Shortly after the 2017 total solar eclipse, I began developing a set of eclipse instrumentation that incorporated lessons learned from the 2017 eclipse. I started early because I did not want to be in a position where some last minute events complicated or prevented a 2024 eclipse expedition. Because I was (and am) disabled, I had to work slowly. Often, I only had few hours of stamina per week left over after my activities of daily living (ADL's) were out of the way. I also had to budget spending more than I had before, because I was entering "fixed income" territory as I aged. Even with these limitations, the 2024 eclipse setup was on track to be finished by mid to late 2021. Thrust Into Being Power of Attorney (POA) for an Incapacitated Friend and Veteran: However, in December 2020, an older friend (and Navy Veteran) became incapacitated. I was his designated Power of Attorney (POA) in the event he became incapacitated, and for the duration of any legally recognized state of incapacity. Seeing to his affairs became almost all I could handle for the next three years. This was mostly because I was disabled myself, and many of the parties involved were contentious. I also had never been in a situation where I had to manage everything for another person, so there was quite a learning curve. My friend had assigned me as his POA because he had no surviving family. He had also said that he did not want anyone else (such as his other friends, who I thought he knew better than me) to do this for him. Before he became incapacitated, but after the "fiery but mostly peaceful" 2020 "Summer of Love" riots in Los Angeles and other "blue" cities, I looked into moving out of state. During the previous Los Angeles riots of 1992, I had twice narrowly escaped being attacked on the way home from work. On one of these occasions, my car was struck by rocks thrown by rioters who ambushed an intersection in Altadena. After more riots in 2016, then again in 2020, I was DONE with Los Angeles! In the fall of 2020 (a few months before my friend unexpectedly became incapacitated), I had asked my friend if there was anyone else that I could hand off being POA to, but he said that he did not trust anyone else to be POA for him. Even though the matter of being POA for a friend is not related to eclipses (beyond it preventing eclipse preparations for a few years), certain aspects are covered below. I had not expected to cover the weighty subject of being an advocate for a person in an eclipse journal, but it became relevant after it was not possible (by the slimmest of margins) to get to the path of totality in 2024. More significantly, the POA situation is covered because it is more important than eclipses, and because it was eye opening to see the degree of opposition to my elderly friend - and thus, his need for advocacy. Many recurring life and death situations were encountered, including having to advocate for him against an HMO "Death Panel". Some don't believe that "death panels" even exist, so my actual encounters with a real death panel may be eye opening for many readers. The upshot of this was that my time was not my own for the three years that followed December 2020, and it was extremely high stress in the first several months, then again in the final year. Among numerous other things (most of which were more important than eclipses), this delayed preparations for the 2024 eclipse by the same amount of time. But with much effort (given my condition), this time was made up in early 2024. I strongly dislike drama, mostly because drama makes me tired. But plenty of it came my way from late 2020 through the first quarter of 2024, with a friend's life sometimes hanging in the balance. It was a wild ride, with the first months and the final year being the most intense, so buckle up for an unanticipated adventure that may make even total solar eclipses seem boring by comparison. Then, the 2024 Eclipse Expedition was Prevented by a LONG Internet AND Phone Outage: With a great deal of effort in early 2024, it was possible to get back on track for getting to the 8 April 2024 total solar eclipse with the equipment that would enable my goals for imaging and experiments. (This had been on hold from late 2020 to early 2024, owing to the responsibility of being POA and advocate, etc., for my incapacitated elderly friend, compounded by bereavement over the August 2023 passing of a very special woman.) By mid March 2024, it appeared that the eclipse equipment would ready in time, and I was working on a land based expedition to Texas. However (spoiler alert), on the night of 18 March 2024 (only 3 weeks before the eclipse), a LONG outage of both Phone AND Internet by Frontier Communications (lasting well over a week) began. This prevented arranging group transportation by road. (I was then unable to drive any distance due to still being exhausted from managing the affairs of, and advocating for, my incapacitated friend; and my own chronic disability prevented negotiating an airport with so much equipment.) Therefore, after all of the eclipse preparation over a number of years, it was not possible to get to the path of totality in 2024. Everything else was ready. The eclipse equipment had all been acquired, built, tweaked, tested, and packed. Practice runs had been successfully performed, and I had reservations at a Texas motel, plus arrangements for a good observing site (with a low horizon for imaging the boundary of the lunar umbra) that was within "walker distance" of the motel room. The ONLY thing that was missing was a way to get there. And Frontier's long outage prevented connecting with people who WOULD CERTAINLY have been able and willing to drive me there. They also wanted to go to the eclipse, but just did not want to go by themselves: To get time off work in time for the eclipse, the driver, who also wanted to go to the eclipse with his mother, would have had to give his employer more notice than what was possible after the long Frontier outage. They did not want to travel that far alone, but would have made the trip with me. The Tracfone I had for the trip had an unfamiliar number to them. Inability to reach each other during the LONG Frontier outage was the ONLY reason the eclipse trip to Texas did not happen. A few months after the eclipse (but before I could get set up with an alternative provider) Frontier had another long outage, this time lasting well over three weeks. And as of mid summer 2024, the availability of either Frontier phone OR Internet was WORSE than 87 percent for the entire year. That is third world level service, yet they charged first world prices for this unreliable service. Most Internet and phone companies promote how many "9's" are in their service reliability (For example, Spectrum advertizes 99.9 percent, while Frontier could not even make one "9". So Frontier's real world down time was over 100 times worse than that advertised by Spectrum.) The Frontier outages caused financial and other harm, including that related to their outage preventing transportation to the 2024 total solar eclipse, after having made a sizeable investment of time and funds in the related equipment, etc. Even though Frontier's unreliable service effectively prevented getting to the path of totality in 2024, this web page includes photos and descriptions the full set of eclipse instrumentation that was painstakingly implemented for the 2024 total solar eclipse. It was comprised of 16 cameras and several lenses, telescopes, and instruments, including two Entaniya 250 degree HAL fisheye lenses, a multiple channel camera controller, an array of light meters (so the range of each meter could be set ahead of time), a meter scale illuminator, and a thermometer, etc. Since 2024 Eclipse Instrumentation was Built, this Web Page Includes Photos/Descriptions. All of the equipment had been designed, procured, built, and otherwise assembled to make the 2024 eclipse setup a reality. Because all of the work on the total eclipse setup had already been done (with the full expectation I would be able to get to the path of totality), the "Eclipse Instrumentation" chapter in this web page includes photos of the full setup, with descriptions. Photos of Past Partial Solar Eclipses, and Transits of Mercury and Venus, are Also Included. Since it was not possible to get to the path of totality in 2024, this web page currently includes photos of recent and previous astronomical events that should help make it more interesting. These include several previous partial solar eclipses (in Appendix D), the solar transits of Mercury in 2006 and 2019, plus the transit of Venus in 2012 (in Appendix E; only a few photos up thus far). Extremely Large (300-500,000 km Wide) Prominences of May 2024 are Pictured as Well. Hydrogen-Alpha photos of very large prominences that were observed near the time of increased solar activity in May of 2024 are also included. The imaged prominences of May 2024 were many times larger than those visible during the 2024 eclipse. On 9 May, the largest prominence was over 300,000 km (close to 1/4 of a solar diameter) wide, and the largest prominence of 10 May was a loop that spanned nearly 500,000 km, or over a third of the sun's diameter! Scale renderings of the earth and moon were added to the latter prominence photo to show the relative size. (Appendix F.) Photos of Rocket Launches from Vandenberg SFB (as seen from L.A.) Included near End. Some of the SpaceX launches were imaged through a telescope, to better capture events such as the first stage boostback maneuver and the separation of fairings from the second stage. Other launches were imaged at wider angles. These are shown in Appendix G. Meanwhile, back to the more important background story, in which the first months included a prolonged struggle against my friend's contentouos bank (they would not honor his POA documents for months), and the final year was a roller coaster ride of recurring HMO-imposed circumstances, where life and death literally hung in the balance on several occasions. Background: A Myriad of New Things to Do as My Friend's POA, Starting in Late 2020: In late 2020, the last time I had spoken by phone with my elderly friend was on about 11 December. Almost all contact with him was by phone because he lived nearly 70 miles away. On 18 December, I had restored and sold one of his telescopes for him, and was going to inform him of this on my next call. He had told me that I could have the telescope, but I knew his saying that was just his dementia talking. So I sold it for him, which is what had been discussed previously. When I called him on about 21 December, 2020, I could not reach him. After some time being unable to reach him, I asked for a welfare check on him, but no status was provided that day or the next. I also continued to call his phone number, but to no avail. A couple of days later, I again called for a welfare check, but also did not hear back. However, when I called yet again on the day after Christmas, someone at the Fire Department remembered that my friend had been taken to a hospital. Further checking showed that this had happened on 16 December. It took a while to find out which hospital they had taken him to, then to find out where he was in that hospital. He was in an HMO hospital that was in the general area (70 miles from me) around where he lived. By then, he was stable and in the hospital overflow area, but he could not be seen in person due to COVID precautions. They had begun to set up a conservatorship for him, but dropped that when they learned I was his POA. The assigned Social Worker there indicated that he was incapacitated, and that the hospital would only release him to a 24 hour care situation. She said his incapacity was almost certainly permanent. This meant that he could not go back to living in his condo. I briefly spoke with him on the phone, and he sounded fine. However, he said he thought he was in a restaurant, rather than a hospital. Maybe that was partly because they had fed him shortly before the call. As had been the case on other calls in recent months, he did not remember where I lived, and he seemed to forget my related answer within a few minutes. As was the case for many elderly people in 2020, the California COVID lockdowns played a significant role in his becoming incapacitated. He had depended on restaurants for getting proper meals, and for much of his social life. When these closed during the 2020 lockdowns, he neither ate properly or had a normal social life. Later investigation showed that he had declined somewhat rapidly in certain ways, starting in the spring of 2020. This had progressed throughout the summer, to a point where he was not refilling his prescriptions by late August. In fact, when it was possible (two months after his incapacity began) to go to his condo, I noticed that the August 2020 page was still open on the calendar in his dining area. For years, I had been calling my friend every few weeks to talk with him and check up on him. Driving that far to see him had not been practical for a decade. Whenever I called, he did not sound much different than before, even while his situation was deteriorating throughout 2020. He also never mentioned any of the circumstances (detailed below) that ultimately led to his 2020 hospitalization. He never mentioned these even later on. It was as though he had no memory of that time. I learned of these circumstances from his local friends and neighbors. Starting Out with a Bad Case of COVID-19: My friend's December 2020 hospitalization and incapacity began at a very bad time in regard to my ability to provide meaningful short term assistance. This is because I had been exposed to COVID at the grocery store on 15 December, and I began to develop mild symptoms by the 19th. These symptoms got worse, and I was ultimately quite ill from COVID for almost a month. I also had to get a heart monitor implant (ONLY a monitor, since I did NOT have arrhythmia) afterward. I knew where I was exposed to COVID because I retained receipts and other information that I could use to retroactively contact trace myself. And I called the one person who had visited me (obviously outdoors, while masked and distanced) between the time I was exposed and when I developed symptoms. Earlier in 2020, I had kept a log of where I went in real time, and had also noted the distancing and masking status of people at each location. When possible, the few times I left home were spaced farther apart than the stated incubation period for COVID. This way, if I developed symptoms, I'd know that exposure could have only happened on the most recent trip. And the other notes could potentially help narrow down where the exposure occurred. However, I stopped doing all of that after it became known that Governor Newsom and others had gathered indoors, with no masks or social distancing, at the French Laundry restaurant on 6 November, 2020. But it wasn't just because the Governor did that. Also there were two high ranking members (including the CEO) of the California Medical Association. So the very people who were telling everyone not to travel or gather - had traveled to gather at a posh restaurant! This communicated that they obviously did not see the virus as a serious health risk, and that the related crisis was perhaps just being used to control the population. After that, I only kept receipts from each trip, so I could reconstruct where I had been on the most recent outing if I later developed symptoms. (I was not going to continue to literally contact trace myself if State authorities acted as though the virus didn't matter to them personally.) However, I had incidentally remembered that I'd seen some unmasked children up to about 10 years of age at the grocery store, and some were running up and down the aisles. Some of these had walked or run right past me on the day I was exposed to COVID. At the time, I think authorities were saying that kids could not spread the virus, but some questioned that later on. For me, having the 2020 version of COVID was bad. It was like having a bad case of the flu - four times in a row. After several days, I'd think it was getting better, but then wham! It took me down again the next day, but with different symptoms. My oxygen saturation also was not too good over some of that time. In order to comply with COVID quarantine guidelines of the day (which were based on a certain number of days after the last NEW symptom), I had to self-quarantine for what ended up being 32 days. I was not tested during the weeks I had symptoms. I was way too sick to even get dressed on most days, so driving somewhere to get tested was out of the question. But there is no doubt that it was COVID because of how bad it was, and because the symptoms, including losing taste and smell (to the extent that I could not even taste or smell horseradish), were consistent with the disease. Taste and smell did not come back for months (some aspects took over a year), and even when these did come back, some things did not seem to taste or smell the way they used to. For example, Gerber prune-apple baby food tasted more like chocolate pudding than like prunes. Ironically, the 2020 Los Angeles "COVID Curfew" contributed to my exposure to COVID. Because I had comorbidities, I had been careful (maybe too careful) throughout 2020, only leaving home for necessities such as groceries, and wearing a mask and gloves when in public. (This was not out of fear. Instead, it was out of respecting the virus in the same way one would respect a table saw: Live life, but take appropriate precautions, based on what is "known" at the time.) Prior to 2020, I almost always went to the grocery store at night, when it was less crowded. But during the 2020 L. A. COVID Curfew, stores were not open at night. Thus, the curfew caused more people to be at the grocery store during the limited hours before the curfew, making it more crowded than it was before COVID! (How's that for a counterproductive government decision! Local COVID "rules" effectively turned the local grocery store into a virus distribution center!) It was also more crowded than usual at the store because shortages in 2020 prevented buying very many items at once, so everyone had to go to the store more often than they did before. I did not become eligible for the COVID vaccine until March, but published medical advice of the day indicated that a person should not get the vaccine until at least two months after having had COVID. And March was also a little late, being as I'd already had a bad case of COVID by then. I had wanted to get the jab before I had COVID, but there wasn't much point afterward. However, I continued to take precautions similar to those of late 2020. In spite of that, I got COVID again a year later. But I must have gotten some natural immunity from previously having COVID, because when I caught it again, it was like only having a mild cold for a day and a half. Ironocally, people I knew who were vaccinated seemed to get COVID more often than me (but on the flip side, they left home more often than me), and to experience more severe illness from Omicron than I did. Over time, I found that various people I'd met or known over the years became very ill after getting the jab; one with a pulmonary embolism. Another even died shortly afterward. Back in the 1970's, I had become very ill for over a year after I got the swine flu vaccine, which was soon withdrawn from the market. I wondered why the COVID vaccine remained on the market in spite of what seemed to be even more wide spread reactions than those to the 1970's swine flu vaccine. Beginning to Manage My Friend's Affairs to the Extent Possible During Self-Quarantine: Even though I was sick with COVID in December 2020 and well into January 2021, and had to self-quarantine for even a bit longer than that, many things still needed to be done for my friend. Everything had to be initiated by phone, Fax, or e-mail, due to my quarantine situation. I was reluctant to send out postal mail, since some still said the virus could be transmitted that way. What had to be done initially included providing my friend's POA, etc., documents and any other information necessary to be recognized as his POA by multiple institutions, utilities, etc., and to get POA access to his funds at his bank so I could pay his bills, etc. The latter was extremely important, because the hospital said it would not discharge him until his 24-hour care could be paid for entirely from his own funds. And he only had significant funds at one bank. In addition to this, I had to determine what type of 24 hour care was a good fit for him, then find a suitable care facility for him. A board and care home (which has very few residents in comparison to a nursing home) seemed like the best option for him. Even with the assistance of a Placement Coordinator, finding a suitable place for him took days of work, since my days are short owing to my own disability. Fortunately, when the right 24-hour care home was found, it was almost a perfect fit for him. He liked to walk outdoors, and very few board and care homes had space to accommodate this, but this one did. There were also other features that made that home the best one for him. The selected home also was not too far from where he used to live (but it was over 60 miles from me), so that his local friends could visit him there - whenever the COVID rules let up enough that they could. There was also the matter of looking into his VA benefits, but I was told that he did not qualify for assistance in housing or care, because his time in the Navy had not been during either the Korean or Vietnam wars. Then there were also the matters of his bills, his reverse mortgage, his previously scheduled medical appointments, informing his other friends, terminating services such as his satellite TV, and numerous other things. What follows describes only a fraction of the major challenges associated with being his POA, MPOA, and Successor Trustee, etc. Challenges that would not have existed if numerous parties had not been contentious. I got the impression that some of these parties may have thought that elderly people should not have any rights. (They certainly acted like they felt that way.) Uncooperative Parties: (Bank won't honor his documents, HMO later wants to end him.) Being POA for my friend was severely complicated by his bank (Bank of America), reverse mortgage company, credit card company (Synchrony), wireless and land line phone company, and his HMO, all being uncooperative on a long term basis. Difficulties with his credit card company and phone company were initiated by his bank's refusal to timely honor his POA documents, and this was the direct cause of many of his bills becoming delinquent before his funds at his bank could be accessed to pay his bills. Synchrony was so hard to deal with on his behalf that I also canceled my own Synchrony card. (I would not want my POA to have to deal with them if I later became incapacitated myself.) When I called them, I was always connected to people in Asia, and they contradicted themselves, said they would not accept payments for weeks, and would not connect me to anyone in the USA. There also seemed to be two Asian call centers, and a rivalry between them. If I was connected to one, some there would claim or imply that the other one was fraudulent, and say that I should not fax any documents there, but should instead use a fax number the second center gave me. Then the first call center would say the same about the second one and specify a different fax number, etc. The company that provided his land line and wireless phone service was also a problem, because calls to them were also always routed to Asia, and people there would not help solve the problem or connect me to anyone in the USA who could. The main issue was that, once his bank belatedly allowed access to one of his accounts, I wanted to cancel his service and pay his (then past due) bill - but only up to the date that they stopped providing service. However, their people in Asia would not allow that. If the bill was paid, they were going to retroactively restore service, then ALSO bill him for all of the time after his service had been cut off. This was unacceptable, so after more than half a dozen time consuming attempts to solve the problem over as many different weeks, I filed a complaint with the PUC. In the meantime, the only way I could keep the wireless phone company from retroactively charging him for the months he had no service was not to pay his phone bill! A while after the complaint was filed, a Vice President of the wireless company called and quickly solved the problem. It seemed that many problems were needlessly prolonged (and had to be escalated to management via complaints) when companies used foreign call centers that refused to connect customers to people in the USA who would even try to solve problems. (This was also an aspect of why Frontier's long dual phone and Internet outage of March 2024 (for my phone and Internet service) lasted so long that it prevented getting to the path of totality, as will be covered later.) My friend's neighbor had paid some of his late 2020 and early 2021 bills before I was able to access his bank funds or come to his condo (the former being because his bank would not cooperate, and latter being due to my quarantine and lingering weakness from Long COVID). However, it was not practical for either of us to continue paying his bills (with our own funds) after long delays by his bank dragged on for weeks, and then months. (Why anyone would use the bank he used is beyond me. They caused a lot of stress and hardship.) My friend's funds were used to refund his neighbor after (months later) his bank allowed POA access to one of his accounts. A Bank that Back Dates Notarized Documents & Does Not Fully/Timely Honor POA Doc's: My friend's bank was the first big problem, because the hospital would not discharge him until I could arrange to pay for his mandated 24-hour care with HIS funds. His bank was made fully aware of this from the beginning. But his bank held up access to even one of his accounts for TWO MONTHS, and I had to file complaints and threaten legal action before even that happened. The bank held up access to my friend's funds for months by refusing to honor his POA documents (which had been drafted by his attorney, and were therefore obviously in order), even after many contacts with them by phone and in person. When the bank was not outright refusing to honor my friend's documents, they were contradicting themselves and making excuses. I eventually filed complaints against his bank during the months long delay, including with the CFPB. But the CFPB proved to just be a paper tiger. Many encounters with the bank exceeded half an hour. If the banker I was stuck with most of the time made nonsensical excuses, I called him out on it and got back to arguing my case. I also went to different bank branches to see if their workers would act differently, and they usually didn't. Jerking customers around, imposing new vexatious conditions, and making contradictory excuses seemed to be ingrained into my friend's bank. The only exception was on one occasion when bank employees were tied up, and a worker in an associated investment firm tried to help. As the bank delays continued, I had to keep checking to see if there was still avalability at the board and care home I'd selected, and looking for a backup in the event the board and care slot evaporated. This, and many other things related to the bank delay, radically increased the stress and work load. Egregiously, when my friend's bank did belatedly, but only partially, honor his POA documents (for only ONE of his accounts) they BACK DATED the NOTARIZED documents that were associated with the signature card (this can be proven), including back dating the notary log book. They did this even after I noticed it and questioned them about it. (They even wrote in a false date for my signature. The dates by my signatures are not in my handwriting.) And even worse: After this, the bank represented the BACK DATED date as being the actual date to the CFPB, to dispose of my complaint against them. Solely because of his bank, my friend was not discharged from hospital overflow to 24 hour care until the end of March, 2021. He had been in the hospital overflow for about 100 days, with the last 60 days of this time being solely because of his bank! And the bank had caused many more rough spots along he way. Just one of many examples is that the bank (especially the banker who back dated the documents, and the acting branch manager) at times told my friend's regular HMO hospital social worker something completely different than what they told me. (And the fact that the bank manager would be talking to the hospital at all seemed strange.) In fact, when what the bank told me was combined with what the social worker said the bank had told her, it revealed that the bank had contradicted itself about ten times on matters of consequence. The bank never provided statements for my friend's accounts, though they did later provide a way to check his balances (including for the account I still had no access to) by phone or online. When I logged on for the first time, I found that my friend had last accessed his online banking on the evening of 15 December, 2020. That was the evening immediately before he had been taken to the hospital. Whatever the last straw that caused him to be hospitalized was, it was sudden. HMO Hospital Discharges My Friend Before His Funds Become Accessible: When the bank belatedly executed (but back dated) notarized documents for one of my friend's accounts in the middle of the week in late March, one signature field was missed. After I reviewed the documents and discovered this the next day, I called the bank to tell them about it, and (even though I was very tired and stressed) I offered to come in that day and sign that part of the form. The banker said not to come in unless the bank's legal department had a problem with the paperwork. Based on how things had gone with the bank thus far, it was probably a foregone conclusion that they would. And sure enough, the bank called and asked me to come in on Friday afternoon and provide that last signature. Even though this last signature completed the paperwork (for one account), the bank said that I would not be able to access any funds until the