of children isn’t one of them.

Many of the Chibok schoolgirls never came back home and are still missing this day, probably still with Boko Haram. I really hope all the people who were abducted the other day return home safe.

Missing man reappears after suspects mistakenly arrested for his “murder”

So I wanted to call everyone’s attention to this New York Post article about a British case. 46-year-old Ismail Ali went missing from Bradford, England in May 2020, and earlier this month five people were arrested on suspicion of his murder. After news of this arrest hit the airwaves, Ismail Ali went to the police station to explain to them he was not dead. The article didn’t say why he went missing or where he’s been these last five and a half years.

I know that in the UK, because the legal system there is different, people are “arrested on suspicion” a lot of times and then held for questioning and then released without charge. This doesn’t happen nearly as often in the US. I have to wonder whether there would have been charges brought against those five suspects if Ismail Ali hadn’t suddenly popped up and been like “I’m not dead, guys!”

MP of the week: Christopher Langille

This week’s featured missing person is Christopher Shawn Langille, a 30-year-old man who was last seen in Atascadero, California on October 7, 1998. He’s white, with brown hair and green eyes. He was 150 pounds at the time and 5’10 tall.

Langille’s case is a “few details are available” one and has never been updated in the whole time the Charley Project has existed.

MP of the week: Aaliyah Bell

This week’s featured missing person is Aaliyah Shadeay Bell, (pronounced “A-lee-a”, and she could use the last name Hall) an 18-year-old black, black-haired, brown-eyed teenager who was last seen in Rock Hill, South Carolina on November 25, 2014.

Aaliyah was last seen wearing a black peacoat, gray leggings or jogging pants, neon blue and green shoes, and a silver lip ring. She was 5’6 tall, 145 pounds and 18 years old, and she has stars tattooed on the left side of her abdomen. Though a relative wired her $100 the day she went missing, she never picked up the money. It was two days before Thanksgiving, and she was just gone.

If still alive, Aaliyah would be 29 today.