following Monday. Therefore, since my friend's funds would not be accessible to pay for his care until Monday, my friend's regular HMO hospital social worker said that Monday would be his discharge date from the hospital. I was extremely tired after the week's events, and had looked forward to getting some rest over a weekend, probably for the first time since January. However, only about two hours after I got back home from the bank (early Friday evening), a different social worker at the HMO hospital called and said that I had to show up at the hospital (70 miles away) by the next day, so they could discharge my friend to me. Discharging a patient who requires 24 hour care to an individual who cannot provide 24 hour care (and before a written agreement even exists with a 24 hour care facility), is NOT how it is done. Because of this, and because I could not make the long drive the next day, or in daylight at all (due to both fatigue and recently increased sunlight sensitivity that began while in the outdoor line at my friend's bank), I refused this social worker's (ridiculous) demands regarding this. I also reminded this new social worker that my friends's funds would not be accessible until Monday, and based on prior discussions with the hospital, access to his funds was required (by the hospital) before he could be discharged from there. (This was per the hospital's own words). Access to his funds was also required to make the initial payment when entering into a contract with the board and care home that would provide 24 hour care. The worker responded by saying that the hospital would cover my friend's time in the care home prior to Monday. But that alone would not solve all of the problems associated with a rushed Saturday discharge. For one thing, it was obvious that no one at the hospital seemed to know what prescriptions my friend needed, or how to fill them in time to discharge him the next day. The next day, the hospital prepared to discharge my friend over my objection. And they would not cover the cost of medical transport to the board and care home, so (because his bank was not allowing POA access to his funds until Monday) I had to pay that transport with my own personal credit card. (That is NOT how it is supposed to work either.) Based on this nonsense, I suspected that the hospital would go back on their word in regard to paying for my friend's time at the board and care home prior to Monday, and this suspicion proved to be correct. To make matters worse, as my friend was being readied for pickup from the hospital, the hospital called ME, to see if I knew what my friend's prescriptions were! I obviously did not know this, because the hospital was the party administering his prescriptions, and people there had said they didn't know what med's he was on when I'd previously asked them what medicine he was being given while there. I told the hospital that they needed to get their act together on his prescriptions before I would confirm the medical transport for him. A little later, they claimed that they had his prescription list in order, but they still did not have a plan to get his prescriptions filled. They were trying to put that on the Board and Care home manager: The manager of a care home for which no contract had yet been executed. Later in the day, my friend was discharged to the Board and Care home, even though I could not get there to sign the contract and other paperwork (or make any payments to them from his funds) until early the next week. The board and care home and the placement coordinator said that the home would temporarily cover the few days prior to when my friend's funds became accessible. Because the hospital had discharged my friend BEFORE his funds became accessible, I wondered if the hospital's whole spiel about how my friend could NOT be discharged before his own funds could be used to pay for his 24 hour care - was just a ploy to milk Medicare by keeping him in their hospital overflow for months. (And at a time when hospital space was scarce due to COVID!) HMO Hospital's Rush Makes a Cluster of My Friend's Prescriptions, Endangering Him: It turned out that the HMO hospital also made a cluster... out of my friend's prescriptions. Specifically, not long after my friend was discharged, he fell at the board and care home and became non-responsive. He then had to be rushed to the ER at the hospital. The reason was found to be that his blood pressure had quickly gone dangerously low. And that this had been caused by the HMO hospital getting his prescriptions wrong in their rushed short notice weekend discharge. Specifically, they had given him too many concurrent blood pressure prescriptions. (Four, to be exact.) And so, in their rush, the hospital had made a prescription error that endangered my friend. After he was stabilized, he was sent back to the care home. The weekend's stressful events made it impossible for me to drive to the board and care home on Monday, so I went after sunset on Tuesday, in order to partially recover, and to avoid sunlight. The board and care home proved to be the one place where people were affable. I had thought that they might be this way in person after previous phone conversations with them. Finally, a party related to my friend's affairs that was not contentious! My arrival there on Tuesday was after the usual (early) resident bed time, so I did not speak with my friend that evening. After completing the board and care home paperwork and making the initial payment, I went to my friend's condo (for only the second time up to that point) to size up how much work would be involved. It was going to be a lot of work. I also wanted to check the balance of my friend's accounts by phone or online, but found that his phone (to which the bank would send an access code) had been disconnected because the bill could not be paid while the bank was refusing access to his funds. Fortunately, I had brought my own flip phone on the trip. This did not help with the bank, but it did provide a way to reach people while I was at my friend's condo. I tried to get my own phone number put on the bank's contact list. They eventually accommodated this, but it took weeks. There was a lot of work in store, but before I could make the next trip to my friend's condo, there was more to come from the HMO hospital: In Their Weekend Rush, HMO Hospital Also Blows it on their Discharge Instructions: The HMO hospital had further blown it in regard to my friend's discharge instructions. I had discussed things that needed to be on those instructions with both hospital social workers (as these were the designated contacts at the hospital), and the social worker who was rushing the discharge assured me that she would see to it that those points were noted in the instructions. One of these points was that, on at least some days, my friend could be resourceful enough to escape 24 hour care if precautions were not taken, then he could potentially become lost. His incapacity did not necessarily prevent his ability to plan, or to have initiative. But the hospital failied to note ANY of this on the discharge instructions. In fact, it appeared that the hospital may have even neglected to indicate the basic fact that my friend was incapacitated. After this, even though I had told the board and care home that my friend had been deemed incapacitated on the one hand, but that he could escape if precautions were not taken on the other, the latter was not taken seriously because it was not even mentioned in the hospital discharge instructions. Then: About two weeks later, my friend escaped from the board and care home through a window. The care home called the authorities, then called me to let me know. I told the board and care home manager where I thought he might try to go, and what street names in that area could be confused with streets in the area around his condo. I then called a person at my friend's condo complex who knew him, and asked her to be on the lookout for him. But she did not believe that he could make the nearly 15 miles to his condo, and blew off my suggestion that he could. I wasn't sure if he would try to go there, or to a place where he had lived before that, but it was my best guess. Two hours later, someone noticed activity at my friend's condo and called the police. When the police arrived, it was found that my friend had entered his condo, apparently using a key that he kept in a hidden area he'd cut into his wallet long ago. My first thought was "Good for him!", but I was also concerned about the risk he had been exposed to. He came outside when the authorities arrived, and his neighbor (the one I had called earlier) gave me a "play by play" account over the phone about what was happening. Even though my friend had made it almost 15 miles to his condo in only two hours, he had no idea how he had gotten there, and he could not remember much if anything from earlier in the day. Someone among the authorities that had arrived there performed cognitive tests on him, and determined that he could not remain at his condo, then they prepared to take him back to the board and care home. He was very pleasant and passive while this was happening. One thing he politely asked was: "Are all of these people here for me?" He had executive planning on at least that day, but apparently no memory of what he did. I was somewhat surprised at how easy it was for authorities to remove him from the yard by his condo. But on the other hand, it appeared that he may not have even asked if he could stay there. Since my friend had made it to his condo, I was mildly on the side of letting him stay there for at least a trial period if he wanted to. More importantly, by suggesting that my friend stay in his condo, it would make the hospital and its social workers have to "put up or shut up" concerning his incapacity. (A necessary step, given their sheer negligence on his discharge instructions.) In reality, there was no way for him to stay there after three doctors had declared him incapacitated in writing (even if the hospital had apparently failed to communicate this). But suggesting that he be allowed to stay would at least force the hospital to communicate at least the basics of what it had neglected to include in his discharge instructions. Using the occasion to force the hospital's hand appeared to eventually lead to their informing the authorities of my friend's incapacity that day. (My simply saying by phone that doctors had deemed him incapacitated would be little more than hearsay in the absence of accessible documentation, and I was over 60 miles away.) And since the hospital had apparently failed to adequately indicate that my friend was incapacitated in their discharge instructions, the care home may have had little on hand to document that he was incapacitated either. (Unless they dug into any records the hospital provided to see if they included the letters of incapacity from doctors there.) Precursors to My Friend's Incapacity: Things later came to light which indicated that my friend staying at his condo (especially alone) probably would not have been a good idea: I later learned that, prior to the time my friend was hospitalized in late 2020 (and then declared incapacitated by doctors at the hospital), he had wandered from home and become lost on several occasions. On one occasion, a local person had found him miles from his condo, and asked where he was going. He initially mentioned a place 40 miles away, where he had lived over 20 years earlier. But after further questioning, he had indicated his then current address. On several other occasions, he had driven somewhere, walked home, then wondered where his car was. Most of the time, he'd driven to a restaurant, only to find it closed due to COVID restrictions. Then, he'd leave his car in the restaurant parking lot and walk home. Afterward, he often did not recall that he'd gone anywhere. At other times, he remembered having been way from home, but not where he had been. When this happened, local friends or neighbors would drive him around to look for his car. Partly for this reason, his neighbors did not want to see him back in his condo. Also, less than a month before he was hospitalized in late 2020, he had been pulled over by the police for erratic driving and given a reexamination hearing notice rather than a moving violation ticket. (This is a hearing about whether or not he was mentally or physically able to drive safely according to the State. It tends to be overused in California, but it may have been justified in his case. After I saw his car, it was obvious that it had experienced a few forceful encounters with curbs, including one where the lower body was dented and another where a wheel rim was bent.) He had missed his reexamination hearing because driving restrictions were imposed by his hearing notice, then one of his neighbors had unilaterally snatched his car keys when he got in his car to drive anyway. So he could not drive there. This in turn ultimately resulted in suspension of his license by about a week before he was hospitalized. It does not appear that he thought of options such as taking a taxi or Uber, etc. And if he had, he may have recoiled at the cost of these options. To compound his problem, in the week or two prior to the early December 2020 suspension, one of his neighbors had snatched his second set of car keys from him when was about to drive somewhere. Since this had happened twice, he had no car keys left. But the same neighbor would not shoulder the responsibility (that one would think should be obligatory in such a situation) of giving him a ride to where he wanted to go, or at least of arranging rides for him. My friend then made a third attempt to drive about a week before he was hospitalized, by having a dealer come out to his condo and make a new key for his car. However, this too was thwarted by the same neighbor before he could drive anywhere. All of this had prevented him from even driving to the store to get groceries, and lack of proper food had in turn contributed to his falling and becoming non-responsive at his condo (at least partly due to extremely low blood sugar), then being hospitalized on 16 December, 2020. My friend had not told me that he was having any of these problems when I'd called him even in November and early December of 2020. And my knowing about that at the time (i.e. before he was hospitalized, and before I got COVID in mid December) may have made a difference for him. However, since I was not functionally his POA until he was later declared incapacitated while hospitalized, all I could have done was make suggestions and try to arrange local options for him. I could not help but wonder if he might have remained independent for a little longer if the driver license (and key snatching) issue had not caused him to nearly run out of edible food at his condo. Perhaps then, he might have avoided the December 2020 hospitalization. But without his license to enable getting groceries, or anyone local to get groceries for him (or to set up an online food ordering and delivery option for him), it would have only been a matter of time. Getting back to the spring of 2021: At the end of April 2021, I made the long trip out my friend's condo again, but met him at his doctor appointment right after I arrived. I was not familiar with how to get to his doctor's office, but one of his neighbors was, and she had previously and kindly offered to take me from my friend's condo to his doctor appointment. Even though I had not spoken with my friend in person for 10 years, and even though I had let my hair and beard grow long (not much choice on that after barber shops were closed due to the L.A. lockdown!), he recognized me at the doctor office. A Bank that Harms its Customers: The prolonged actions of my friend's bank complicated his other affairs, and caused two month delays in his cancer surgeries,. That appears to have played a role in his ultimate demise, nearly three years later. During the bank's initial two month delay, the bank had repeatedly been made aware of his urgent situation, but they didn't care. (So, far from being useful, his bank may have irreparably harmed him. They certainly harmed me in terms of health, but I won't go into that here.) Also, my friend's bank still had not allowed POA access to his savings even by the summer of 2021 (over five months after my initial contact with them), even though the bank had told the CFPB (a.k.a. the paper tiger) that they would timely allow POA access to all of his funds. Because of this, my friend's condo had to be sold for him FOUR MONTHS sooner than would have otherwise been necessary, in order to pay his bills. This needlessly rushed the process and radically increased the work load. It also led to a debilitating back injury that otherwise would not have happened. My friend's condo had to eventually be sold for him because he'd long had a reverse mortgage, and he could not live there while getting 24-hour care. But the sale date required by this circumstance was a year after he ceased to live there for medical reasons; or at least four months later. In their 2021 response to the CFPB, the bank had said that it would timely cooperate on providing access to my friend's other account. But as of when this was written, three years later, and after over 20 to 30 contacts with them, they never did honor his POA documents for his other account. Over time, I obviously had to emphasize contact with "results oriented" organizations rather than "excuse oriented" ones like his bank, or nothing would get done. Some at his bank also imposed vexatious processes and seemed to just like jerking people around. I even heard one of them mock a customer. Very unprofessional. Over the first year, the bank had made so many excuses and deflections that I wondered if they were in the wrong business. It seemed that they'd make more money than they do in banking if they instead simply sold all their excuses to students who had not done their homework! Their excuses were much more imaginative and convluted than saying: "The dog ate my homework!" As of when this was written in 2024, it was obvious that official channels and conventional complaints were not going to get his bank to cooperate. And numerous contacts with the bank (both in person and by phone) had not helped either. So immortalizing what the bank did (to both of us thus far) on this web page was and is a last resort. There are no plans to make this record disappear if that bank later cooperates. I lost numerous hours and days to that bank, and as will be seen below, repercussions of the bank's initial two month delay may have caused irreparable harm to my friend. Other vulnerable people who could be similarly be impacted by a bank may benefit from this cautionary tale. A complaint to a different agency against the bank, for back dating notarized documents (which is perjury according to wording on the documents), is still open. Stuck Here During Bank's Refusal/Delay to Fully Honor My Friend's POA Documents: During the years-long debacle with my friend's bank, I had wanted to move out of state. This was partly so I could spell my brother in taking care of my Dad, and partly so I could acquire a house out of state before home prices in the few areas of interest went through the roof. Even if I could not move for a while, I wanted to acquire a house in an area I wanted to relocate to before prices there went way up. However, I could not even temporarily leave the state as long as my friend's bank was needlessly and severely complicating his affairs. And repeatedly dealing with his contentious bank also used up a lot of time, while accomplishing nothing. It was stressful, and like being stuck in molasses. For those familiar with the artistic eight minute prelude to the 2011 movie "Melancholia", a couple of scenes in it capture what it felt like to be stuck here because of my friend's bank. Both scenes are in slow motion. In the first scene, about 2.5 minutes in, a woman is trying to run across a grassy area while carrying a child, but her legs keep sinking into the ground up to knee level, preventing any headway. In the other scene, starting just before the 5 minute mark, a woman in a wedding gown is trying to run, but is held back by a web of black ropes and roots. That's what the bank problem felt like. (I am not a fan of the full movie, but the 8-minute prelude is interesting.) (Comment: In this web page, when I mention films that circumstances remind me of, it is usually so readers can infer more specifics than what would be practical to explain through writing alone.) And during the first year I was stuck here because of my friend's bank, home prices in the few areas I was interested in did indeed go through the roof, just as I expected they would. In fact, in early 2021, I missed out on getting a nice 3-bedroom house that was in good condition, on a full one acre lot, and in an area I was interested in, for $220k - solely because of my friend's bank. Because I could not leave here to view and buy that particular house during the months it was on the conventional market, it ultimately went into foreclosure and was sold at auction (for a LOT less than I was going to pay for it). It was bought by a company that hoards and rents out houses. Circumstances of the auction were not made available until it was too late to send an authorized proxy to bid in person (the only way a bid was allowed). Also, getting permission for a proxy to see the current condition of the house (after foreclosure but before the auction) was too convoluted: The party managing access said I had to locate and contact the previous owner to get permission for anyone to enter the house. (Afterward, it appeared that the party managing that aspect may have been a potential bidder!) Home prices in that area later nearly doubled. So my friend's bank effectively harmed two parties in this real estate matter alone: Myself, and the original seller of that house. When the house was on the conventional market, it was not even as a short sale. Therefore, foreclosure on its owner could have been avoided if my friend's bank had not effectively prevented me from leaving here to purchase that house while it was still listed for sale. And that house was also in a good area for amateur astronomy, with Bortle 4a skies (magnitude 21.6 per square arc second), while also being within half a mile of town. Also, just before I got COVID, I had been in touch with the town about whether or not a specific observatory structure would be allowed in the back yard of that house per local code, and it would have been allowed. All of the above meant that the house would have been suitable on a long term basis. Blowing Out the L4-L5 Disk in My Back, All Because of My Friend's Bank: Because of circumstances imposed by my friend's Bank in and after 2021 (namely, their years of failing to honor my friend's POA documents for his savings), my friend's condo had to be sold for him at least four months sooner than otherwise would have been necessary. This needlessly rushed the process, and was another reason why I could not even temporarily leave the state. And in my condition, it was profoundly difficult to prepare my friend's condo for sale soon enough to use the proceeds for the cost of his care and his other bills. Most work was related to sorting and removing his stuff, but considerable work and coordination also went toward the property itself. Obviously, a different bank was used for funds from the sale of my friend's condo! Specifically, for funds remaining after paying off his reverse mortgage when his condo was sold for him in August of 2021. Using a different bank made those funds accessible to pay for his care. If my friend's original bank had fully honored his POA documents and allowed POA access to his savings even by June of 2021 (five months after the process was started with his bank), his condo could have been sold months later. Then there would have been no imposed rush. And by that time, the local housing market also would have also allowed it to sell for more. Also, regarding his original bank: In February and March of 2021, the light sensitivity aspect of my condition was exacerbated by his bank requiring that people wait in line outside the building (in sunlight) for up to 45 minutes at a time. The bank had closed many of its branches, so the few branches that remained open had to service many times the usual number of customers. This concentration of customers at the bank also caused their handicapped parking to be woefully inadequate, and there were times when it took me more than 5 (tiring) minutes to make it up the slope from the nearest available parking space (using a rollator walker with a seat on it) to the line at the bank entrance. (They only had ONE handicapped parking space in the whole parking lot, and maybe half a dozen parking spaces in total that did not require walking up a long, steep incline that appeared to gain at least 12 feet of elevation. And those closer spaces were usually occupied. Clearly not acceptable for people with disabilities.) This caused me to be tired before meeting with a banker, and it also increased my exposure to sunlight there. Once I was burned by excess sunlight exposure (for my condition) at this bank, I could not be exposed to sunlight more than a few minutes a day (and not much more than that in a week) over the next several months without being further burned or blistered. The bank was the only place where I got sunburned. This bank was also the only place that did not accommodate my disability. Because of the newly increased light sensitivity, I had to drive out to my friend's condo at night (a 1.5 plus hour drive), black out the windows, then stay there several days at a time (on each trip) to go through and clean his stuff, prepare his condo for sale, and list it for sale with a realtor, etc. Fortunately, the realtor helped finish preparing the condo for sale and dealt with most of the furniture. While working at my friend's condo (which was in a different county), I found that people around there were not as freaked out about the virus as people in my home county. The related rules did not seem to be as strict either. That was a nice change. The rules in my home county (such as COVID curfews that caused stores to be more crowded) seemed counterproductive anyway. My friend's stuff was not very organized. And for some reason: In the kitchen, closets, bathrooms, and the two rooms with the most stuff in them, everything was unusually grimy. Most of it was coated with a sticky, smelly, film that nearly blackened whatever touched it. He did not smoke, so I didn't know if the grime was from gas appliances in his condo, failure to keep things clean, or both. But the result was that anything brought to my place for repair, thorough cleaning, further sorting, or storage; or that was brought to him at the care home, or that was donated, had to be cleaned to some extent first. Otherwise, the stuff would spread the grime and odor. The odor was obvious, even though my sense of smell was still reduced from having had COVID several months earlier. There was also something unusual about the state of things in his condo. By the amount of dust in different areas, it became obvious that some areas had not been disturbed in months or even years. The RC airplanes in his second bedroom had not been used in over a decade, and the telescopes and tripods in the center of the room appeared to have at least a year or two of dust on them. His dining room table (and numerous items on it) had accumulated more dust than that, even though it was obvious (from wear and damage on the finish) that it was once heavily used. It was as though he just stopped doing anything at his dining room table one day, then left everything he was using that day out on the table throughout all of the years since then. The way that all of this seemed out of character for my friend, and the way some aspects seemed to show a progression over time, reminded me of the short film "Creswick", except that there was no dark entity as in the film. For any who want to see the 9-minute Creswick film, a "cut and paste" URL for it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeSQA5nSaek (180518,Omeleto) 9:35 The air conditioning at his place was not working at that time, so I bought a portable room air conditioner to use until his air conditioning could be serviced. There was a backlog on local air conditioning service that summer, so his A/C could not be serviced for some time. Because only one room of my friend's condo was cooled during that time (and highs that summer were mid 90's to over 100 degrees F.), everything had to incrementally be brought into, then out of, the one cooled room for cleaning and sorting. It took a long time. The cooled room was also where I slept while there. I sometimes stayed for over a week at a time, due to how much work needed to be done in comparison to my condition. Because of the grime, heat, mess, and how much work had to be done, it was not a very pleasant place to be. The garage was the worst area, since it was even more grimy, and it never had any air conditioning. His stuff had to be gone through piece by piece to find and clean important items and locate a few missing documents. Due to the need to clean things on site before removing them, plus fatigue, and mostly because of the bank-imposed rush, there was no time to have an estate sale on site. A few exceptions to this were that his car, workbench, and larger machine tools, as well as almost all of his R/C airplanes (which he had not used in over 10 years) were sold on site. The R/C planes took up over half a bedroom, and had to be removed to open up some swap space to stage his other items for sorting and cleaning, as well as organizing what had been cleaned and sorted. Once the R/C planes, car, and large tools were out of the way, things went faster. This is because his place finally was no longer like a sliding number puzzle, where several items had to be moved to access other items. I also wanted to be sure I found and retained items that he might want to keep or use at the board and care home, and separate out items that could later be sold for enough to pay for his incidental expenses, in the event his funds became exhausted on his care and he went on State assistance. In addition to sorting, etc., I photographed his condo as it was, then again after it was cleaned up. I also photographed his stuff, usually arraying items on the floor or a table to photograph it, whether it was retained or not. This was just in case he'd care to see pictures of it. But to the extent that his memory allowed, my friend was then more interested in people or events from his past than in things. Therefore, beyond asking if he wanted certain items brought to him at the care home, there never was a time when discussing his condo or his stuff (or looking at pictures of either) became relevant. He hardly ever brought these up in conversations with me. For example, my friend often asked me where I lived when I called him, and he usually seemed surprised that I was in the Sunland-Tujunga area. (I lived in Pasadena back when we worked together in the 1990's, and had not moved until after he retired.) When he heard me mention Sunland, he sometimes spoke of going to "Pop's Willow Lake" with his dad back in the day, and that his dad let him row a small boat while they were there and out on the lake. I am not sure where Pop's Willow Lake used to be, but most references seem to indicate that it had been where modern day Orcas Park (just south of Lake View Terrace) is, or perhaps partially under the present day alignment of the 210 freeway, immediately north of the park. Getting back to my friend's condo and his stuff: Ultimately, his furniture was sold or otherwise disposed of by a third party, hopelessly broken items were thrown out (or recycled when necessary). Large items, plus a considerable amount of clothing from a deceased relative, were donated to local charities. The best of his own clothes and certain other items were washed and brought to the care home for his use. Smaller items and books of possible sentimental value to him, or that he might use at the home, were brought to my place for cleaning, and storage (or repair when needed), until I could bring them to the care home. Several boxes of smaller items that had not yet been sorted were also brought to my place, to sort (and further clean) there. It turned out that he did not want much more of his stuff. However, when he was in the hospital two years later, he seemed to like it when I read to him from his books about the ship he served on in the Navy. (Those books were the last thing he had read before he was hospitalized in late 2020.) In all, about 10 boxes of his stuff were brought to him at the board and care home. Over half of this was clothing. I did not bring his Navy books or high value items there because they sometimes lost track of things. I instead made copies of highlights from the books and put valuable stuff in a box to take there with me so he could see it. I was going to photograph every page in the books put them on his iPad tablet, but I did not end up doing that because he did not seem up to using a tablet. Unfortunately, visiting him was not possible for some time due to the Vaccine Mandate. Over 30 boxes of his stuff were brought to my place in July and August of 2021. In terms of volume, this may have been less than a 15 percent of the non-furniture items that were in his place, so he obviously had a lot of stuff. The remainder was donated to local thrift stores, sold on site, or (in the case of decades-old bills, reams of old HOA mailings, and hopelessly broken items, etc.) thrown out or recycled. But I retained HOA communications that were specific to his condo. I also found and preserved his photos, some of which were found mixed in with other things, including stuff in his garage. I paid him market value (usually based on eBay prices) for the limited number of items I thought I might use myself, in the hope that the funds could help extend his time in the good board and care home. In a few cases, I bought broken or beat up items that would otherwise be given away or thrown out (such as his beat up dining room table), just so he could get some money out of them. The beat up table also provided a place to further sort some of his stuff at my place. Some of the items to be stored, tested, repaired, or further cleaned were heavy enough that even a 15x12x10 inch file box full of them was excessively heavy. Therefore, these heavy items were moved separately, then put back into their respective boxes at my place, so as not to lift the whole box full of stuff at once and strain my torn rotator cuff, etc. Even though I had been careful not to lift anything too heavy, the sheer number of lifting operations was apparently too much. While handling the next to last load of his stuff, my back suddenly gave out. An MRI showed that the L4-L5 disk in my back had blown out, and it was pinching a nerve. The blown out disk was very debilitating for the next eight months. I needed to have someone else do almost all of the lifting for the last load of my friend's stuff (trading some of his automotive CB radios for the labor), and I could not do much at all for months after that. I could not even visit my friend or start to sort the rest of his stuff during that time. Surgical level lower back pain made it take 10 to 15 agonizing minutes to just get up and transition to standing at the beginning of each day (on the days I could stand up at all), and it was almost as bad each time I got up after laying down to rest during the day. When I was able to get up during those months, I had to use a 4-wheel walker all the time. A cane, or even two canes, usually wasn't enough. My right leg also became weak from the pinched nerve, and the lost strength was not significantly recovered for years. The blown out L4-L5 disk is the main reason I still have such a low medical (and real world) lifting limit. All ultimately because a bank would not fully honor my friend's POA documents! An HMO where Patients Experience a "Natural Dying Process", Even if They Want to Live: My friend's HMO was also a problem, especially in 2023. It took them a year and a half to even provide some of his medical records. And when these were provided, all records about his most recent two hospitalizations (and his related rehab stay) were missing. His name and some specifics obviously are not mentioned here, both for his privacy and due to HIPAA. Precursors to My Friend's Long 2023 Hospitalization: Previously, up through late 2022: Due to delays caused SOLELY by my friend's BANK, his skin cancer got worse throughout early 2021. Medical appointments could not be made for him while the bank situation (and thus, his discharge date from hospital overflow) was unresolved. After that, there was nearly another two to three month backlog in appointments at his HMO. But his doctor was able to pull some strings and arrange an appointment a month sooner than what I had been able to come up with (June vs July 2021). Playing "Catch Up" with My Friend's Cancer, Because of His Bank: From then on, it was a matter of playing catch up on his skin cancer. One facial lesion went from dime size to almost silver dollar size during a period of time equal to the bank's delay. Another went from smaller than a dime to the size of a quarter. And that was just what was on the surface. After this, every cancer surgery on his face had to be more invasive than it would have been if it could have been done two months earlier (without the bank-imposed delay). And, there had to be more total surgery appointments, because the more invasive surgeries could not be grouped together as much as the lesser surgeries could have been without the bank delay. One of the facial surgeries was even disfiguring to an extent. In October of 2022, one of his facial incisions, from what was supposed to be one of his final cancer surgeries, was not healing, and it ultimately became infected. This was from a cancer surgery that probably would not have been done as late, or have been as invasive, if his bank had not imposed a two month delay over a year and a half earlier. HMO Sent Him Home Twice, Apparently Without Adequate Treatment: He was taken to his HMO ER twice for the incision problem, but he was sent home twice without anything significant being done about it. But then, only four hours after he was sent home the second time, a hospital case manager called and said that two tests had just come back, and both showed that he had considerable bacteria in his blood (sepsis). She said he had to be brought back to the hospital on an emergency basis. However, she said the HMO would not do anything about arranging transport, so there was no choice (with my being 70 miles away) but to call 911, and get transferred to where I could arrange an ambulance for him. A Contentious HMO Case Manager in Late 2022: I had the distinct impression that the case manager had sent him home too early, and that she would not help arrange transport to obscure that. This impression was reinforced by her attempts to discharge him too early on two subsequent occasions that year. The same case manager also seemed to want to provoke, and repeatedly did provoke, his board and care home manager when she brought my friend to a facility or picked him up. Very amateurish. As soon as he was brought to the hospital by ambulance, he was admitted to the hospital and put on IV antibiotics via a PICC central line. However, after only a few days in the hospital, and before the course of IV antibiotics was finished, he was discharged to a rehab facility in Pomona. He got Scabies, had a Possible Incomplete Course of IV Antibiotics, then got COVID: While at the rehab facility, he got scabies, and in the scratching that accompanied that, he pulled out his PICC IV. After this, the same case manager (who was for some reason also involved with the rehab facility) repeatedly dodged questions about if they re-established his IV and finished his antibiotics. Before long, this case manager at the rehab facility tried to discharge him back to his board and care home - before his treatment for Scabies was complete. (They had previously volunteered that they would keep him until that was complete.) So I filed (and won) an appeal, and they kept him until that treatment was completed. But he tested positive for COVID about when he would have been discharged, so they kept him a while longer. He had been vaccinated a number of times, but got COVID anyway. (In the early days of COVID, some authorities said a vaccinated person would not get it: The President said it in a 7/2021 Town Hall, and Fauci implied it the month before: [Ref: A. Fauci nterview with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, circa 210622.] But a lot of people in power said untrue things back then...) My friend was then put in the COVID ward at the rehab facility. They made no mention of treatment for his COVID. On his proposed discharge day, it was found that the facility had not isolated him in a different room from other COVID patients, and they refused to do a PCR test. The care home (understandably) refused to take him back under these conditions, and it was clear that the contentions case manager was more interested in trying to accuse the board and care manager of "abandonment" than she was in resolving the problem. (The board and care manager understandably would not take my friend back after rehab facility case manager refused to demonstrate that he did not have an active case of COVID. This was understandable because my friend's room mate at the home was 96 years old.) Therefore, I appealed the discharge again. This second appeal was lost, but it bought enough time (private pay) to iron things out so he could be safely discharged. This Pomona area rehab facility never provided his records, even when my requests for records were backed up by the hospital. After his early December 2022 discharge from the rehab facility, my friend did not seem to be as well as he had been before his stay there. According to the care home, he was sleeping a bit more, and was not doing as much as he used to when he was up. After my friend was back at the care home, I wanted to visit him there, but could not because I'd been unusually fatigued ever since I'd had to deal with the contentious case manager at the rehab facility for a protracted time. It seemed that the case manager never wanted things to be resolved, as though keeping them unresolved was a way for her to feed a control complex or something. And she had continued to needlessly provoke the care home manager clear up until my freind's discharge from the rehab facility. To make matters worse, I found that the same case manager had also communicated (untrue) bad things about the care home manager to the HMO medical center, and someone she knew there also began to provoke the care home manager when she brought my friend there (and often stayed with him) for his medical appointments. This understandably made the care home manager reluctant to bring him there, and conventional medical transports (which may not provide transport until two hours from the optimum time) then had to be looked into. She had brought my friend to the medical center without incident for over a year and a half, and there was never a problem until the contentious case manager got involved. A Longer Term Hospitalization, with Recurring Life and Death Implications: In February of 2023, my friend had a crisis and had to be hospitalized longer term. He was sent to the hospital after it appeared that he was only partially waking up from his nap, then he seemed unable to stay awake for the next several minutes. After he arrived at the hospital, it was found that he had sepsis again (but this time, an antibiotic resistant variety), plus pneumonia and congestive heart failure. Many things pointed back to the rehab facility he had been in a couple of months earlier (the same one that did not provide records), and the possibility that they had not finished his antibiotics after he had pulled out his IV. Some of the HMO doctors later even concurred with this opinion as to possibly why his sepsis was antibiotic resistant. Also, his heart had been fine in tests from only a few days before he was sent to the rehab facility, but now, his E.F. was almost 20 percent lower than it was then. He was put on oxygen (not a ventilator) early in this hospitalization. He began to come around after several days in the hospital, and it was possible to speak with him on the phone on a few different days, starting about ten days after he was admitted. He was understandable, but his voice was weak, so I kept each call to under a minute or two per nurse recommendations. A few days later, he began to aspirate. He soon regressed to where he could not speak, and 3 March was the last day he could speak during that hospitalization. He soon needed a feeding tube (which I approved), because he was aspirating too much for eating to be practical. Early the next week, during a call to check on my friend's status, a nurse informed me that a certain doctor had put a note in my friend's file, indicating that I had supposedly approved withdrawal of his IV nutrition. This was alarming, because I had never approved such a thing. In fact, beyond the hospital informing me that my friend was on IV nutrition the week before, the subject had not been discussed during the entire hospitalization. And on top of this, the doctor's material indicated that the so-called conversation had occurred on a day when I had not spoken with a doctor about anything. I informed the nurse of this, but there wasn't much reaction. The next time I called the hospital, they had CHANGED the date of the supposed conversation and nutrition withdrawal approval - to a date when I had actually spoken with a doctor. But on this call, I pointed out that I was aware of the false entry about IV nutrition, followed by the change of the conversation date in my friend's records. I also held out until they gave him IV nutrition again. Something wasn't right ahout all of this. That a doctor would make a false entry that claimed I had approved withdrawal of IV nutrition (when I had not), also entering a false date for the supposed conversation, then changing the record to show a different date after I pointed out that I had not spoken to the doctor at all on the first date. At that point, I knew that an in-person visit to the hospital would be the only way to get to the bottom of it. This was my first inkling that the HMO hospital could be a very dangerous place for my friend. Later in the week, it appeared that the pulmonary staff made an error in administration of his oxygen (switching to a nose cannula, when he breathes through his mouth) and his O2 saturation had frequently gone down in the mid to low 80's for a number of days. I later learned that His kidneys had begun to fail during this period of low saturation, and it later appeared that dialysis would be necessary. But I did not learn any of this until after I arrived at the hospital early the next week. The First Visit to See My Friend in a Distant Hospital. 12 March, 2023: My friend was in an HMO hospital that was 70 miles away. A few years earlier, a 70 mile trip would not have been a big deal. However, after I had developed increased light sensitivity (as in rapidly getting sunburned) and increased fatigue in early 2021, I could only make such a trip if I rested a lot beforehand. And most driving had to be at night. I was going to eventually go to see my friend, but events of early March dictated that the first visit happen sooner instead of later. My first visit to the hospital began on the evening of 12 March, 2023. My friend did not look quite the same as he did at the board and care home, but it was obvious that he was still him. I was expecting him to look like any patient would when their mouth is open and tubes are hooked up to them, so there was no shock upon seeing him. It did not take long to become used to seeing him that way. I decided not to try to wake him up outright, because he seemed to cycle in and out of sleep every half hour to hour or so. When he appeared to be awake, I slowly and somewhat softly read to him from one of the books about the ship he served on in the Navy. These were the last thing he had read before he became incapacitated two years earlier, and his neighbor had informed me that one of these books was out on a table at his condo at that time. I never tried to jar him into wakefulness or to do anything to startle him. From my own prior hospitalizations (all related to surgeries), I knew loud or sudden noise could be counterproductive, and that speaking for long in a voice much louder than what is used in normal conversation could seem to have so much echo as to sound unintelligible. When he came around a little more than usual after several minutes of reading to him, he rarely opened his eyes, but there were other signs that he was awake. I gradually began to see what ways he could respond, and it became obvious that he could respond with his hands, though not very strongly. I knew that this was one way some people could respond if they were not up to talking. So, I held his hand to begin to see what level of response he was capable of, as he felt up to it. (I normally would not hold the hand of a dude, but I had to go outside of my comfort zone for his sake.) I asked him to only try to respond if he felt up to it. I did not request a response very often, asking maybe once an hour. It soon became obvious that he could communicate via his hand. The first clue that he could respond with his hand was in noticing that he was reluctant to let go of my hand UNLESS I first assured him that I was going to stay right by his hospital bed. When I told him that, he would let go of my hand when I gently pulled it away. But if I instead had to leave the room for a while, and told him that before pulling my hand away, he would tighten his grip if I started to pull my hand away. For the rest of the time I was at his bedside that evening, and then again the next day, the correlation for both responses was absolute. On rare occasions, there had been a soft rattle in some of my friend's breaths, but it was not anything like what I'd heard people describe when referring to a death rattle. I briefly prayed with him and occasionally softly read to him. In spite of his critical situation, it was a peaceful time that could be likened to the calm before the storm that would unexpectedly befall both of us the very next day. The hospital let me sleep in the hospital room that night, but it was a restless sleep due to how often people came into the room. Some of the ways that my friend could respond or otherwise express himself are included here (and below), because staff at the HMO hospital seemed oblivious to the ways he could respond. However, later actions by the HMO left the impression that perhaps the staff was encouraged not to notice when my friend was responsive. What is included here can perhaps be tried by others who care to see if a person is responsive. (With the caveat that this is not medical advice.) Careless Hospital Staff Panics My Friend, plus His Expressed Desire to Prolong Life: When the morning shift took over on 13 March 2023, they switched my friend from a nose canula and back to a mask for his oxygen, and temporarily increased the setting from 2 to 8 liters. His saturation had gone down in the early hours of the morrning, probably because they had used a nose canula instead of a mask the previous day and overnight, even though it appeared that he was breathing through his mouth. I learned that a nose canula had been used on several previous days, and that kidney failure had begun to follow. One nurse said that my friend had been at risk of coding that morning. Therefore, I decided to ask him about his preferences for resuscitation and proloning life when the opportunity presented itself. I had developed a way to phrase such questions when my Mom was hospitalized for her final time in 2014, but never got to ask her those questions. But I could now ask them to my friend. That afternoon, as I was with my friend in the hospital room, a female doctor came into his room. Almost immediately, she carelessly and aggressively started pushing for a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate order) - IN HIS HEARING. When I did not promptly agree to that (I was blindsided by it suddenly being pushed, and was not prepared to address it on the spur of the moment while being pressured), she became more aggressive, while still in his hearing. And, also while still in his hearing, the same doctor was pushing the narrative that my friend was not responsive, even though he was responsive. This happening in my friend's hearing obviously panicked him. His expression and some aura I could sense reminded me of the expression and fear that the older man had in the 1971 movie "Andromeda Strain", when seals in the laboratory failed, and the character thought the Andromeda Strain was going to kill him. My friend's breathing rate also became unsustainably high. At that point, I decided to ask him if he wanted to be resuscitated (if necessary) or prolong life, and to do so that very day. His Advance Directive from way back in 2006 had said he that did not want to prolong life under certain circumstances (none of which existed on that particular day), but his reaction of panic (to the doctor pushing a DNR and saying he was not responsive - in his hearing) seemed to indicate that he did want to prolong life. But he had to be calmed down first. Over the next few hours, I incrementally asked my friend about those things - 20 times. He was asked this many times so that he could be asked in different ways, partly to keep possible reflexes from being interpreted as answers. And he calmed down after I explained that I was going to ask about his preferences, then back him up on his wishes. At the time, there were not many ways he could respond. His eyes were rarely open, so he had to answer by squeezing my hand. To rule out reflexes, I asked questions in different ways, sometimes asking him to respond if he DID want to prolong life, and at other times to respond if he did NOT. I also tested his response before asking questions. He was 19 out of 20 on that, for 95 percent confidence that he was responding when (and as) asked to. This included his not indicating a response on the few occasions when he was asked not to respond. Some of the time, I also asked him to squeeze my hand to indicate "Yes" answer, and NOT to squeeze to indicate "Yes" at other times. For each question, I moved a finger in the same way (so he could feel it with his hand) to indicate when I had finished asking a question. (At all other times, I kept my hand as still as a dead fish.) One purpose of this was to keep him from responding to just the sound of my voice when I began asking a question. Asking him NOT to squeeze for some of the answers made a reflex "answer" highly unlikely, since it would be difficult for him to inhibit squeezing my hand if squeezing it was a reflex. The resuscitation and prolong life questions were asked separately, to simplify each question. The resuscitation question was asked 20 times, and the prolong question was asked 16 times, with half of the latter asked in the context of being on life support for the rest of his life. Eight additional questions specific to a ventilator were also asked. He was also asked about his religious faith. His answers emphasized that he did want resuscitation and he did want to prolong life. To be more certain about his answers, I asked the last session of each set of questions in a way that placed more emphasis the down sides. For example, I emphasized the doctors' comments that CPR was likely to break his ribs, and that "full" recovery was unlikely after resuscitation. I also emphasized that being on a ventilator for more than a few days would involve creating a hole in his throat. The emphasis of his answers remained about the same. After a matrix of asking each question the above noted number of times (and in different ways) was completed, there was more than 87 percent confidence that he DID want to be resuscitated, since he had indicated that he wanted that 18 out of the 20 times I asked him, and another one of his responses was 1-2 seconds later than usual, so it was counted as a neutral answer. There was 75 percent confidence that he DID want to prolong life, and 75 percent confidence that he DID want a ventilator if it was needed. A group of questions was similar to the following. In this example, the questions ask if a person ever had a dog. The answers which indicate that a person DID have a dog follow each question: No: Question: Answer, if DID have a dog: 1. Grip if you DID have a dog. Grip 2. Grip if you DID have a dog. Grip 3. Grip if you NEVER had a dog. No Grip 4. Grip if you DID have a dog. Grip 5. Do NOT grip if you DID have a dog. No Grip 6. Do NOT grip if you DID have a dog. No Grip 7. Do NOT grip if you NEVER had a dog. Grip 8. Do NOT grip if you DID have a dog. No Grip C: Asked to grip w/o asking question. Grip In the categories that had 75 percent confidence from the answers, half of the negative answers occurred when a question was posed as a double negative (i.e. "do not squeeze if you do not want to prolong life", where a squeeze means do prolong life, as in the example question 7 above). That can be a curve ball even for healthy people. The request to grip at the end is for more confidence that not gripping was his intended reply, as opposed to his going to sleep. A continuum in the complexity of how questions were asked served a dual purpose, in that it also helped assess mental alertness at a basic level. This was helpful because his outward appearance usually did not imply alertness. (But at the same time, I could tell that being there was meaningful to him.) The order that questions were asked was also switched around, to reduce anticipation bias. I ordinarily would not have asked that many questions in only a few hours, but the hospital was pressing for an answer, and applying pressure toward a DNR and not prolonging life. He was asked a few of the same questions weeks later (after he had developed more obvious ways to respond), with similar results. It is interesting to note what one doctor at a different hospital said months later: That a patient may become angry after being panicked by a careless staff member who pushes end of life matters, and claims that the patient is not responsive, all in the patient's hearing. And that out of anger at having been panicked, a patient may indicate a desire to prolong life - just as a way of saying "Screw you!" to the staff member that panicked them. Because prolonging life was the opposite of what that staff member wanted. I had never considered that this could be a patient's motivation for answering such important questions in a certain way. Ironically, that could be sort of what happened concerning the HMO doctor who pushed for a DNR in my friend's hearing, while also claiming that he was not responsive. That panicked him. And his reaction could have also included anger. The panic may have been a very visceral thing for him, and that would have made it memorable in ways beyond intellect or ordinary memory. If the doctor had not done that, there would have been no need to calm him down, and I may not have asked him about resuscitation or prolonging life as thoroughly as I had. Instead, I likely would have acted based on his Advance Directive. Conditions under which his advance directive would specify withholding care had not been met on that particular day, but the conditions may have been met before much longer. I still would have asked him about his current preferences, but not as many times, and not when he was panicked. Under those circumstances, his answers may have been different. And if he had not been panicked by that doctor, he then very well might have passed away in March of 2023, perhaps even peacefully. But since he was panicked by that HMO doctor, I thoroughly asked him about prolonging life, etc., and his answers informed what I did on his behalf from then on. My Friend Goes on Life Support for Real: Unfortunately, the same doctor came back about four hours later, and began to push a DNR again. I told her to take it out in the hall, so we went out of the hospital room. However, when I again would not agree to a DNR (and cited my having questioned my friend about it), she got upset and intermittently started YELLING at me, increasingly acting like you might expect someone to act if they'd lost it emotionally. Before long, everyone in the corridor was looking in her direction. As her anger grew, she became more and more illogical. For example, when I mentioned there had been a 19 out of 20 correlation when testing my friend's responses before I asked him questions, she interrupted and yelled: "So you're saying there's NO correlation!?" Other things she said became similarly nonsensical. She carried on for almost 10 minutes before leaving. But the worst part is that she had been loud enough, for long enough, that my friend could hear it even from his room. This panicked my friend again. And I could not calm him down this time. His breathing rate went into the high 40's for hours, which was unsustainable. After the shift changed that evening, the night doctor said that my friend would not survive the night unless he was put on a ventilator. I promptly approved the ventilator, and he was moved to the ICU put on one at about 1:30 a.m. on 14 March. This was about 6.5 hours after he had been panicked the second time. As long as there was a way to prevent it, there was no way that my friend was going to go out while he was in the panic that had been needlessly caused by the day shift doctor only hours earlier. That would have been a distressing and chaotic way to go. The Hotel from... (well, you know): I stayed in a hotel that night, because I knew I'd need to visit the hospital the next day. And I really needed sleep. I was stressed from (twice) being pressured by (and having to argue with) the aggressive HMO doctor about a DNR, from my friend being twice panicked by the same doctor and coming close to biting the dust, and from being at the hospital until well after 2:00 a.m. The hotel floor and some walls were so grimy that I did not want to set any of my stuff on the floor, or even on the upholstered furniture. So I found a way to set most of it on the combined desk and dresser top, and I put rest of it on the seat of my walker. Because of my continuing light sensitivity, I also had to set up the material I brought to black out the window to a degree beyond that provided by the curtains and window shade. It was finally possible to go to bed at about 3:30 a.m., but it took most of an hour to fall asleep due to the freeway noise, unfamiliar environment, and stress, etc. I hoped to sleep in until about an hour before the 11:00 a.m. checkout time. But the hotel I picked unexpectedly turned out to be the wrong hotel for that. Well before 8:00 a.m. (at a time when I'd had less than 3 hours of sleep), loud heavy equipment started operating right outside of my room, and the noise kept going all morning. But I was able to intermittently doze off again after half an hour or so. But then at 8:30, the hotel office called and said that they needed me to move my car ASAP because they were resurfacing their parking lot. Based on information from the call, I expected to only have to move my car a short distance in the same general area on the hotel property. It can take 15 minutes just to get partially dressed when that tired, and they were in a hurry, so I may have only worn a bath robe or pants (I don't recall which) and an undershirt out to the car. (I ordinarily would wear a men's kilt to go outside this soon after getting up, because it is easy to put on when tired, yet is way better than a robe. But I had not worn or packed a kilt for this trip.) I had to use a 4-wheel walker or cane for every step that soon after getting up, due to my disability. I had a handicapped placard and had arranged to be in the handicapped spot right in front of my room when I checked in, so you'd think they'd notice. I'd ordinarily leave the handicap spot for someone worse off than me, but I was in fairly bad condition at the time, and really needed the spot for that stay, partly because the curb up to the sidewalk in front of the other rooms was too high to negotiate with my walker. I was then unable to carry much of anything, so the seat on my walker was used to move everything that I took into the room. However, after I began to move my car in the direction directed by a worker for the parking lot resurfacing contractor, someone from the hotel came up to my passenger side car window and told me that I had to move my car to a restaurant parking lot that was close to a block away. That was unacceptable, since it would be extremely difficult to make it back to the room, not to mention the prospect of having to move everything I had in the room about a block to the car (which would require at least three trips on a walker and could add half an hour to the process) when I later checked out. The hotel person seemed unsympathetic to that situation, even after having been informed of my disability and the importance of getting enough rest to deal with the hospital that day on matters that could be of life and death import. And they still insisted that I move my car that distance. At this, I royally (per my standards) cussed the hotel person out for a couple of sentences (not calling them names, but unfortunately using at least one word per sentence that turned the air blue when describing what I thought of their demands), while reiterating the points I had made earlier, to the extent possible on well under four hours of sleep. This was the first time I had sworn at anyone in decades, and I was later disappointed in myself for doing so. (I was surprised that I did that after decades, but I apparently still had buttons that could be pushed after less than 4 hours of sleep, not to mention two years of dealing with contentious parties on behalf of my friend.) At least the hotel person was by the passenger side window, so what was said did not broadcast to others in the parking lot. After that, the hotel person relented and said I could leave my car where it was originally parked until I checked out. But I did not get much if any sleep because the loud equipment was still running, and I'd also been exposed to full sunlight. Also, arguing with the hotel person increased my heart rate. If I'd been a cartoon character, steam would have been blowing out my ears. I had always wondered why cartoon characters had steam blow out their ears when they were angry. Now that I finally felt like such a cartoon character, I knew why. The hotel office reluctantly said that I could check out a little bit later than their usual time because of the disturbance. I was not able to get more sleep in the extra time, but it allowed enough time to take a cursory spit bath and try to organize some files for my friend before going to the hospital. As I was loading the car, the contractor working on the parking lot mentioned that there had heen no need to move my car when the hotel had wanted me to earlier that morning. I presumed this meant that the hotel person may have just wanted to have a power trip. After checking out, I finally left the hotel from... well, you know. Protocols Reminiscent of Entering the Lab Complex in the 1971 Andromeda Strain Film: Because of the stress, sleep deprivation, pressure at the hospital the day before, and the tumultuous but brief stay at the hotel, I was so spaced out from brain fog at the hospital that there was little point in staying very long. On so little sleep (by then, I had not slept much for two nights in a row), I lacked the forcefulness needed to effectively advocate for my friend, so the less time I interacted with staff that day, the better. This was unfortunate, since I could have set a different tone for future interactions with the hospital if I'd been alert enough to be more assertive (yet still tactful) that day. On the other hand, it had rarely been necessary to be forceful at the hospital on that particular day, partly because the night shift doctor had taken charge of the situation and had more or less done that for me the previous night. The hospital did not bring up a DNR or withholding care that day. By this time, the hospital had discovered that my friend had a staph infection that could spread around the hospital if it was allowed to escape, so it was necessary to don a gown and gloves (not to mention a mask and hair net) to visit him. For some reason, the gowns, etc., again reminded me of the 1971 film "Andromeda Strain", but a different part of it, where the movie characters were being disinfected as they entered the underground complex. My friend was barely responsive at that time, and he had a lot of latency, so there was little point in seeing him for long that day. For the rest of the afternoon, my emphasis was to rest in the waiting room to try and gain enough alertness for the long drive home. It took a week to recover after I got home, so I had to keep tabs on my friend's condition via phone. He was put on dialysis the next day, and stepped down from the ICU a few days later. Several days after the trip, after I had regained a little strength and more alertness, I watched the 1971 version of "Andromeda Strain" again, for the first time in years. About a week later, the hospital said that my friend had fluid around his lungs, and they recommended that the fluid be removed. I promptly approved this, especially given that the amount of fluid was significant. Toward the end of March, his attending physician also proposed that he should get a PEG (abdominal wall) feeding tube instead of the one routed through his mouth or nose. I was in favor of this as well, because people I knew (who had feeding tubes) had said that getting rid of the feeding tube in their nose was a big improvement in their quality of life, mainly because it eliminated a severe recurring sore throat. I visited the hospital once more in March, and a few more times in the coming weeks, staying in a hotel each time so as to get two visiting days out of each 140 mile round trip. On each trip (and on each phone call between trips), I checked status on the previously discussed procedures, and the answer was always that these had not yet been done. The reason given at the time emphasized that they just had not gotten around to doing the procedures yet, but it was later found that this was not the real reason. If all of the procedures had been done, I may have considered the hospital's subsequent stated preference that dialysis be done only for a trial period. Any discussions about a possible trial period had been in the context of the procedures being part of the entry criteria for such a trial period. But the procedures had not been done. In fact, even after almost a month, neither of them had been done. High Pressure HMO Tactics, Including Numerous Unsolicited Calls: Visiting the HMO hospital was almost always extremely stressful. It was 70 miles from where I lived, and every time I went there, one or more doctors (etc.) would push a DNR, or even more than that. When I did not agree to that (based on the preferences my friend had indicated many times), the person pushing it would often get upset, and maybe about half of the time, even start yelling at me. (The nurses usually did not have that bad of an attitude.) All of this wore me out, and I had to stay in a motel overnight to be up to making the drive back home. I usually at least briefly came back to the hospital after checking out of the motel, to get in two visits on each trip. Needless to say, the pressure made me averse to visiting the hospital, so I only visited there every week or so. The hospital was rarely a place where I could visit my friend in peace. So much pressure was brought to bear at the hospital that it was impossible to have any peace when visiting him. I was also concerned that he could pick up on the tension that resulted from all of the pressure imposed by certain staff there. Similar pressure had been brought to bear on my Dad when my Mom was hospitalized at the Mayo Clinic hospital in Phoenix, AZ back in 2014, but at least they had limited most of the pressure to daily meetings that happened at designated times. The exception was when a certain pompous doctor came by the hospital room unannounced, to pressure my Dad in Mom's hearing. One aspect of my Mom's final hospitalization there reminded me of the movie "Coma", in that the ICU room she was in was also used to store several unused rolling IV stands, and this limited available visitation space in the room. It also did not communicate a success oriented situation. Regarding my friend's hospitalization in the spring of 2023, I wondered what certain HMO hospital staff may have been saying in his hearing that could alarm him on the days I was not at the hospital. They had said plenty in his hearing on some of the days when I was there. In addition to the pressure while at the HMO hospital, I also received numerous unsolicited calls from the HMO hospital when I was at home. Almost all of these were pushing a DNR (and/or termination of dialysis, etc.), often without providing any information about my friend's condition. When I would not agree to a DNR, etc., the person calling would often also get upset, and a portion of the callers would also start yelling over the phone. On some days, there were multiple unsolicited calls per day. On one occasion, I got at least three such unsolicited calls in one day, which in total used up almost an hour and a half of time trying to pressure me. So there was no peace from the HMO even when I was at home. I began to dread hearing the phone answering machine or seeing that messages had been left on my phone. I had to answer when they called and began to leave a message, since their first words were that they were calling to update me on my friend's condition. However, there was rarely any update when I answered. Instead, it was nothing but pressure to try to get me to approve a DNR, etc. Because the HMO hassled me even at home, there was no time or energy to frame future questions for my friend concerning life support. Therefore, I continued to act on his most recently expressed preferences, which were to continue his "full code" status and prolong life. Since so much time was spent on the phone with unsolicited callers from the hospital (almost all of whom were trying to pressure me), I sometimes brought up peripheral subjects to establish context. Many callers from the hospital seemed to be very cavalier about things that would, or could, result in my friend's death in the near term, so I sometimes mentioned that I had asked my friend about his faith in late March, in the context of eternal life in Jesus Christ. The staff response to this surprised me. Most of the callers had their family origins in a certain Communist country in Asia. And their response ranged from having no idea what I was talking about, to that of a deer in the headlights. They had no concept about eternal life. They could not even grasp what eternal life was, or that it was even possible. The subject even made a few sound afraid. But if they could make numerous unsolicited high pressure calls that don't even update me on my friend's condition, I could occasionally bring up unsolicited subject matter such as faith. Goose-Gander! All of this made the staff's cavalier attitude about death seem even more puzzling. If there is no eternal life, then this life on earth is all there is. Yet they had no problem with snuffing it out. HMO Bioethics Board Denies Him Important Procedures Without Informing Me: Because the above procedures (PEG feeding tube and removing fluid from around my friend's lung) were NOT done, all bets were off in regard to limiting dialysis to a trial period as far as I was concerned. Failure to perform some of the procedures was setting him up to fail. I did not find out until some time later that those procedures had been denied by the HMO Bioethics Board. In some cases, as early as March. Yet I had not been informed of this as POA. It was not until the next November that I discovered (from a doctor with some candor) that they had never removed the fluid from around his lung, and that this was why. (That might also explain their failure to provide his records that included any of this time period. But I have other evidence of this and other aspects.) Weaning off the Ventilator - Twice: By 1 April 2023, my friend began to tolerate being weaned off the ventilator. By about 4 April, he could respond to questions by moving his legs on command. This provided two communication modes, and it looked like more may develop. I asked him one of the previous questions again a few times, and got a similar answer. I would have asked him more at this later time, but one of the doctors said it could tax him too much. Yet at the same time, the doctor was saying he was not responsive. That begs the question of how a question can be taxing if a patient supposedly is not responsive? (But the fact is that he was responsive, and his response latency was improving.) Several days later, my friend began bleeding in his throat by where the nose-routed feeding tube was in contact with it. After three or four more days, this gradually worked its way down lower, until it impacted his breathing. He then had to go back on a ventilator. Fortunately, he did not have to remain on the ventilator for long. The bleeding stopped after a few days, and by about the end of the month, he was able to tolerate being off of the ventilator again. I wondered if his second use of the ventilator might have been avoided if the HMO had implented the PEG feeding tube, since this would have removed the source of irritation in his throat. Rescuing a Friend from an HMO "Death Panel" (And Yes, Death Panels are REAL!) Ever since the term "Death Panel" was used in a 2009 Congressional debate about "Obamacare" legislation, there has been controversy about whether or not death panels became a reality. They did indeed become a reality (I have first hand knowledge of this), but in a different way than what was anticipated back then. In the 2009 debate, the term was used in the context of government bureaucrats deciding which disabled or critically ill patients would or would not receive adequate care, including when denial of care would result in near term death. The death panel I encountered was not anything like this. It was instead a function of a "Bioethics Board" in my friend's HMO. Care was denied via the board acting as a corporate "Star Chamber" of sorts, instead of by government bureaucrats. This death panel was created within the "Managed Healthcare" framework of a so-called Health Maintenance Organization (HMO). So the death panel I encountered was not of the political origin that was envisioned during the circa 2009 political debates. It was instead a function of privatized medical care and insurance trying to aviod using life sustaining resources on certain patients. It is administered by a private corporation, not the government. The Death Panel (unofficial name) I encountered was very real, and I have its unilateral April 2023 written decree of death for my friend (via withheld care) as evidence. I also have a follow up message from them that dictated when care would be withheld; and which acknowledged that, as his POA, I objected to their withholding said care. In that message, the Board's stated, written intent was that their decision would result in my friend's death. So in my experience (summarized below), the death panel was again a role that the "Bioethics Board" of the hospital or HMO took on; in this case, at a time when the organization did NOT want to expend a certain scope of resources on a patient. Once the Board had their sights on a patient (in this case, my friend in 2023), care was denied to him, often behind the scenes at first (as in March 2023), in that withholding of care was not timely disclosed. In the case of my friend, I was not even informed that the Bioethics Board was involved in some of these matters until weeks and months (8 months in the case of one procedure) later. If a patient survives this initial stage, as my friend did, the Board has a formal meeting and DECREES that certain aspects of care will openly be DENIED to the patient, with the STATED INTENT that this will result in the DEATH of the patient. (Thus, the accurate term "Death Panel".) I first got wind of the Death Panel on about 13 April 2023, during a heated exchange over the phone with one of the doctors who made an unsolicited call to my house. He was wanting to both impose a DNR and end my friend's dialysis. When I calmly and cordially would not agree to these (based on my friend's indicated preferences), the doctor quickly got mad and started yelling over the phone, not too unlike a few previous callers. However, this doctor really lost it, and declared that he was going to unilaterally impose a DNR over my objection as POA. I obviously disagreed and argued with him about that. Then, when this angry doctor became more upset during the argument, he started bragging about things that the Bioethics Board had been doing behind the scenes. This was my first introduction to the existence of the Bioethics Board, and its involvement. The most notable thing he bragged about was that it was the Bioethics Board which had denied my friend a PEG (abdominal wall) feeding tube over two weeks earlier - shortly after my friend's attending physician had recommended a PEG tube. That physician had also obtained my approval for the tube (in the hearing of a witness) over two weeks earlier. Since that time, doctors and nurses had told me that the hospital just "had not gotten around" to the procedure yet. When in reality, the Board had already denied the procedure without informing me! That did not sound very ethical, yet the Board called itself a "Bioethics Board." The next thing the angry doctor did was proudly declare that the Bioethics Board was meeting the next day, and that they were going to overrule me as POA - and deny dialysis to my friend. From that point onward, I sought to make direct contact with the Bioethics Board. The Board did not meet the next day, but they did meet early the next week. When I finally reached someone who knew what was going on, I was told that I could indirectly submit material to support my position to the Board. I would never have learned this if I had not made several calls to push for answers. It was obvious that the hospital had no intention of informing me of what the Board was doing prior to my calls. (The above mentioned emotional outburst from the angry doctor was how I had learned of the Board's involvement.) One hospital person I spoke with even said that patient families or POA's rarely know what the Boiethics Board is up to until after the Board meets and makes a decision. This was very short notice for me to get an argument and related material together. And based on the what the Board said they had considered in their decision (see below) I was not convinced that they had received (or considered) everything I had sent. It was eventually possible to communicate directly with the head of the Board, but not until the evening before their meeting early the next week. The Panel's Death Decree: Early in the week of 16 April, 2023, the HMO Bioethics Board met and decreed (in writing) that they would OVERRULE me as POA, UNILATERALLY impose a DNR, and deprive my friend of dialysis; with the expressed intent that this would result in his DEATH. Prior to when they did this, I had been under the impression that it was illegal to overrule a POA, especially on something this significant. Perhaps it is illegal, but they didn't act like it was. They ruled this way, even though I had submitted material to them stating that my friend had unambiguously indicated that he DID want to prolong life in March 2023. I had even sent them documentation for how he had been asked twenty times about prolonging life, etc. The way the Board acted behind closed doors, the way the decision was written, and other aspects of the ordeal, reminded me of the 1983 film "The Star Chamber", except the "crime" for which the HMO "Star Chamber" pronounced death was simply being elderly and sick at the same time. The Panel Undermines Attempts to Transfer My Friend: The Board allowed a brief time to try to transfer my friend to another hospital, but they provided NO assistance at all in doing this (when regulations appear to indicate that they should assist in this). And I later found that my efforts to get him transferred had even been undermined. Sometimes, I was undermined by the HMO taking several days to send my friend's records, which kept prospective facilities fron timely taking it into consideration. The HMO also would not give me the records from his 2023 hospitalization, which made it impossible for me to provide records to a hospital when the HMO's delay was excessive. Another problem was that one hospital thought the HMO's records were (to paraphrase that hospital's description) a sock drawer of contradiction. (Perhaps yet another reason why the HMO did not provide me with records from that time.) An even bigger problem was that HMO doctors would not speak with other hospitals, while the other hospitals said that they could not even start a transfer unless it was initiated by a doctor. I had also tried to relocate my friend to various sub-acute skilled nursing facilities (including some that may have been private pay under the circumstances), but that was also undermined, usually by a hospital case manager calling the facilities to discourage them from taking him. (Some of facilities informed me that this is what happened.) The case manager who did this was not his usual case manager. There were other times when the same new case manager claimed that a given facility had told her that they would not take my friend. However, when I called the facility myself, the facility said they had not even heard from anyone at the HMO, and that they generally would need his records to make a decision. One facility even told me it was likely that they would take him if they could get his records and admit him while a bed was still open, but then the new HMO case manager delayed sending his records until it was too late. In a single day, this new case manager shot down the primary facility and two backups. And she shot down more on other days. This and other circumstances gave me the impression that the new case manager may have been a "fixer", whose purpose was to hinder my friend's transfer. I was blindsided by all of this interference, and it appeared that the HMO Bioethics Board had not been sincere when they said that my friend could be transferred. On a number of other occasions, when it looked like I had something arranged, the HMO hospital would move the goal posts, communicate things that discouraged people at the facilities, withdraw existing authorizations (some facilities told me that the HMO also did this), and/or increasingly say that more aspects had to be private pay. All of this seemed unethical to say the least, so it seemed ironic that a "Bioethics" Board appeared to be behind it. A private pay situation was an issue not so much for financial reasons (my friend's money was HIS money), but it complicated or undermined things administratively, in that it was difficult or impossible to get my friend admitted to certain facilities, or scheduled for certain procedures, on a private pay basis. Especially on short notice. After the above hindrances became apparent, I (in parallel) began formalizing documentation for the purpose of locating and hiring an attorney who would seek a Court Order to keep the HMO from doing in my friend, then contacted a few law firms. This increased my work load even more. Unfortunately, it seemed that preventing harm was not what the law firms were into. They were oriented toward going after offending parties after harm had been done. That would not do my friend any good, since the harm (if it was allowed to happen) would result in his death. Also, some avenues to getting a court order seemed to involve filing a claim, then seeking an injunction related to the claim. That seemed complicated. Needless to say, having to do so many things in parallel in April and May 2023, with the life or death of my friend hanging in the balance, was very stressful. This ultimately exacerbated my own medical condition to such an extent that major aspects would persist clear up to when this was written in mid 2024. But even worse for my friend, trying to find a place to transfer him to was so labor intensive that it was nearly impossible to visit him until the matter was resolved. The Panel's Specific Death Sentence: A couple of weeks after the "Bioethics" Board's mid April death decree (and ironically, on my friend's birthday), the Board declared (in writing) that they would overrule me as POA, that my friend's dialysis would end in two days, and that he would experience a "natural dying process". Specifically, low points of the written communication included the following: "...so that you will have written confirmation, the medical team intends for [patient's name] HD [hemodialysis] session on [date] to be his final session..." "..our intent will be to maintain patients's [imposed] DNR status, discontinue HD, and allow a natural dying process to occur..." "Death due to renal failure is not immediate, so it is expected that [patient name] will persist for several days or more once HD is discontinued." And over my written and verbal objections as my friend's POA, they stopped his dialysis two days later. The Board's response to each written objection was to only write the reply: "Your objection is noted." Maybe this is why "HMO" also works as an acronym for "High Mortality Organization"! After several days without dialysis, my friend had to go on a ventilator AGAIN, and he was never able to get off of it after that. (However, the HMO Bioethtics Board's then undisclosed prohibition on removing fluid from around his lung was also a factor in this. Their failure to ever remove the fluid, and the Board's role in that, was not disclosed until months later, in November.) The fact that my friend would require a ventilator yet again reduced the range of facilities that he could be transferred to. This further reduced his options. The Rescue: At this point, there were few options left. It had taken weeks to try and find a different facility for my friend. But all attempts had failed, mostly because (based on feedback from a few facilities) my efforts had been undermined, usually by the new case manager, plus a couple of others at the HMO who had withdrawn existing authorizations. But finally, one of the independent congregate homes (one that the HMO had previously discouraged from taking him) decided to accept him. Then, when the head of the Bioethics Board was on vacation, my friend was physically "rescued" from the HMO hospital in May, 2023, by having an ambulance (private pay to the tune of $4k) move him 70 miles - to a sub-acute care congregate home in another county. (The HMO may have been in the wrong in insisting that this transfer be private pay, since they later had to pay for it.) His discharge from the HMO hospital was not an AMA discharge, partly because there was no "medical advice" to go against when the HMO's stated intent was to bring about the end of his life. My friend's new location was closer to where I lived (making it more practical to visit him), and it was in another jurisdiction, where his rights as a resident of the new county could presumably be asserted in order to keep the HMO from clawing him back to their hospital in the original county. The literal recurring life and death nature of all of this, and the times my efforts to transfer my friend had been undermined by the HMO, had caused (and was still causing) unbearable stress. This is partly because it seemed that failing to rescue my friend from his HMO, even if I did everything I could, would be the same as letting him down or violating his trust. A Lot of Damage Had Been Done Before My Friend's Rescue: Once my friend was in the congregate home (and thus closer to my place), I visited him there almost every day. The DNR was removed, and dialysis was ordered by his attending physician. However, things were about to get worse before they got better. A lot of harm had been done to him during the week that the HMO had deprived him of dialysis, and it would be at least two days before a local dialysis clinic could work him in on 15 May. The first new problem was that the congregate home failed to get him to his first (private pay) dialysis session on time, then the dialysis clinic could not work him in. The home did not tell me about this until I called them to check status. The home also did not tell his attending physician about their failure to get my friend to his first dialysis session, so I told him, and he went ballistic about the home's failure to do this, because he knew how long the HMO had deprived my friend of dialysis. (For background: Once a transfer from the HMO had been arranged a couple of days earlier, the HMO had provided one brief dialysis session to stabilize my friend for transport, but it wasn't enough dialysis to normalize his tests, or to even partially correct for all that had gone wrong during a whole week without dialysis.) The same day, on the evening before he was to have what would have been his second dialysis session, he pulled the feeding tube out of his nose. He was then sent to the nearest HMO hospital to get another one put in, but they kept him there almost all night before getting around to it. No one seemed to know where my friend was at the hospital, and I was literally up all night trying to locate him and learn his status. The congregate home had not kept tabs on his situation very well. Instead, they were trying to use the occasion to have the hospital implement a PEG feeding tube before they sent him back. Knowing what I then knew about the HMO Bioethics Board's role in denying him a PEG tube in late March, I told the congregate home that trying to force the issue of a PEG tube with the HMO during the current hospitalization was very ill-advised. Ensuring that he made his dialysis appointment (which was then only hours away) was far more important. It was about 5 a.m. before I reached someone at the hospital who knew where my friend was. At that time, I informed them of his dialysis appointment that morning, and they already seemed to know. They were just then putting in a conventional feeding tube that was routed through his nose, like the one he had before. They said he was not actually admitted to the hospital that night. The hospital said that he would be picked up by their medical transport at 7:30 that morning. This was cutting it close for his dialysis appointment, but it could barely work if everything happened on time. I asked them if they could arrange an earlier transport, and they said they could not. Then, even though the HMO hospital knew that his (private pay) dialysis appointment was early in the morning, their transport to take him back to the congregate home was not even close to being on time. It was over an hour late, and he was not even picked up until after the time of his dialysis appointment. (And they would not instead take him directly to the dialysis clinic to compensate for that.) That made two missed dialysis sessions. Worse, the HMO hospital would not do dialysis to compensate for keeping him so long that he would miss his existing dialysis appointment. And worse still, the HMO had sent him back to the congregate home in questionable condition, and he was unstable by later that morning. It began to appear that all had been lost. My Own Health Crashes During the Stress of Recurring Imposed Life & Death Situations: Ultimately, my own health failed dramatically over a period of only a couple of hours, just as it appeared that all had been lost on the morning of Tuesday, 16 May, 2023. My doctor said that I had completely depleted my reserves, and had become exhausted in the fullest sense of the word. The potential outcomes my doctor warned about (for failing to get enough rest from then on) were, and still are, scary. (This is part of why I could not later push with the limited vigor I normally would when trying to get to the 2024 eclipse after the long Frontier Internet and phone outage.) The Most Important Parts of My Friend's Rescue Happened While I was Too Ill to Act: I have mentioned prayer in previous eclipse journals, and it applies here as well. This is because, just as I became temporarily incapacitated myself from all of the stress and short notice sleep deprivation, and while I was so spent that I could do nothing but lay in bed and pray - that was the time that the most important aspects of my friend's rescue happened. At the very time when I had no power to do anything at all, and during the very hours I was in a helpless state, many beneficial things that were beyond my control happened: One of the most important aspects of making his rescue effective was his admission to a NON-HMO hospital - under conditions where the HMO had to pay for everything, which (due to what the HMO Board, etc., had done) is something that I had not even considered as a possibility. But things would get worse before they got better. Because by this time, a lot of damage had been done to my friend due to his HMO denying him dialysis for a week: On 16 May, 2023, the local HMO hospital had not sent my friend back to the congregate home until after the time of his private pay ($600 per session) dialysis appointment that morning. This caused him to miss that appointment. But due to the urgency of his situation, the clinic said they could work him if he could get there by an hour later, but then the congregate home claimed that transport could not be arranged for that in time. (Since he was on a ventilator, ordinary medical transport would have been inadequate.) So his dialysis was rescheduled for early that afternoon. When a suitably equipped medical transport came to the congregate home to take my friend to the dialysis clinic, the people providing the transport found that he was too unstable to go to a dialysis clinic, and said that he instead had to be taken to the NEAREST hospital right away. This was less than four hours after the HMO hospital had sent him back to the congregate home! As it turned out, the nearest hospital was NOT with his HMO. After he was admitted, it became obvious that this hospital had a completely different (and better) attitude than the HMO. This non-HMO hospital was success oriented. His HMO mildly tried to claw him back to the hospital in the other county (almost 70 miles away), but I did not approve their taking him back, and I asserted his rights as a new resident of Los Angeles County (by virtue of his being in the northwest Los Angeles area Congregate Home prior to the current hospitalization), and the HMO relented. And after a few close calls over the first two days at this new success oriented, non-HMO hospital, his condition turned around within two weeks. He also was never under a DNR at this hospital. One important difference from the HMO is that the success oriented non-HMO hospital gave him enough dialysis to eventually bring his test results into the normal range; while the HMO (when it was providing any dialysis at all) was sometimes only doing it enough (at times only twice a week) to get his numbers down to about twice as high as high normal values at the end of a session. Among other things, it was also found that my friend had developed a large, open pressure sore during his stay at the HMO hospital. It was huge, being the size of a business card, and it was not expected to heal very quickly. When I recovered enough to be able to take a taxi to the new hospital, and they learned of the circumstances that brought him there, they said he was the first patient they ever had there who had been saved from the decree of a Bioethics Board (or, in non-medical terms, a death panel). Meanwhile, his condition improved at this new success oriented hospital. The hospital was a more positive environment than the HMO hospital had been, and it was closer. For this reason, I visited once or twice a week, though I had to take a taxi due to the exhaustion that had set in on 16 May. Another good thing (though a far lesser thing by comparison) about the success oriented hospital was that their cafeteria had good food at a very reasonable price, and the cafeteria hours were less limited than what I'd recently seen at other hospitals. He Improves Enough for Discharge to a Skilled Nursing Facility with In-House Dialysis: My friend started opening his eyes and mouthing words within two more weeks, and he was discharged to a sub-acute skilled nursing facility another couple of weeks after that. I really wanted him in a facility with in-house dialysis (to spare him the stress of being transported for every dialysis session), and this is what was ultimately arranged for him. In addition to the in-house dialysis, the facility used a bed with an air mattress in which different cells would increase and decrease pressure, in order to help with his current pressure sore(s) and reduce the risk of his developing more of them. He was intermittently and audibly speaking by not much more than two weeks after he was admitted to the skilled nursing facility. Because he was talking past his ventilator, he could not speak very loud, and it did not sound like his usual voice. The facility tried a speech enabled ventilator attachment a couple of times, but he usually seemed to do better without it. Most of the time, he'd say "Hi" when he noticed I was in the room, then say "Bye" when I left. When he said "Hi", he often took my hand, looked me in the eye, and squoze my hand tightly, while also moving his hand up and down a little. At other times, he most often asked what kind of place he was in, and less often, where it was. He did not seem to remember the answer(s) by about a week later, and would ask again. Since he was talking past the ventilator, he did not talk in long sentences. Instead, each greeting, question, or comment from him was usually limited to what he could say in one or two breaths. The air conditioner there was loud, so he sometimes had to repeat what he said before I could hear him. In general, he only spoke between 3 and 6 phrases to me throughout any given visit. This was a radical improvement over the previous situation where the HMO had said he was not even responsive, when in fact he was responsive even back then. But now, after success oriented treatment, he was responsive in more conventional ways. However, one of the remaining issues, which could possibly be expected under the circumstances, was that he was not wakeful for very long on any given day. At best, maybe an hour or two in total per day that I could observe. He had begun to exhibit this trend shortly before he was hospitalized at the HMO hospital back in February, though his wakeful time was then still up to several hours per day. He seemed most likely to speak about half an hour after he was turned and cleaned by a nurse in the late afternoon or early evening. I usually went out on the facility's roof patio to have the meal I brought along while the turning and cleaning was happening. I also waited that long to eat because I could not spend long on the roof patio while it was in full sunlight. The roof patio was noisy due to the surrounding roof air conditioners, but was otherwise a reasonably comfortable area. The facility did not have a cafeteria, but there was a break room for the employees only. My Friend Begins Regaining Kidney Function at the Skilled Nursing Facility: Since the sub-acute skilled nursing facility had in-house dialysis, my friend did not have to be moved to another facility for each dialysis session. This spared him the stress of being transported for every session, not to mention the logistics of repeatedly transporting a person who is on a ventilator. (A ventilator that may not have even been needed if the HMO Death Panel had not withheld dialysis for a whole week before it was possible to transfer him in mid May 2023.) In time, he began to regain kidney function, and he did not require dialysis as often by the end of the summer. I was informed that he was producing over a liter of urine some days, and that his related test results stayed in the normal range for longer after each dialysis session. I visited him several times over the first half of the summer, but still had to take a taxi because I continued to be too exhausted to drive to the nursing facility. (Also, driving in downtown Los Angeles wasn't my cup of tea even before that time.) I prayed with him and read to him (usually from his Navy books) the first time he became wakeful on each visit, or sometimes when it appeared that he may soon become wakeful. In the latter case, this usually brought him around in a more obvious way after several minutes. On one occasion, I brought some badges from his dance club and some other things, and told him what they were as he touched them. This seemed to be meaningful to him in a generic sense. He also smiled when I played classical music on the radio for him. Most music he had at his condo was classical. Before long, he became more responsive to things he saw, so I brought his iPad, which had the most recent photos he had taken on it. He responded to these, and seemed to enjoy seeing them. I also put some of his older hard copy photo prints in a notebook, and showed him those as well. Concurrent with this, the sheer amount of paperwork (hundreds of pages, including admitting, approvals, applications, and the HMO-related complaints and appeals of the previous winter and spring), and the communications required to see to his affairs (and keep him out of the HMO's clutches) was daunting. The humanity of the person could become lost in all the work. Ironically, this work for him limited how often I had the stamina to visit him in a hospital or nursing facility. With few exceptions, staff had not spent much time interacting with him, especially at the HMO, where they'd said he was not even capable of being interacted with. Exceptions were that the success oriented non-HMO hospital, and some nurses at the skilled nursing facility, had taken time to solicit responses from him (including to hearing his name) and to note how he responded. I tried to visit him often enough to keep his responsiveness close enough to the surface that he did not have to be slowly brought out of "Never-Never Land" during each visit. But relatively frequent visits were only possible through July, due mostly to fatigue and increased paperwork. I hoped he'd improve enough to be wheeled outside onto the nursing facility's roof patio that was just outside his room, so he could be in the sun like he preferred. But he had a long way to go before even that would be possible. Much of the time, he'd only been regaining ground he had lost in the rapid decline from when the HMO had deprived him of dialysis in May. I wondered how much better his condition might have been if the HMO had not harmed him in that way. Over the rest of the summer, he remained at the sub-acute skilled nursing facility. He was not under a DNR there. And during that summer, he was safely out of his HMO's clutches. Bureaucracy Puts My Friend in Harm's Way Again: Due to the situation with his HMO, I sought to get him out of his HMO well before the normal Medicare Open Enrollment period. He qualified for Medicare "Special Help", which should have made it possible to switch providers by the next quarter. This could make it possible to get him out of his HMO, and into regular Medicare with a supplement, as soon as 1 October, 2023. However, in late July, the State level services fouled up and enrolled him in the same HMO, when I had specified something entirely different for him. I had made the selection within a week of when the State provided the forms, so I was timely. But the worker for the State had apparently lost the POA, etc., documents that were provided with his application, and she refused to recognize me as his representative so I could reverse their error. The worker offered no timely solution. This ultimately contributed to his death, by overloading me with more work and making it impossible to get him out of his HMO in time. I normally would not mention such details, but there were many irregularities in the HMO and in this State matter, and there was no official mechanism to address it. I wondered how many other patients or advocates went through something similar, or how many other patients didn't survive something similar. The only agency I thought was really good was Medicare. They were amazing (in a good way) by comparison. And the success oriented hospital in the northwest part of L.A. was amazing as well. But I can't mention its name because I have to keep certain things vague for HIPAA reasons. The HMO Gets Their Hooks in My Friend Again, with Fatal Results: In mid September 2023, my friend had a crisis and was taken from the skilled nursing facility to the nearest hospital, which was a non-HMO hospital. I visited him there and spoke with the doctors and other personnel. When I saw him, he again indicated that he wanted to prolong life, though in a less convincing way than he had the previous March. I also did not ask him about it as many times as I had the previous spring. He was in decline, and did not have much quality of life to look forward to. But if he wanted to prolong, I would back him up for as long as doing so was feasible for him. I had an in-person meeting with the Palliative team at the non-HMO hospital, and they thought it was reasonable to pull him through in this hospitalization, including in regard to dialysis. It looked like he was not far from weaning off of it, so only a few more sessions may have been needed. But other indicators made it appear that he could be getting close to running out of cycles. However, behind the scenes, the HMO was pressuring the hospital to transfer him to one of their hospitals in LA County. (The pressure they brought to bear, as related by the non-HMO hospital, was quite dramatic.) And the HMO's efforts to transfer my friend were not all out in the open. For example, when people from the non-HMO hospital called me early the next week, they said my friend was being taken back to the nursing facility (and I think they really thought that this was the case), but it turned out that his HMO instead had the ambulance take him to their own hospital. At this point, his HMO had their hooks in him again. They again imposed a DNR and deprived him of dialysis, using the antiquated Bioethics Board ruling of the previous April as justification. One doctor at the HMO hospital made it clear that the HMO intended to finish what it started the previous spring, without any acknowledgement of what had happened over the summer. He said that the hospital was going to make (to paraphrase his words): "what should have happened months ago" (namely, death), happen to my friend in the near term. My friend's dialysis catheter was being changed by the non-HMO hospital at the time the HMO transferred him. (In that the catheter had been removed due to suspected infection, but it had not yet been replaced.) And once he was at the HMO hospital, the HMO refused to put in a catheter as a way to enforce their dialysis ban. And they again stated INTENT to end his life via withheld dialysis, regardless of my position on the matter (as I acted based on his preferences) as his POA. Because his transfer to the HMO hospital had happened without my consent (and apparently without the knowledge of some at the non-HMO hospital), I refused to sign the admission papers for the HMO hospital. I also refused to provide consent on the phone, telling them that I did not authorize the transfer. (Not sure how the HMO planned to bill Medicare for that, when there was no consent for his admission to their hospital.) And so, at a time when he was nearly weaned off of dialysis, his HMO deprived him of dialysis yet again, and he began to succumb to this (and to the undisclosed fluid that was still around his lung) over the next two and a half months. They soon transferred him back to the subacute skilled nursing facility - but without a dialysis catheter. The DNR was removed at the nursing facility. At that time, I could not think of any way to improve his situation. I still had brain fog and fatigue from when my health had crashed from exhaution the previous May (which is why I had used a taxi for every trip to the nursing facility or hospital). And it was worse while I had apathy from bereavement over Willma Alcocer, who had passed away only weeks before, in late August 2023. In spite of continuing to pray about my friend's situation, all of this seemed to adversely impact my ability to think of options, and the notion of implementing a dialysis catheter as a private pay operation at a non-HMO hospital did not even occur to me while my friend was still on the planet. I had thought of this sort of thing (and repeatedly attempted it) during the previous April and May, and spent many days arranging it over and over again, only to be undermined by the HMO almost every time except the final time. But I was not able to think of such options (or contemplate other things that would be likely to result in recurring adversarial situations with large corporations such as the HMO) while I had such severe fatigue, brain fog, and apathy that fall. I was just too spent. In late November, my friend was admitted to a different HMO hospital, mainly for high BUN and other abnormal tests. I approved his November admission there by phone, CONTINGENT on his getting dialysis if he needed it. But they re-imposed a DNR and deprived him of dialysis anyway. Inconsistencies at the HMO Hospital: On 25 November, a doctor at the HMO hospital called and claimed that my friend was in complete kidney failure, that he was "not making any urine", that his veins and arteries were leaking fluid, and that he had a few other end stage symptoms. He thought that my friend could pass away as soon as that night or the next day. This doctor thought that heart failure or pulmonary edema were what would take him down, but he didn't know which one would get him first. Other than when my friend was profoundly harmed to the extent that he nearly died after the HMO Death Panel withheld dialysis the previous May, this was the first time that the conditions for not prolonging life on his Advance Directive had been met. It could really be said that this was the first time the conditions had ever been met, because his crisis in May was caused by the Death Panel withholding care. Developments after that indicated that the scope of his kidney function loss at the time was not entirely irreversible. Namely, his Advance Directive said he did not want to proling life if: "I have an incurable and irreversible condition that will result in my death within a relatively short time." And, even in light of his subsequent indications that he wanted to prolong life: Based on what the doctor said, and given that the HMO was refusing dialysis even though he'd nearly weaned off of it in September, there was probably no additional intervention that would make much difference for him. Ever since the HMO had consistently denied dialysis to my friend (starting in September, 2023), the time between his ER or hospital visits began to get shorter. At first, he did not need to go for several weeks; but then eventually, he had to go after only a couple of weeks. Ultimately, this became only one week. Each time this happened, he was a little worse than before, and he did not recover as much after each ER visit. It reminded me of skipping a rock on a pond, where the skips off the water get closer and closer together until the rock loses momentum and sinks. Up until this hospitalization, my friend remained aware of his surroundings when awake, and he responded to hearing his name. That is, except for when he was in an HMO hospital. (Maybe he was also responsive in the hospital, but the HMO just would not acknowledge it.) I was too ill to visit and see for myself. I wasn't even able to get dressed on some days during this time period. What the HMO doctor said on 25 Nov. informed my decisions of that day, mainly in regard to the DNR and escalation of certain types of care. In recent months, the HMO had always put a DNR on my friend (over my objection) whenever he was in one of their facilities. But based on the stated proximity of death, I did not oppose the DNR that day, though I obviously did not request it either. (Opposing the DNR on that occasion would not have made any difference anyway, since the HMO had repeatedly imposed DNR's over my objection.) However, I later found that the statement about complete kidney failure was not true at all. The HMO had exaggerated his condition, possibly to create the impression that this was his last rodeo. And, since the HMO had long withheld certain types of care, it could very well become just that. This discrepancy might explain something odd that had happened during the 25 November call. Unlike the cold way most HMO doctors had come across, the doctor who called that day sounded like he was about to cry at the end of the call, even though I had been able to keep my composure during that call. (Difficult to do under stress, after the death of Willma Alcocer in late August.) The same doctor had also informed me that the Bioethics Board was the party that had prevented removing fluid from around my friend's lung the previous spring. This was the first time I was made aware of this, even though it was eight months after the fact! Given this doctor's candor on that, I wondered if he might have sounded like he was about to cry because he may have violated his conscience when he exaggerated my friend's ailments. During this hospitalization, the HMO wanted to take my friend off of the ventilator, but since they had refused to remove the recently disclosed (yet long preexisting) fluid from around his lung, I would not let them take him off of it. Pulmonary issues had been a sore point with him ever since the careless doctor had panicked him the previous March. A day or two later, one of the more aggressive HMO palliative care people (who I had not even engaged beyond a preliminary consulting role) misrepresented part of a conversation that she'd stretched out to 45 minutes in attempts to pressure me, and she told a doctor to reduce his oxygen without the doctor discussing it first. This palliative person left the impression that she wanted to push my friend off the planet. I cynically wondered if she was someone who would push an elderly person down a flight of stairs if she thought she could get away with it. I wondered the same about several others in the HMO who also seemed to want to push my friend off the planet. This palliative person also did not even know my friend's saturation numbers, yet was expressing a number of medical opinions, when it was obvious that her medical knowledge was very limited. For example, she said the 30 percent oxygen he was on was "almost the same" as room air, when in fact, room air is 21 percent oxygen, and I'd heard that 30 percent oxygen was the equivalent of at least a 2 liter per minute setting, with each liter corresponding to 4 percent more oxygen versus room air. I did not learn of the change in my friend's oxygen until I spoke with a doctor about 24 hours later, on 29 November. At that time, the doctor thought he was terminal, but she did not think that he would pass away very soon, indicating that it could be several days to a week or more. She also said he was only then beginning to have severe kidney failure, rather than (supposedly) having been in complete kidney failure since the previous Saturday. This was when I realized that my friend's condition had been exaggerated in the Saturday phone call, though further discussion revealed that most other things that the doctor had said about his condition appeared to be true. His Last Rodeo: However, my friend unexpectedly passed away from heart failure less than eight hours later. He passed away in the late night of 29 November, 2023. This was an unexpected time, but it was probably a better and faster way to go, assuming that he was not experiencing air hunger before that time. But the palliative people had dropped the ball concerning having someone with him, and he died alone. I know this because the doctor who informed me that he passed away said that he had been "found" in a deceased (and cold) condition at a certain time, as opposed to anyone witnessing his death, or even knowing the exact time of his death for that matter. Another anomaly is that the time of death on his death certificate is not congruent with what I was told that night, being 10 minutes later than the time I was told that he was found deceased (and cold). In a way, I felt so relieved for both of us that I did not even feel his death (much) for a while. However, I was still experiencing so much lingering grief over the late August death of Willma Alcocer (details in the next chapter) that it was hard to feel much if anything else. Regarding my friend being alone in his last hour on earth, I can only hope that he was in a fog where he could not perceive his surroundings, nor care if he could, much like the fog I was in when I almost bought the farm in September, 2019. The fact that my friend lived 2.5 months without any dialysis at all shows how close he had come to being successfully weaned off of it. But the HMO was so fixated on getting their way and depriving him of any further dialysis that he had no opportunity to finish safely being weaned off of it. The bottom line: DON'T use an HMO if you want to SURVIVE such a situation! And, don't use an HMO if you want to keep your POA from being run through the wringer while advocating for you. (And avoid using certain banks, etc., for the same reason.) This is also why, for at least some, it may be best to avoid a DNR (at least when an HMO does not impose one over objections). A DNR can prevent eligibility for certain treatments (for example, dialysis at various facilities in my friend's case), and it can lead to reduced quality of care. The latter is exemplified by the fact that my friend was not even "found deceased" after he was "cold". This implies that the nurse station was not even monitoring his vital signs, since a person does not become "cold" until some time after their death. Some hospitals claimed that a DNR would not impact quality of care, but the real world results noted above would indicate otherwise! My friend might not have lasted even another year if he'd received success oriented treatment all along, but there is no way to be sure. Regardless, he likely would have had better quality of life in the time he had, and his advocate would have been spared prolonged strife and conention (and related stress) - IF his health care had not been provided through an HMO - in what proved to be "Medicare DISadvantage" in his case. (Otherwise known as Medicare Part C.) The Fog that I Hope My Friend May Have Experienced in His Final Hours: On a side note, for any who are curious about what the "fog" was like when I almost bought the farm from colon issues in 2019, the short 5-minute film "Dandelion" (also called "DANDELION va") is the closest thing I've found to it, and it also hints at what it was like to be preoccupied with breathing (though not in much distress from it) during some of the time I had COVID from late 2020 through early 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMfEkmtyqmY 200618, by Antonio Maria Da Silva AMDSFILMS. (The same author also made a 2-hour mashup movie called "Dinosaur Hunters".) The fog was not an out of body thing. I also did not "see" anything like the animals or the flying whales and viruses that are in the film. It was more like I was not seeing anything at all. But it did almost seem like another place. A place that I didn't want to leave, because the fog was like a comforting blanket that dulled surgical level abdominal pain from a big lump in the left of my abdomen that was related to weeks of colon paralysis. The fog was more of an inability to perceive much if anything beyond the edge of my bed, and it made me not care about anything, including the possibility of dying. (That was why I hoped my friend may have experienced a similar kind of fog at the end. Because then, he would neither know or care that he was alone.) I was not on any drug at the time. Not even pain killers, since they could have made the paralysis worse. But as is implied starting at the 3:59 mark in the Dandelion film (where the lady says "I must breathe...I can breathe for real", I had to decide to leave the relative comfort of the fog and come back to the real world. It took about a day and a half to come out of it, and that was when I began to recover from the paralysis. The film was a way to remember the fog without remembering the extreme abdominal pain. There is NO Apparent Government Oversight of HMO Death Panels: It seems odd that many states in the USA (and even some entire nations) have gone to great lengths to phase out the death penalty for even the most serious crimes, while at the same time, such states and nations seemingly make it easy for corporations (HMO's) to end the lives of hospital patients via Death Panels, etc. Such corporations act as though they feel they can secretly withhold care from a hospital patient to the extent that the patient becomes destabilized, then proceed to end that patient's life with impunity. All when such a patient's only "crime" is being old, ill, and/or helpless. There does not appear to be any oversight of those who direct or implement this deadly practice. There also does not seem to be any government authority that a patient advocate can directly appeal to on behalf of a hospitalized friend or family member, or that can act fast enough to prevent death by death panel. Who can say how many people have died this way in recent years. Thousands? Perhaps even millions? Perhaps even a relative of someone who is reading this? Blindsided by More Problems, Postmortem: After my elderly friend passed away in November 2023, the problems continued. For example, the previously purchased "prearranged" funeral plan he had was not so prearranged. It turned out that the burial plots he had were incompatible with the full casket burial that had been arranged. When his arrangements were made and paid for in April 2023, the cemetery had represented, in writing, that the plots were compatible with the full casket burial prearrangements that were being made. (The process had started months before, but their sales person was slow to answer the few questions I had, and kept making paperwork errors. Also in April, events at the HMO prevented my having time or energy to go to the cemetery in person to make his prearrangements.) But then the cemetery did not even disclose that there was a problem until NINE DAYS postmortem. And then they would not work toward a reasonable solution after they had belatedly disclosed the problem. They said: It was either cremate him or buy a larger plot for a small fortune. Since it was a little late to ask him about cremation, and because his funds could be inaccessible for some time after he passed away (and because I did not then know if Medi-Cal would have a claim on said funds), I had to file a complaint against the cemetery with the State. (I also prayed, as with other difficulties.) The solution was that the cemetery provided a full size burial plot at THEIR expense. Unfortunately, all of this led to a long delay in his burial (and his death certificate). And he was not interred until 23 January, 2024. Almost two months after he passed away. The cemetery is not named here because the solution was acceptable in terms of what I thought he would have wanted, even though (for me) the matter still resulted in stress, anguish, and a lot of lost time. Several months later, the State sent me a letter indicating that they had conducted an investigation, issued the cemetery a warning letter for displayed unprofessional conduct (by misrepresenting the size of my friend's grave space), and closed the case. Until then, I had not known an investigation had followed when the cemetery had provided the adequately sized burial space at their expense. Over the previous three years, it had been necessary to file more complaints on behalf of my friend than the sum of all complaints that I'd had to file on my own behalf in my entire lifetime. Some of the organizations seemed to act the way they did because of his age. Others (such as his bank, some in the call center at his credit card company, and a Case Manager at the Pomona area rehab facility) just seemed to enjoy jerking people around. Others (such as the HMO Bioethics Board) seemed motivated by money or control issues. In other words: Willful acts. Only rarely did the problems seem to arise from simple incompetence. Summary of Leading Causes of Problems in Managing My (Late) Friend's Affairs: Almost all of the numerous problems related to managing my friend's affairs arose from three major circumstances and about four lesser circumstances. Of these, the three most significant circumstances caused more than 2/3 of the increased work load and stress, and could have even contributed to my friend's death. These circumstances are summarized below. The THREE Most Significant Circumstances (His Bank, HMO, Advance Directive): His health plan was an HMO. An HMO with a Bioethics Board that presumed to act as a Death Panel when they did not want to utilize certain resources for a patient. This was the single biggest contributor to his perishing in 2023. Possibly an even a bigger contributor than his condition would have been if he had instead been treated in a success oriented way. The Death Panel is the main reason that all of this is covered in this "eclipse" web page. DEATH PANELS are REAL (tin foil does not apply here), and people have a right to know. His Advance Directive (from over a decade earlier) said DO NOT prolong life. HOWEVER, in his final year, he consistently indicated that he DID want to prolong life. BUT the HMO would not recognize it, saying that because had been declared incapacitated BEFORE he indicated a desire to prolong life, his indicated desire was NOT valid to them. (But the fact was that the nature of his incapacity had little if any effect on his ability to know what he wanted.) The HMO also did not recognize that he was responsive EVERY day I saw him. They just didn't make much EFFORT to solicit or identify responses from him. (But most facilities other than the HMO did solicit and identify responses.) Almost all of his funds were in Bank of America, and this bank would NOT fully honor his POA documents (when other institutions would). When this bank BELATEDLY, but only PARTIALLY, honored his POA documents (for only one account), they BACK DATED the related NOTARIZED DOCUMENTS, then represented the BACK DATED date as the ACTUAL date to Federal authorities, in order to dispose of my complaint against them. Even after more than three years, they still have not fully honored his POA documents or allowed access to all of his accounts. They never provided statements either, though they did later provide a way to check his balances by phone or online. The bank's long delays also caused a two month delay in my friend's cancer treatment, ultimately contributing to his death. If you choose the wrong BANK and later become incapacitated, that decision can KILL you! As far as harm to me personally, this BANK is tied at the top of the list. A great deal of evidence exists for what the HMO did to my friend. Unfortunately, it seemed that few if any agencies had mechanisms to keep the HMO from harming my friend in the ways described above, or to sanction the HMO for doing the same after the fact. My friend, who is the party that experienced the greatest harm at the hands of the HMO, did not survive the experience. If the HMO cannot be held accountable for what they did to my friend (and by extension, to me), there is nothing to keep them from doing the same thing to other patients and their advocates. The same would go for his bank, since the CFPB proved to be a paper tiger that accomplished nothing. FOUR of the Next Most Significant Circumstances (Banks, His Creditors, His Cemetery): My friend had a reverse mortgage, and the reverse mortgage company threatened to foreclose on his condo before it could be sold, even though they had no legal standing to foreclose until he was out of his condo for a continuous year for medical reasons. I sought legal counsel, which indicated: The company had delayed honoring his POA documents, and I had no contract with a party that had not honored his POA documents. I thus had no obligation to disclose his residency status to the company. Therefore, his condo was sold for him without informing the company until the reverse mortgage was paid off at closing. He was taken to the cleaners by a plumbing company a few months before his incapacity, and (for a problem the HOA should have fixed) the plumbers charged him so much that he got a line of credit with Synchrony to pay the bill. After he became incapacitated, Bank of America's MONTHS of delay in even partially honoring his POA documents resulted in the plumbing debt being delinquent and going to collection before his funds became accessible. Even before this, the company would not let me speak to anyone in the USA. Calls were apparently routed to one of two Asian call centers, and one call center would say the other was illegitimate, and that I should not fax documents to the other. The second call center said the same about the first. After months of this call center nonsense, I moved on to work on other things, then paid off my friend's debt in a lump sum after his condo was sold. The company's Asian call centers pulling customers into their apparent feuds with each other was unacceptable, and I canceled the credit card that I had with the same company. If I was later incapacitated, I would not want my POA to have to go through the same thing! My friend's cellular service and land line phone bills became delinquent while Bank of America had refused and delayed POA access to his funds for months, so his phone services were disconnected. After funds in one of his B of A accounts finally became accessible, I called the company to pay his bill and cancel his service, but I was always connected to a call center in Asia. And the call center said that I could NOT cancel his service. They said that when his bill was paid, they were going to retroactively charge him for the time AFTER his service was disconnected. They also would not connect me to anyone in the USA. They would not budge, so I did NOT pay his bill, as that was the only leverage against proposed illegitimate charges. After months of this nonsense, I filed a complaint with the Public Utilities Commission (PUC), and a Vice President of the phone company later resolved the issue. The Asian call center had prevented resolution of this for months. His cemetery sold a prearranged full casket burial for a burial space that was to small to be compatible, but had represented in writing that the burial space was compatible with full casket burial before arrangements were paid for. The problem was not disclosed until over a week postmortem. The cemetery ultimately provided a compatible burial space at their own expense to resolve this. But it was stressful and led to a two month delay in his interment. The cause appeared to be that a cemetery sales person who worked remotely had failed to actually look at cemetery records before she wrote that his burial space was large enough. And of course, after he passed away, it was too late to ask him if alternative arrangements compatible with a small burial space (such as cremation) would be acceptable to him. HARM Caused By B of A's Failure to Timely or Fully Honor My Friend's POA Documents: Was the SOLE cause of a TWO MONTH delay in my friend's cancer surgeries. Cancer growth during this delay required that most of his surgeries be more invasive, and his surgeries could not be grouped together as much as they could have been otherwise. One of the more invasive surgeries (required to do the delay) disfigured his face. Bank delay contributed to hastening my friend's death, as noted in chapters above. Prevented funds in his savings from being used for his prearranged funeral at his cemetery. Required that his condo be sold at least four months sooner than would have otherwise been necessary, in order to pay for his care and his fall 2021 bills. This caused the process to be rushed, prevented having an estate sale on site at his condo, and handling his stuff during the rush caused a lower back injury that is still a problem. By the time my freind's bank even partially honored his POA documents on ONE account in late March 2021 (so I could pay his bills), several of his bills had gone to collection. This added complexity that could not be resolved for months. Bank requiring people to wait in line outside in 2021 radically worsened the light sensitivity aspect of my medical condition (rapid sunburning) for years. (It is still a problem even now.) All of the time required for up to 30 contacts related to the bank delayed or prevented doing other things for my friend, and adequately keeping up with my own affairs. Prevented buying a house in an area I wanted to move to while home prices were still low. Imposed a lot of stress and caused extreme fatigue. And it still isn't over. HARM Caused by the HMO Death Panel (Bioethics Board): Only a partial list. Care withheld by the Board before the Board's death decree worsened my friend's condition. Board's withholding dialysis before my friend could be transferred (and the Board secretly withholding other care) caused my friend to go back on a ventilator for the rest of his life. The above, and his developing a huge pressure sore at the HMO, reduced quality of life. The April 2023 Death Panel ruling was used by the HMO to deny dialysis to my friend in September, after he had weaned off off it enough to be making over a liter of urine per day, and maintaining normal test results for a week or more after isolated dialysis sessions. One HMO doctor said the HMO was going to see to it that "what should have happened" in May (i.e. my friend's death) would happen in the near term. This denial of dialysis (and one minor procedure) caused my friend's DEATH ten weeks later, on 29 November 2023. Imposed so much urgent work (trying to find a place to transfer my friend) and caused so much stress that my heath failed due to exhaustion in May 2023. (Still haven't receovered.) Recurring effects from the Board's death decree put me under incredible stress for months. Prevented being able to leave town to visit family, etc., for the rest of my friend's life. Prevented bringing my dad from my brother's place to his house and caring for him there. Continued exhaustion was the sole reason I was unable to drive to the 2024 eclipse myself. As noted earlier in this journal, the contentious or otherwise difficult parties mentioned above are by no means all of the parties that had to be dealt with, and even dealing with the sum of these parties did not represent anywhere near all of the work that was required for my friend. Other difficult parties were, or were related to, the following: The property management company associated with my friend's HOA, his car insurance, the plumbing company that had taken him to the cleaners (Rapid Plumbing would not provide suitable evidence of work needed for my friend to receive a prevailing rate reimbursement from the HOA); the title company used in the sale of his condo, the CFPB, his substitute social worker in late March 2021, one Medi-Cal worker (she was only a problem from July 2023 until my friend's death, but this played a role in his death); HMO doctors who made unsolicited calls to pressure me without providing any status on my friend; some hospitals and facilities I contacted to see if my friend could be transferred to them (after the HMO's Death Panel sentence, and while the HMO was interfering in transfer inquiries, when it was the HMO that should have made these contacts, as they said doctors have to authorize transfers between hospitals); law firms I contacted to see if I could hire them to seek a court order to keep the HMO Bioethics Board from withholding care to the point of death (the firms apparently were not interested in preventing harm), and the congregate home he was in during part of May of 2023 (they effectively raised their rate $500 per day after he arrived there, yet they failed to get him to his first dialysis session). His CPA was problematic, but for a different reason: She was looking into if he had to file tax returns one year, but permanently dropped off the radar a few days before the filing deadline. Parties that were more or less neutral (but some still required time to deal with) included: His gas, electric, and water utilities; the county his condo was located in, his satellite TV, people who bought some of his stuff, a couple of medical facilities I contacted regarding transfer of my friend after the HMO Death Panel sentence; his primary care doctor at his HMO, one of his attending physicians at the first HMO hospital, one case manager and at least two nurses at the first HMO hospital; the company that negotiated his Medi-Cal application, one dialysis clinic in NW Los Angeles, most medical transport contacts, Medi-Cal (other than the one worker noted above), some aspects of Medicare, a California agency with which I filed a complaint against my friend's bank (a complaint about the bank back dating notarized documents, then reporting the false date to the CFPB to dispense with my CFPB complaint against them, after which they continued to deny POA access to my friend's savings, and the harm this caused to both of us); and the skilled nursing facility my friend was in from mid to late 2023. The most agreeable and/or fair parties included the following: The board and care home my friend was in from spring 2021 through early 2023, the care home placement coordinator, the success oriented hospital in NW Los Angeles (and just about everyone there), my friend's regular social worker at the HMO hospital in early 2021, most members of the palliative care team at a non-HMO hospital in Los Angeles, different aspects of Medicare, patient advocates I met along the way, his credit union, his realtor, his attorney, my neighbor (who loaded and unloaded the last load of my friend's stuff after my back went out); and the different bank that was used for the proceeds from his condo. It was an unexpected and wild three-year ride, in which I encountered hundreds of different people while representing and advocating for my friend. There are still some loose ends. But other than those caused by my (now late) friend's original bank, most remaining loose ends are still open because I have not had the alertness or energy to deal with them, or because I was unable to travel to address matters that can only be dealt with in person. Relative Priorities: Eclipses don't care if you see them, but friends do. All of the above obviously has nothing to do with eclipses (other than delying preparations for one), but it shows that I had responsibilities that were far more important than a total solar eclipse. And it shows that contentious third parties needlessly made it all many times more difficult than it should have been. Business with those parties will be avoided as much as possible from now on. In the end, my friend had at least 6 months and 13 days (perhaps as much as 8 months and 15 days) more life than he would have had if his HMO had been allowed to have their way without resistance. A total solar eclipse does not hold a candle to that. An eclipse does not care if anyone is there to see it. But a friend cares if you are there for them. Also, I had become acquainted with a few other patient advocates along the way, and the fellowship of patient advocates is a sweet one, possibly because I encountered so few of them. When this journey began, I had no idea that I would end up being a patient advocate, or how grueling, yet rewarding, being an advocate can be. And it was a way to make a difference, even if just for one person. I did not start the journey of advocating for my friend with a vision of making a difference. It was more a matter of obligation at the beginning, because he had no surviving family and said he did not trust anyone else to represent him. It also seemed this way during the times when there was so much paperwork that it interfered with visiting my friend in the hospital or nursing facility. But it was better than this at other times, and I could see that it made a difference for him. And once I was in the role of advocating for my friend, it was not something that could be done halfway, because there were times when my friend's life literally depended on strong advocacy and prayer. But many aspects also seemed like a zero sum game, where advocacy only overcame adversity, and prevailing was only breaking even. Never really making lasting gains. For example, contention with the HMO Death Panel only gained my friend a level of care that he would have gotten in a normal non-HMO medical setting. It was a temporary break-even at best, instead of a long term gain. But at least this honored my friend's expressed wishes to prolong life. On my 1994 eclipse trip to Bolivia, I had met Willma Alcocer. She was then a director at a primary school in Cochabamba. She was a person who made a difference in many people's lives. And on some occasions, her efforts were spent on standing up to interests that were opposed to students at her school, most of whom were from poor families. This was often a break even situation as well. Advocating to prevent loss for her students, and doing what she could for her students with the resources that she and the school had, but rarely making gains against the rich who opposed her and the poor. But she kept at it and didn't give up. Knowing her, even briefly, made me want to make a difference too. A difference beyond anything to do with eclipses. But in my profession as an engineer, and also being in relatively poor health, there were not many ways of doing this. In addition to the above, many difficult things had been happening concurrently. One of these difficult things was that Willma Alcocer passed away in August 2023, only two weeks before she was going to legally relocate to the USA - and to a place only 20 miles from where I live. Several Other Friends Pass Away, then My Dad Does: On 22 August, 2023, Willma Alcocer, one of the most remarkable people I had ever met, and one of the parties to whom I had dedicated my 1994 eclipse journal (and my 1997 story "Syzygy"), passed away in Bolivia. We first met in Bolivia during my solo expedition to the 3 Nov. 1994 total solar eclipse. She was then a director at a primary school in Cochabamba, Bolivia. A school that began operation in 1978, and that is currently called Colegio Evangelico Buenas Nuevas. In more recent times, she had retired, and had been trying to legally relocate to the USA for years, but encountered red tape. Then her health became an issue, in that she became too weak to travel. She had heart surgery in 2018 to become strong enough to make the trip, but had a long recovery. But then came COVID, and with it, overreaction and power grabs by many liberal governments. The Biden Administration in the USA imposed a Vaccine Mandate (only for legal immigrants) that was not lifted until May of 2023. She was not going to get the COVID vaccine because a family member in her generation had apparently died from a large amount of clotting - only about a week after being vaccinated. Willma was finally going to move to the USA in early September, 2023, and one of her younger sisters had gone down to Bolivia to prepare her for the move and accompany her to the USA. But she died only two weeks before she was going to move to the USA, to her sister's home, which was only 20 miles from me. AND, it was found that one of the same political people who was a problem for both of us in 1994 (see my 1994 total solar eclipse journal for details) allegedly contributed to her death by doing things that severely stressed her for a prolonged period of time. The COVID vaccine mandate had apparently delayed her move to the USA by at least two years. Another way of putting it is: If a less authoritarian Administration had been elected in the USA back in 2020, I would have seen Willma again. But there were numerous if's in this matter. I was a basket case for months after Willma died, at a time so close to when she was going to move here. Apathy was one of the things that accompanied the grief, and this made it harder to stand up for my friend against his HMO, or do anything else. Dealing with my friend's HMO was particularly difficult during the worst of the grief over Willma's death. If my voice broke while speaking with the HMO, they seemed to see it as weakness, and then they would aggressively pile on pressure and try to get me flustered. The people at the HMO who did that (especially those who acted as though they had been in the CCP), were absolutely heartless. One example (out of several such incidents) was when an HMO doctor (the same doctor who had said the HMO was going to finish what it started concerning withholding dialysis from my friend) heatedly pressed about what I thought would make my friend's quality of life worthwhile. I mentioned that his improving enough to be rolled out onto sunlight on the skilled nursing facility patio would make a difference for him, since sitting in the sun was one thing he'd liked to do all along. To this, the HMO doctor scoldingly replied that it was completely unrealistic to expect that my friend would return to a board and care home where he could be go out into the sun. But I had NOT said anything about going back to a board and care home. What I said was clearly in the context of rolling him onto the roof patio at the skilled nursing facility he'd been at all summer, and that the HMO was going to discharge him back to. The HMO doctor had twisted that and jumped to his own uninformed conclusions, probably in attempts to trip me up or make himself feel justified in withholding care. That was the sort of illogic I had to deal with in almost every call to or from my friend's HMO. And besides, if my friend chose to prolong life when informed about his likely prospects, and when prolonging is feasible from a medical standpoint, my role as his POA is to support him in that. Neither the HMO or I get to decide what is "worthwhile" to him in regard to prolonging life. To counter these HMO attempts to pressure me or trip me up, I had to be "cried out" over Willma's death shortly before interacting with the HMO on a given day. So, I found combinations of music and pictures of Willma that would set off rain, and would go through that anguish before calling the HMO (or before when I anticipated they would call me). This probably led to more sadness, and more rain than would otherwise have fallen, but the nature of the HMO made it necessary. Sometimes, it is OK to be broken when one so precious as Willma has left this earth, especially under the circumstances she endured. And even though it hurts. - It is then easier to acknowledge our helplessness, and just do what a helpless person can do, which is next to nothing. And to grieve and pray. And to leave any recompense to Him. - Because when God puts together what is broken, it can become better than before it was broken. - He is the ONLY cure for sorrow, pain, and brokenness from such loss. - I don't know much Spanish any more, but sometimes it is a better language to say things such as: - Confiando en Dios. Aunque la vida duela. Solo Dios es fiel. - Lyrics in the Roberto Orellana song "La Paz de Dios" include the phrase: "Busca la paz y olvida el enojo" (Seek peace and forget anger). [Cut and paste link into browser to see the music video:] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC3294YejkQ (200501, Roberto Orellana) 5:13 - When broken and submissive before the Lord, this seems more reasonable, and can help lead to at least some restoration of inner peace. After intensity of the grief became less severe, I found the Tomas Ocampo song "Valle de Lagrimas" (Valley of Tears) to be both comforting and descriptive of the previous year's experience as POA for my friend. During all of that, intense times or prayer, and sometimes tears, had indeed preceded the victories. Because the HMO posed a recurring threat to my friend, each victory was only temporary. But each victory was a victory nonetheless, because it at least bought him more days of life, which is what he indicated he wanted. This song (with its lyrics) is at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZa8NJ9eWJA (210921, Tomas Ocampo Oficial) 3:31 The application of this song was especially true of the emotive 2022 recording of it by Digna Meza, (now formerly) of Ministerio Eliab in Peru: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bQPC3vHamg (220827, Digna Meza Vera) 11:27 The version below was not interrupted by the LOUD ads that distracted from the above link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN5jXeVM8GA (230521) 11:28 As the deeper grief over Willma's passing subsided a little more, I found that the lightheartedness of the music video of the song "Espiritu Santo Te Necesito" (and certain other songs) by the Bolivian Christian singer Wilma Ticona was comforting while in the troughs between waves. The corny (in a good way) sounding (though a bit repetitive on the bass) accompaniment, and the jumping up and down during the song, seemed cheerful at a time when cheerfulness finally became helpful. For any who care to see the music video, it is at this URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1_UuoGYE50 (121129, Ismael Pacco) 5:13 Some of her other music videos seemed similarly cheerful, though most had fewer calisthenics. - I had not been a fan of energetic of music videos like this before the grief, but liked it after the worst of the grief subsided; perhaps because it helped keep me from falling back into the pit of deeper grief. Something about it made the deaths of people I knew seem farther away, even if only for a while. This may sound odd, but sometimes, making cheerful spiritual music that lifts someone's spirits can be serious business. It can help a person get their life back, through getting out (and staying out) of a pit of deeper grief. There is probably a spirtual component to this. - Unfortunately, dozens of her music videos were taken down in early 2024, and only some were re-posted on other channels. Many songs were re-posted as audio only, to still photos of notional album covers. Just hearing the audio of certain songs didn't seem to have as much positive effect, but was better than nothing. I'd buy her CD's or DVD's (and some from the "Fuego y Sanidad" group she was later in up through at least 2019), but these don't seem to be available. - One of the later, calmer songs is this one by Fuego y Sanidad, which includes drone video of Angel Falls and Iguazú Falls. It is linked because some of their other videos (not linked here) have numerous added bright white full screen flashes that could potentially trigger seizures in some. - Ticona, Wilma (Fuego y Sanidad): Separado de ti nada puedo hacer Jesus (Apart from you I can do nothing, Jesus.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzIx0EFGB0A (190102,mli/ng) 7:45 As for eclipses: For almost six months after Willma's death, I didn't care at all about eclipses. In fact, since I'd met her on an eclipse trip, and eclipses reminded me of her, I almost DIDN'T WANT to see another eclipse during the worst months of the grief. However, this had no effect on whether I could go to an eclipse, or even prepare for one: I then could do neither because of responsibility for my friend, plus two months of problems with the cemetery that followed his passing. Besides Willma Alcocer, three other people I knew, including the friend for whom I was POA, and my late mom's best friend since her school days - had also died in the span of only a few months. During the same period of time, I also belatedly learned that my astronomer friend German Morales (of ASO in Bolivia) had passed away. Dad Passes Away (27 August, 2024): Starting in late 2020, my Dad had been living with my brother in Boulder, Colorado. In April 2024, my Dad, then 94 years old, decided at the last minute that he wanted to travel to Texas with my brother to see the 8 April total solar eclipse. Dad had seen the 29 Feb. 1979 total solar eclipse with my brother and I in Montana, and he had long said it was one of the most impressive things he had ever seen. The 2024 eclipse trip seemed to tax Dad to a degree, and he began to decline more rapidly after that. In July 2024, Dad had a setback and was hospitalized. He began to recover from the crisis fairly quickly and was moved to rehab, but then he began to eat less and declined again. On 27 August, 2024, only five days after the one year mark from Willma Alcocer's passing in 2023, Dad sadly passed away. He was 94. As was the case when Mom had passed away in 2024, and when Willma Alcocer had passed away in 2023, the brunt of grief from Dad's passing did not hit right away. In fact, the full brunt of it did not hit in an identifiable form for a few months. However, the delay in Dad's case could have been due to having to counter egregious actions by Dad's funeral home in Arizona, where they would not let Dad be interred for well over six weeks. Having to contend with the funeral home almost daily for weeks required that I put off feeling grief to the extent possible, and it took my time away from other things, including arranging the venue for Dad's memorial service in Arizona. But the grief seemed to manifest in other ways, including not being able to be as forceful as I wanted to be against the funeral home. (Maybe that's what some funeral homes are counting on?) And when I was able to be forceful, I was often wound up enough that it was not particularly easy to be diplomatic at the same time. A complaint ultimately had to be filed against the funeral home with the state before the matter was resolved. The long struggle against Dad's funeral home is summarized in the next section. Return to Local Table of Contents When Prepaid "Prearranged" Funerals Aren't So Prearranged: When my late friend (the one I was POA for) passed away in 2023, his prepaid and "Prearranged" funeral did not turn out to be very prearranged at all. His funeral home and cemetery (as noted a couple of chapters earlier) had sold a prearranged full casket burial for a burial space that turned out to be too small for a full casket. This was surprising, because the cemetery had indicated in writing that his burial space was large enough. His cemetery did not disclose there was a problem with my friend's prepaid funeral arrangements until over a week after he died. Their proposed solutions were only to cremate him, or pay over $13k for a burial space that was large enough. A week postmorem was a little late to ask him about cremation, and the funeral home's other option was not acceptable. After his cemetery would not budge on this for weeks, and after prayer about the matter, a complaint was filed against them. In the end, the cemetery provided a suitable burial space at their expense. When my Mom had passed away in 2014, the funeral home in Arizona claimed that they did not have documentation showing that her prepaid arrangements covered all of the major costs. My Dad was very upset by this, but he held his ground, and the funeral home later "found" the documents that showed those costs were covered by Mom's prepaid arrangements. And then, when my Dad died in Colorado in August 2024, the same funeral home in Arizona claimed that they could not find documentation for Dad's prepaid funeral arrangements. And for several days, they would not allow the Colorado funeral home to send Dad's remains to them. (Dad's prepaid arrangements were not assigned to the Colorado funeral home, so as to leave the Arizona aspects intact. Instead, the Colorado funeral home's services were paid for outright.) After the Arizona funeral home finally allowed Dad's remains to be sent to them, they refused to inter Dad until they either located their documents (mainly the Statement of Goods and Services), or until they received a copy of the Statement from another source. My brother and I both lived in other states (and I am disabled) so either of us making a near term trip to Arizona (solely to see if the documents were in Dad's files), was not in the cards. And, the funeral home is responsible for retaining such files. The funeral home finally found the documents on the desk of one of their employees on 26 September (almost a month after Dad passed away). That should have solved the problem, but they made other excuses for whey they would not allow Dad to be interred. Most of the time, they blamed the insurance company associated with Dad's prepaid arrangements. I had raised concerns about the storage fees over all this time, but they said we would not have to pay for any of that. In late September, I obtained documents showing that the funeral home had always been the beneficiary for Dad's prepaid arrangements. These were provided to the funeral home, even though I would expect them to already have such files. (The insurance company associated with Dad's prepaid arrangements had said that a different funeral home had initially been the beneficiary, but their assertion did not stand up to fact checking.) In early October, the funeral home continued their nonsense, so I informed them that I would file a complaint against them if Dad was not promptly interred. On 4 October 2024, the funeral home finally said it may be possible to inter Dad in a few days, but that they needed me to sign a contract to acknowkedge that $17.62 in extra sales tax was due, and that this needed to be paid before they would let Dad be interred. When the funeral home sent the contract, the $17.62 amount did not appear anywhere on it, and it instead showed that over $2,400 was due, and it had no line item to show an adjustment for what would be paid by Dad's prepaid arrangements. The contract also had wording to indicate that Dad's estate could be liable for the full amount of refrigerated storage (hundreds of dollars per day) during any delay in interment, without any provision for the delay being entirely the fault of the funeral home, or where the funeral home has said that such fees are not due. The conract also had a due date that was back dated to two days before the contract had even been sent to me. Therefore, I refused to sigh the contract as is, but said I would sign one that was marked up to show that only $17.62 was due, and that neither I or the estate had any liability for storage fees or anything else above the $17.62. The funeral director said that he would accept the contract as I proposed to redact it and mark it up. I faxed the marked up contract that evening, then mailed a copy of it to them, along with a check for $17.62. This was paid by check so I could indicate on the check that nothing beyond the $17.62 was, or ever would be, due to the funeral home. I did not hear back from the funeral home after this, but the cemetery later said they expected that the funeral home would approve Dad's interment, and that it should happen on 10 or 14 October. However, this date as moved to 17 October by the funeral home, and I was not confident that even that date was for real. Therefore, based on what the funeral home had tried thus far, plus the long delayed and changing interment date, I filed a complaint against the funeral home. That would hopefully provide a way for State regulators to compel the funeral home to allow Dad to be promptly interred, and would also discourage the funeral home from trying to collect fees that they were not legally entitled to. The complaint was also filed to alert Arizona regulatory authorities to what the funeral home was doing, in the hope that this would deter the funeral home from doing the same to other grieving families. If a bereaved family member in a similar situation was to sign the funeral home's contract as is, it could cause them to be liable for up to thousands of dollars in illegitimate fees. Dad was not interred until 17 October, 2024. That was over 50 days after his death. The common theme the above is that all three of the above noted funerals had fully prepaid arrangements, but NONE of the actual funerals went well. And, in two of the three cases, the funeral home or cemetery involved delayed interment of the deceased by more than six weeks! In other words, the so-called "prearranged" funerals were not so prearranged. And, the outcome was many times worse (and more stressful) than would have been the case if there had been NO prepaid arrangements at all. All that the prepaid arrangments did was put middle men into the picture, who then screwed things up and caused unbelievable prolonged stress. I would be very surprised if the Arizona funeral home would have delayed interment of a person to whom they sold prepaid arrangements - IF that deceased person did NOT have surviving family that they could jerk around or try to chisel - regardless of what they thought of related insurance companies. Based on these painful and stressful experiences, I am not obtaining prepaid arrangements for myself. Instead, I simply acquired a burial space with no services attached to it, then I am just setting aside funds and leaving written instructions for what I would prefer to happen. After the above experiences, I personally would NOT recommend that ANYONE make prepaid funeral arrangements, except perhaps a person has no heirs or others who could see to their funeral. If the companies involved won't promptly honor prepaid arrangements, there is no point in having such arrangements in the first place. It can be worse than having no arrangements at all. In contrast to the above nonsense with prepaid funeral arrangements in the USA: When Willma Alcocer passed away in Cochabamba Bolivia in 2023, she was interred only two days after she died. Her family did not have to go through weeks or months of hassle with a funeral home or cemetery before she could be interred. Sometimes, other countries do things better than the USA. Return to Local Table of Contents Picking Up Where I Left Off in Late 2020 on Eclipse Prep - 3 Years Later, in Early 2024: By early February 2024, the grief over Willma's passing had become less debilitating, in large part due to the kind support of a member of Willma's extended family. This family member probably had no idea what was in store when she kindly informed me that Willma passed away back in August of 2023, and I did not then know the depths that grief would take me to either. It was over a week before it hit me full force. But she stayed in touch through all of it, and I am grateful to her for it. Humanly speaking, one else made even close to as much difference as she did. One prescription for blood pressure had also held me back, by increasing apathy and causing lack of initiative, but it was discontinued after my pulse rate went too low for an extended time. After all of this, I began to have some initiative again, and I half-heartedly resumed preparing for the 2024 total solar eclipse. When it became apparent that I WOULD be able to finish the eclipse experiment and imaging setup in time, I pursued it with more purpose. From that point on, I DID again want to go to the 2024 total solar eclipse. I had long wanted to see this eclipse, and being apathetic about it was only temporary. Total solar eclipses had long been a priority when I could get to them. (One might gather that from my eclipsechaser.com web site!) But also, each total solar eclipse I had observed after the stressful 1994 eclipse trip to Bolivia had helped dilute bad memories of the 1994 impositions of a failed local would-be politician and his rich cronies, the serious illness that resulted (which required increased surgery to correct), and the same people interfering with my 1994 eclipse program and southern sky observations. And most of all, their opposition to Willma Alcocer's work, and their severely limiting time that she and I could have together; not to mention the ability of one of them to potentially screen her calls, mail, and visitors later on. However, the state of exhaustion that began during advocacy for my friend in May 2023 was still an issue, in that I lacked stamina to drive even a fraction of the distance required to get to the 2024 total solar eclipse path. The 2024 symptoms were remarkably similar to symptoms of exhaustion that resulted from unexpected impositions of the failed would-be politician and rich men in Bolivia some 30 years earlier (see my 1994 eclipse journal for details). The notable exception is that I did not have the painful prolapse problem in 2024. But in 2023 and 2024, one of my doctors said that it could take at least a month of bed rest, followed by appropriate exercise, to regain much stamina, etc. It was not until the summer of 2024 that things began to wind down enough that this much rest may be possible. One thing is for sure: To date, stamina has not not returned in the absence of a lot of rest. Also, the April 2024 eclipse setup and associated luggage was too large and heavy for me to handle in an airport or bring on an airplane, being the equivalent of seven large carry on bags and weighing about 250 pounds in total. I also had a medical lifting restriction that prevented handling more than one small carry on item myself. And even for that, I usually had to put such an item on the seat of a 4-wheel rollator walker to move it very far. This made flying alone all but impossible. In the End, Missing the 2024 Eclipse Came Down to Unreliability of a Telecomm. Company: The search was on for a ride to Texas to see the eclipse. By 18 March, I had composed messages (in text files) to ask several people I knew if they, or someone they knew, could either take me and my eclipse setup to the eclipse, or be a driver to get my car there. That night, I was only hours from sending these messages out when my Phone AND Internet (BOTH by Frontier) went down. And both of these stayed down for NINE DAYS. I had no way to communicate with anyone except via a Tracfone I had acquired for the trip, but its number was unfamiliar to people I could reach only by phone. I also did not know the phone numbers of many of my other friends and contacts, and only had their email. The excuses Frontier provided for not being "able" to timely restore service were way out there, and are covered below. In the end, it became CERTAIN that I WOULD HAVE made it to the eclipse IF the Frontier outage had been only a few days shorter (that is, less than a week of continuous outage, as opposed to nine days). It all came down to the amount of lead time one of the otherwise available drivers would have had to give his employer in order to get time off work to go to the eclipse. Also, the hours of time required on my Tracfone, to try to get Frontier to act - was time that could have otherwise been spent resting and physically getting ready for the eclipse trip. If that time had not been lost, it would have also been possible to go with a last minute BACKUP plan for a driver. This was a last minute backup only because the driver's contact could not be reached while Frontier services (BOTH phone AND Internet) were down. In order for the last minute backup driver to work out, I would have had to be ready to go a full day earlier than I was. (The eclipse equipment was ready in time for that, but preparations related to accommodating my medical condition (including limiting exposure to light) while on the road were not finished.) It certainly would have been possible to be ready one day earlier if so much time had not been lost to Frontier. So that's TWO ways to get to the eclipse lost due to Frontier. But Frontier had NO sense of urgency in restoring service, even for a disabled person. And because they apparently have a MONOPOLY on the lines here, they would restore service when they felt like it. And when they felt like it was a few days TOO LATE to make it possible to arrange a ride (with my equipment) to the 2024 eclipse. For this reason, Frontier's excuses (and the implications their claimed reasons for not being able to timely restore service could have on their ability (or inability) to restore service if there was a natural disaster that caused widespread outages) are immortalized below. The harm was irreparable, in that I will be older when other total solar eclipses occur, and those likely to occur in my lifetime are only observable from other countries. All of this would make future total eclipses much more difficult (and expensive) to get to. In the grand scheme of things, the matter of Frontier's unreliable service is obviously far less important than having had to advocate for my (now late) friend against parties including an HMO death panel back in 2023. And it is also obviously of far less importance than the fact that others I knew died in 2023 and early 2024. However, since this is an eclipse journal (at least in name; eclipse stuff starts about 40 percent of the way through this web page) the Frontier issue is covered in detail because it was the only thing that prevented me from reaching the path of totality in 2024. With great difficulty, all other obstacles to getting to the 2024 total solar eclipse had been overcome, but then Frontier blew it in the final weeks. It could cost upwards of ten thousand dollars (that I can't responsibly spend) to get myself and my equipment to a suitable foreign eclipse site, since that would require funding assistants to register all of the instrumentation with U.S. Customs, then get all of it to a future foreign eclipse of sufficient duration. On a foreign trip, it would also be difficult (though not impossible) to fully black out the rooms I sleep in, and otherwise limit sunlight exposure to the extent advisable for my condition. Had I been able to get to the domestic 2024 total solar eclipse, I could have handled all of the equipment myself (using my rollator walker to move each box or case), and my brother (who was at the same motel I had reservations at) could have helped move stuff if I was weaker than usual. Unfortunately, such a favorable scenario is not possible at a foreign eclipse. Assistants would be required to get myself, eclipse instruments, and a rollator walker to a foreign total solar eclipse. (Of course, if Frontier wants to fund all that is needed for me to transport and use the equipment at a foreign eclipse of sufficient duration, to partially compensate for their long outage...) After all of the catching up that followed more than three years of lost time, it all came down to the unreliability of a telecommunications company (Frontier) in the weeks before the 2024 eclipse. And a telecommunications debacle shortly before a total solar eclipse was eerily similar to what had happened 30 years earlier, right before the stressful 1994 eclipse trip to Bolivia. Except for one important difference: The 1994 telecommunications debacle did not prevent the 1994 eclipse trip! All I have to show for my 2024 efforts in eclipse planning, motel reservations, etc., is a $229.98 charge on my credit card for having to cancel my 3-day reservations of two rooms, on the day before I would have otherwise arrived in Waco, TX, plus a similar penalty for late property taxes. It WAS Adequately Clear at the Site I Selected in Waco, TX. My brother in Colorado was able to go to the path of totality, and he stayed at the same motel where I had reservations. He and my 94 year old Dad both observed the eclipse from there, as I would have. The motel grounds were better for my applications than the McLane Stadium grounds (for which I had written the eclipse procedure) would have been. And, it was adequately CLEAR there during the entire duration of totality! There were high, thin clouds, but they were very thin. Almost a full solar diameter of corona (with a lot of structure) was visible all the way around the moon, with more than a solar diameter of corona being visible in two directions. The boundary of the lunar umbra was not visible from there during mid totality due to low clouds near the horizon, but the corona was visible. So, it is almost certain that I would have obtained good results from all six corona cameras in the setup (including extreme close up video of second and third contact) if I had been there. Those who would have wanted to see such material have Frontier Communications to thank for the lack of it. Photos and descriptions of equipment (for the total eclipse) are included in this web page, as are visible and H-Alpha photos of the partial eclipse, as seen from L.A. It is hoped that the good performance I got from the equipment (and surprisingly, from myself) during test runs (for the total eclipse) will be added as an Appendix within a few months of the eclipse date.

Similarities Between the 1994 and 2024 Eclipses (and related trips) include that the paths of totality relative to the solar azimuth were similar. But differences included the solar elevation angle and the absolute direction that the umbra moved. The motion of the 2024 umbra with respect to the solar azimuth was similar that of 1994, except that the relative direction of motion for the umbra is reversed in 2024. This was expected to cause the most impressive views of the 2024 umbra to occur during and after totality. There were other similarities between 1994 and 2024, but these were more down to earth. The eclipse expeditions planned for both years were preceded by highly disruptive problems with telecommunication companies (Excel in 1994 and Frontier in 2024) - to such an extent that it impacted each expedition. But the 2024 fiasco was worse because it prevented the expedition. The Telecommunications Debacle of October 1994 (Excel): Shortly before my 1994 eclipse trip to Bolivia, my MCI phone service was "slammed" to a different carrier without my consent - TWICE! I did not learn of the change until I got the bill (with exorbitant phone rates) from the new and unfamiliar carrier in October. This meant that the unauthorized carrier change had happened in September or perhaps earlier. After some investigation, it was found that an unethical sales person, whom I had never even spoken to (and at a company I had never spoken to), unilaterally changed my phone service from MCI to AT&T. Then, almost immediately, it was changed again from AT&T to a company I had never even heard of called Excel. It was barely possible to change my phone service back to MCI before I left for Bolivia. However, all of this required a LOT of time that had been set aside for rest and final preparations. Further, all of this rendered my MCI International calling card unusable. And it was not possible to get a new MCI International calling card in time for the trip. This increased per-minute phone call cost from Bolivia by a factor of three or four over what it would have been otherwise. Worse, the considerable time lost to this 1994 telecommunications debacle prevented getting enough rest immediately before the expedition, which in turn made my health more susceptible to the unexpected political nonsense (from the brother of a 1993 Bolivian Presidential candidate and his rich cronies) that was unexpectedly encountered - starting on my first day in Bolivia. Specifically, being spent at the beginning of the trip made my more health susceptible to sleep deprivation and exhaustion from political impositions that prevented much sleep or rest during my first three days and two nights in Bolivia. After that, I was very ill for the rest of the trip (including during the eclipse), and surgery was required afterward. (Details are in my 1994 eclipse journal.) Following the 1994 eclipse expedition, I sought to settle the Excel bill in a way which had a per-minute charge that was equivalent to MCI's rates. (There was ZERO chance that I was going to pay the full (high) amount of the bill, since it was for service at a carrier I had not authorized.) After discussions with Excel, they were going to charge only what MCI would have charged, but only if I documented what the MCI charges would have been for every call on the phone bill, and that was a LOT of phone calls. That was a ridiculous amount of documentation, given that I did not make or authorize the switch from MCI to their company. And I didn't have time for all of that. Ultimately, they relented and said that I didn't have to pay the bill at all. This may have been partly because they acknowledged that the unethical sales person who slammed my phone service to their company worked for them. More detail on this (and the 1994 eclipse itself, plus the Bolivian political intrigue that I was involuntarily exposed to back then) is in Section 1 of my "Eclipse Chaser's Journal, Part 3, The Wild One: Total Solar Eclipse of November 3, 1994", at the eclipsechaser.com web site. The Telecommunications Debacle of March 2024 (Frontier): In 2024, a sudden and LONG outage of my Phone AND Internet service, BOTH by Frontier Communications, began late on the night of 18 March 2024 - only about two weeks before I needed to leave for the 2024 eclipse. I had to travel by road due to the amount of equipment. This LONG outage was a BIG problem, because I was then temporarily not strong enough to be comfortable driving myself to Texas, or even across town for that matter. Therefore, I was communicating online to see if a combined trip could be arranged with other observers in my area. However, the sudden and complete failure of Frontier's Internet service pulled the rug right out from under this, just as as I had almost finished composing messages to a number of people. The long outage of BOTH Phone AND Internet service by Frontier Communications, and the fact that they would not even provide an estimate for when service may be restored (or any type of alternative service during the outage), posed an extreme risk to the 2024 eclipse expedition. This was an expedition that required hundreds of hours to prepare for over a period of years, not to mention the considerable funds required. (The above part of this paragraph, and the previous paragraph, were written during the Frontier outage, before it became apparent that the outage would persist so long that it prevented the 2024 eclipse expedition.) In addition to eclipse related matters, the Frontier outage made it impossible to communicate with my doctors on their patient portals during a fairly critical time. The long Frontier outage also resulted in my property taxes (which I pay online) being late for what might be the FIRST time ever, and penalties for that cost as much as what two months of Frontier (non) service would cost. As of when this was written (offline) after close to a week of the Frontier outage, Frontier had shown no concern for the difficulty their LONG outage (described below) was causing, even though they had repeatedly been made aware of the importance and urgency of the situation, and that I was disabled. In fact, they would not even provide an estimate for when service would be restored. (Other than a promised time of restored service that they failed to meet three days into the outage.) Therefore, if the long March 2024 outage by Frontier (which was still ongoing at the time this was composed offline), contributes significantly to not being able to physically get myself and the eclipse equipment to the 2024 total solar eclipse, it will have obviously prevented getting photos, video, and experiment results at the total eclipse. In that situation, a description of Frontier's actions will be a permanent part of this 2024 eclipse web page. (And now, after the fact, it is such.) This material is also included here because posting it here may be the only practical way to timely provide information for a consumer complaint to the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) that I can steer authorities toward. The only way of communicating with them would all too often be by speaking on my Tracfone. Ironically, since Frontier's Internet service is so unreliable, I can't count in it being available to file an online complaint. This is because filing online complaints (and timely replying to those who respond) requires reliable Internet access. But part of a complaint against Frontier would be about their long outages in Internet access that last over a week! Nine Consecutive Days without Frontier Internet OR Land Line Phone in March, 2024: It was only possible to upload this web page shortly after the Frontier outage because it was written offline. It was possible to upload a draft shortly after service was at long last restored, several hours short of NINE DAYS of outage. Internet service resumed just as I was about to briefly have limited Internet access via a third party. The Frontier outage lasted until 27 March. My medical situation did not do well during the outage, possibly due to effects of a prescription. However, I could not communicate with a doctor's office about it via their online patient portal due to the Frontier Internet service outage. (Phone calls to them did not get a response.) Therefore, I eventually had to unilaterally stop taking the blood pressure prescription that I suspected was making my symptoms worse. (It appears that the prescription was causing weakness, but I am not back to where I was before I was put on it prior to the Frontier outage. I might have been able to go off of it sooner if I'd been able to reach my doctors via patient portals during Frontier's outage.) A long outage of both Internet AND phone was and is a big deal for a disabled person who (at the time) was not even up to driving to a nearby store during the outage. There was not even a dial tone, so even calling 911 from my home phone (had that been necessary) was not possible. Details About the LONG 3/2024 Frontier Outage, and its Consequences: Details about the LONG Frontier Outage and the hardship it has caused, and the complexity it continued to cause, follows. It will remain a permanent part of this journal because it DID prevent being able to get to the 2024 total eclipse. And it is known with near certainty that I COULD have made it to the path of totality if the long Frontier outage had been at least 2-3 days shorter. The extended Frontier outage also prevented ordering last minute items that my equipment tests had shown would be beneficial, and it prevented the above mentioned important matter of follow up on arranging transportation. More importantly, the Frontier outage has held up specifying the final details on a grave marker for a late friend, as well as the above noted communicating with my own doctors via their patient portals, etc. There were a myriad of other things that the long Frontier outage also interfered with. Due to years of being Power of Attorney for a (now late) incapacitated elderly friend, and having to deal with many contentious parties in the process, it had not been possible to complete preparations for the 2024 eclipse equipment very far in advance. And other aspects of the planned expedition were similarly affected. In addition to this, my health was temporarily in a state where I was not expecting that I would be able to make the three day drive to the eclipse myself (as noted above). I had not by then found a way to travel with someone else, though I had begun writing communications related to that just before the Frontier outage. Also, it was almost impossible to find and book a plane ticket without being able to go online or physically travel somewhere to arrange it (which I also could not do at the time). Also, I was not sure I was even physically up to traveling solo on a plane. And the eclipse setup was too large to take on a plane in carry on bags (not to mention needing a rollator walker with a seat to move baggage on at an airport), and I lacked enough large bags that allowed adequate space for padding, not to mention that I could not ferry that many bags around myself, being handicapped and all. Lack of Internet service also meant lack of email. And because I did not then have phone numbers or street addresses for most people I had communicated with by email, there was no way to look into a joint trip while Frontier's services for BOTH phone and Internet were not working. The fact that telecommunications company has "an outage" isn't the problem. However, the fact that Frontier Communications had such a LONG outage of MULTIPLE services for MORE than a WEEK, and that they had no sense of urgency in disclosing or correcting the outage (even for a disabled customer), which was also due to their lines, WAS a problem. Complacency of an Apparent Regional Telecommunications Monopoly: Verizon/Frontier appear to more or less have a MONOPOLY on the lines in my area, so they have tended to do what they please, without regard to customer needs (including the need to use online portals with my doctors, and the urgency of the eclipse), which they were repeatedly informed of. When, after about four days of outage, Frontier was pressed on the matter of even estimating a date of restored service, the excuses they came up with defied even the imagination. Their nonsensical excuses are included below partly for the entertainment value. All calls to Frontier were apparently answered by call centers in Asia, and when people there could not solve the problem, they refused to connect me with anyone in the USA who potentially could. When Frontier was first contacted (via my old Trac flip phone) on Tuesday, 19 March (right after I became aware that BOTH the phone and Internet had ceased working, which was about 12 hours after I found that Internet service stopped), they said they would have to send a person to my house. However, they said that it would be two more days before that person would arrive. I had not contacted Frontier in the few hours after I noticed that the Internet service had gone out (when Internet was the only outage I was aware of) because Frontier's Internet service had always been unreliable. It has frequently cut out for several seconds to a few minutes at a time, several times each day, and outages lasting an hour or more had happened every now and then. So, initially, I thought it was just another (brief, but all too typical) Frontier Internet outage. While on the subject of performance, the speed of Frontier Internet service was only a fraction of the 8-15 mbps speed they charged for, and it often struggled to stream even 720p video, with the video all too often pausing while "circle of death" spun in the middle of the screen. (I had been waiting for Starlink to become available in my area before making a switch away from Frontier.) Frontier did some sort of remote check where they had me unplug both the phone and the router, and they then said that they thought it was their line. But they also emphasized that the issue might be with wiring in the house. However, they would not schedule a technician visit until two days later. (The box that Frontier had installed outside the house lacked an accessible phone connector (as older phone boxes used to have). If it had not lacked this connector, I could have connected phone to where their box connects to the house, to determine whether lines in the house were involved.) When I arranged the tech appointment, I repeatedly informed Frontier that I could see a text on my simple Trac flip phone, but that I could NOT SEND a text, due to the nature of the phone verses my condition. So what do they do? They sent a text that seemed to anticipate a text response. So I called Frontier on my Tracfone to confirm the appointment, but it took FIVE attempts, each going in the same loop over and over, to get to where I could even address a service appointment. But then their system showed a different appointment time, so I said "No" to confirming the new time. What did the Frontier system do? It thanked me for CONFIRMING the less appropriate appointment time - a time that I had NOT confirmed! So I had to repeat the procedure - to cancel the unwanted imposed appointment time - and reschedule the original appointment time. It took over an HOUR to do this via their quirky system - a system with no available people. Then, later in the week, and a few MINUTES before the end of the time window for when the Frontier technician was supposed to come (and the close of business for their office) they sent a text saying that the problem was with their lines, that there was an OUTAGE in my area, and that there was no need for a technician to show up. But they provided no estimate for when the problem would be fixed. Thus, it took Frontier THREE DAYS - just to figure out that they had an outage. An outage that I had informed them about over two days earlier. So I called Frontier again to try and get an ETA on restored service. It took the better part of an hour (of Tracfone minutes I was paying for) to reach a real person. They then said that both the phone and Internet would be restored in 12 to 18 hours, which would correspond to no later than 9:00 on Friday morning, 22 March. On Friday, 10:00 a.m. came and went, and there is still no phone or Internet service. Then noon came and went. And it is here that the plot thickens. And the nonsense that followed made me hope that my none of my pension funds were invested in Frontier: On Friday afternoon, after almost FOUR days of outage, Frontier said that they had NO IDEA of when service would be restored. I reminded them of my disability, the doctor portal situation, the eclipse, and the travel difficulty situations that all made the matter more urgent, but they obviously did NOT care. I demanded to talk to a supervisor or someone else in authority would have some answers, but the Frontier person REFUSED to connect me with anyone else for several minutes. Finally, I was connected with someone who said they were a supervisor having a different name than the person I had just spoken with - but the voice sounded almost identical to the person I first spoke with. And, the same people at Frontier (NONE of them appeared to be in the USA) REFUSED to connect me to anyone in the USA concerning the Frontier outage. (Frontier uses these people in other countries, so the fact that they did not connect me with anyone in the USA is on Frontier.) There was no viable way to report this to Frontier (since these are the people you get when calling Frontier), so this web page may be the only way that the matter can be reported. I only spoke with one person at Frontier who seemed to care at all (on 23 or 24 March), but he had no authority to do anything. He was in India, and he or those he knew remembered the 1995 total solar eclipse in India, so he seemed to understand the rarity of a total solar eclipse in a given country. He also may have been the first person to actually type that I was disabled into the record. Frontier eventually claimed that the outage was caused by someone "stealing" a length of cable that had 13 twisted pairs of wire in it. (Possible, since it is Los Angeles, where theft has all but been decriminalized.) And here, things got more interesting: Frontier Excuses - NOT Results! (They have to "Order" Equipment to Splice a Cable!) Frontier said that they had to "order" the cable to be able to fix the problem, apparently meaning that Frontier did NOT have cable like this in any of their local facilities. (A telecom company that has NO appropriate spare cable on hand! Fancy that.) AND, Frontier said that they had to "ORDER" the EQUIPMENT required to SPLICE the cable, meaning that they did NOT even have equipment to splice the WIRE cable! (I recorded this nonsense from Frontier. They say they record the calls, so because that makes it 2-party knowledge, is is legal to record them.) And they said this multiple times on multiple days. I don't know if what Frontier said above is true, but my first impressions are that such excuses (having to "order" equipment to splice a cable, for example) were way out there. To top it off, Frontier had NO estimate on when they might restore service. They would not even bound the time by saying it would be less than WEEKS (plural). So, other than continuing to call them, all I could do was periodically pick up my phone to see if it had a dial tone. At the time, I did not even have a way to get to a nearby store to acquire a hotspot with related service to fill in the gap. And Frontier repeatedly refused to provide a hotspot when asked. (Also, given the apparent monopoly, they said my area was not eligible for Frontier fiber service.) One would think that a PHONE / INTERNET COMPANY would have the equipment needed to SPLICE a wire cable. We're talking about multiple conductor wire cable, not a fiber optic cable. Given the above, I pity the poor soul who has Frontier as their only service for phone and Internet in the event of a natural disaster. If Frontier had to "order" the equipment to splice a WIRE cable, I can only imagine how much stuff they would have to "order" (with the related delays) in the event of widespread outages of either wired or fiber service that could follow a natural disaster. Since California has earthquakes, I don't want to be one of those poor souls, so I will be looking for an alternative once the 2024 eclipse date passes, whether I make it there or not. Because of the apparent monopoly, there is no alternative for a land line, so the solution may have to be wireless.

After I began to get caught up from the effects of the long Frontier outage of March 2024, and was looking online for alternative Internet and phone services, Frontier's service for BOTH phone and Internet went down AGAIN! This happened while I was well into looking online for alternatives to Frontier, so it prevented looking into these further. I was stuck with Frontier (and a COMPLETE lack of their Phone or Internet service) for as long as the July 2024 outage (which proved to be even longer than the nine day Frontier outage in March) lasted. This second long Frontier outage of 2024 began before 2:20 a.m. on 1 July. This time, early parts of the outage (and Frontier's initial response to it) played out about the same as it did in March, except in July, it "only" took them one day to realize and acknowledge that there was an outage. As was the case for the LONG Frontier outage in March 2024, the July outage interfered with communicating with my doctors and ordering daily supplies online. (I am disabled, and Frontier knows it, and being able to timely order items online this is important.) In fact, after the July 2024 Frontier outage had reached its TENTH DAY, I had to cancel one of my mid July doctor appointments, because I could not interact with their office via their online portal, etc. AND, with no Frontier service for my regular phone number, I also could not receive calls from whatever pharmacy was supposed to fill and deliver my prescriptions. Therefore, I was without some of my prescriptions solely because of Frontier. The weight of that is part of why this second long Frontier outage of 2024 is covered here, even though it was after the April 2024 total solar eclipse. This also shows that the LONG March outage was NOT an isolated incident with Frontier. The matter is also included here so it can be seen by the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) via giving them the URL (or applicable search terms) over the phone. (It has to be a publicly available web site for search engines to find it, to get the search terms to work.) That is only timely option, when there is no way to file a complaint online while Frontier Internet service is not working. Accordingly, subsections of this web page that cover the long Frontier outages of March and July 2024 are more detailed than may be necessary for part of an eclipse journal, since the detail may be useful in formal complaints. At some point later on, after the complaint(s), etc., are addressed, some details may be removed. However, the fact that the March Frontier outage was the SOLE reason that I could not get to the 2024 path of totality will be retained indefinitely. The impact of the second Frontier outage on things relevant to content of this web page (such as missing rocket launches) will also be retained. Think of it as a review of Frontier's service, where flaws are mentioned - just as flaws were noted in any camera or lens reviews that I published in the past. Based on Frontier's past performance this year, their service could easily go down for a third time before I am able to file a formal online complaint or make an informed switch to another phone and Internet company. This is because there is a lot of catching up to do after a long outage, such as rescheduling missed doctor appointments and ordering groceries, etc. The long July outage by Frontier also caused me to miss several rocket launches that would have otherwise been pictured in Appendix G of this web page. (I could not tell when the lauches would happen without an Internet connection!) As for other events related to the July 2024 Frontier outage: This time, even though it was after midnight on the morning of 1 July, I called Frontier within about an hour of when the outage had begun (prior to 2:20 a.m.), rather than waiting until the next day. Frontier's shorter outages tended to last "only" for several minutes, rather than an hour or more. Therefore, it was a safe bet that it would be a longer outage after it had exceeded an hour. When I initially called Frontier in July, I think I spoke with a Filipino call center, and these (in my experience) have almost always been superior to call centers in mainland Asia. This might be part of why Frontier acknowledged the July outage three times faster than was the case in March: Because in July, they scheduled a tech appointment three times closer to when the outage began. In both outages, Frontier did not seem to realize there was an outage until a few minutes before the tech was supposed to arrive at my place. Each time, they'd sent a text saying the tech was on the way to my place, followed by a text that said there was an outage, and that the there was no need for the tech to show up. (Prior to this, their automated system had said there was not an outage.) Frontier Keeps Customers in the Dark During their Second WEEK+ Long Outage of 2024: As was the case in the March Frontier outage, there was no initial information about the nature of the outage, or when Frontier expected to restore service. When I later called about this (the day after their message that said the tech did not need to come), their automated system said that their personnel would not have any information about the outage. This leaves a customer completely in the dark about when service may be restored, which is of course unacceptable. It was then difficult to reach a real person. When I did finally reach a real person on this second call, it was unfortunately at a call center that appeared to be in mainland Asia, and it showed. They seemed to have difficulty understanding my request to add notes to the ticket so the tech or others could see them. And after I got that across, they seemed to be reluctant to add such notes. However, based on what they said, it appeared that they did make at least one of the three requested notations. They said that the outage would be resolved in 24 to 48 hours, but had no information about the nature of the outage. After the 24 to 48 hour time to restore service came and went, and service still was not restored, I called Frontier a third time, and it was again difficult to reach a real person. (This failure to restore service by the promised time was the same scenario as Frontier's outage in March of 2024, except that in March, it took many more calls to get even this far, so a lot of calls were made to Frontier in March.) I did not call them as often in July because an eclipse was not coming up, though an appointment with my doctor, for which I would need to use their patient portal, was coming up. In this third July call, after four consecutive days without Frontier Internet or phone service, they still knew nothing. And as was the case in the March Frontier outage, they then would not provide a revised date for when service would be restored. The person I spoke with seemed to have some candor, but it appeared that Frontier may have been keeping information from their own foreign call center. Frontier's apparent way of doing things in July 2024 was to keep their own call centers (and thus their customers) in the dark. As before, they claimed that there was no way to connect me with anyone in the USA. And (also as in the March outage) they would not provide a hotspot to bridge the LONG gap in Internet service. A Phone Company with an Unreliable Automated Phone System: In subsequent calls that were made after more than a continuous week of Frontier's long July outage, their stated hold times were up to 40 minutes. Even worse, their callback request option only acknowledged that it had been selected about 25 percent of the time. (A very poor phone service for a phone company to have!) But it was worse still, because every time the callback request feature failed to work, it threw me back into the queue. And every time this happened, it said the wait time was 10 minutes longer than it had been only a few minutes before, when the callback request feature had failed to work. Then I had to try it all over again. This happened up to three times before the call request feature worked. Frontier also never sent status texts after these were requested via their automated system. On the rare occasions when Frontier's callback option did acknowledge my selection and my Tracfone number was provided, the call sometimes showed disconnected as soon as I answered. On the rare occasion when a callback actually worked, I was put on hold by the system that made the callback, and it was some time before I could speak with a person. When that happened, it was the same old thing, with no information about the outage, even after the outage had gone on for more than a continuous WEEK. Another Frontier Yarn: One of the calls was an exception, and the yarn they told was one for the record books. (And as with other Frontier calls, this yarn was recorded. Frontier says that they say that they record calls, so both parties have knowledge of the call being recorded.) On 8 July, after the outage had lasted over a WEEK, Frontier claimed that the outage was because they were doing a "copper construction". (Odd term. Maybe the foreign call center did not phrase it correctly, even though they used the term repeatedly.) They said that this was where Frontier's central office was being rewired, and that MANY of their customers had experienced an outage since the previous day. This seemed odd, since you would think a company would inform its customers in advance if an outage of BOTH phone and Internet was coming up, so customers could prepare for it. Their yarn seemed way out there. But since phone companies often refer to a regional office as a "central office" I asked if Frontier meant to say that they were rewiring a local or regional office, such as one in Los Angeles, or if they meant it was something wider in scope. The reply was that it was Frontier's central office, in the central time zone (not my time zone) and not a regional office. I then asked if this meant that EVERY Frontier customer in the entire COUNTRY was currently experiencing an outage because of the rewiring. The answer was YES. I asked again to be sure (and to give them an opportunity to get out of the grave they seemed to be digging around themselves), and the answer was again YES. (So if you were a Frontier customer who did NOT have an outage on 7 and 8 July 2024, feel free to let me know.) As it happened, Frontier's yarn seemed less outlandish by only two days later. By then, their automated system was saying that even their fiber phone service was out in three states, including Florida and Texas. So, it sounded like things were falling apart. (That's when I began to consider jumping ship in the near term.) However, because Frontier's claimed outage for rewiring supposedly did not start until 7 July, this yarn did not explain why my Frontier service had been out since 1 July. They claimed that my service would be up again on 9 July, barring some major new problem. But Frontier service still was not working at all on 9 July, and the long outage continued. True to form, Frontier had no further information when I called that day, and they would not estimate when service would be restored. I asked them to notate that I was filing a complaint with the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) that would mention BOTH of their long outages of 2024. Filing a Complaint: Frontier's LONG July Outage was NOT an Isolated Incident: I filed a complaint by phone with the PUC on 9 July, but they indicated that Frontier had already more or less blown them off, by saying it was a "regional" outage in response to other complaints. A written complaint by Postal mail would be a follow up, since it was not possible to file an online complaint while Frontier's (by now demonstrated unreliable) Internet service was still out. This raised the stakes, because it meant that this was not an isolated incident for Frontier. Because if Frontier is claiming even to the PUC that the July 2024 outage (which had gone on for NINE DAYS and counting) is part of a regional outage, what does that say about their reliability? This means that the nine day (and counting) outage of July 2024 was common to many customers of Frontier. So it was not an isolated issue. My impression and opinion is that this sounds like a sinking ship. A ship I may have already been off of if their service had not gone down for a second time as I was looking online for alternatives. By the next day, the duration of Frontier's July 2024 outage was in its TENTH DAY, surpassing even the length of their ridiculously long 9-day outage of March 2024, which was the only thing that had prevented arranging a ride to the path of totality for the 8 April total solar eclipse. Regardless of the veracity of what Frontier's overseas call centers say, it is still all on Frontier, because they did NOT provide any way for customers to reach their people in the USA. Maybe Frontier no longer has employees in the USA beyond a few harried tech's who have to keep putting Band-aids on poorly maintained infrastructure? The fact that Frontier had to "order" even wire cable, and the equipment to splice it, before they could even restore service in March - indicates that they lack adequate spares. That does not inspire confidence about preventive maintenance. Also, in the case of the July outage, one reason Frontier kept claiming they had no status was that they said an external contractor was correcting the problem. This reinforces the impression that Frontier may not be a real phone / Internet provider that actually owns the assets necessary to provide service, and that they instead just lease the assets used to provide service. If correct, that would mean that their company is just an administrator of third party assets, which is of little value when compared to a company that actually owns its assets and the means to maintain them. All of the phone time with Frontier was on minutes that I had to pay for on my Tracfone. This made longer calls to Frontier (mostly loops through their nonsensical and unreliable automated system) cost me on the order of $4.50 per call. A seemingly worthless company. I once again hoped that none of my retirement funds were invested in Frontier stock! Less than 90 Percent Frontier System Availability (Here) for the Entire YEAR to Date! The continuous July 2024 Frontier outage of both phone AND Internet had ultimately lasted for TWELVE CONSECUTIVE DAYS (and was still going) by the time it was possible to SWITCH to another provider that did not use the monopolized phone lines. This second Frontier outage began before 2 a.m. on 1 July, and it still had not ended as of when I switched to a Cable company at 5 p.m. on 12 July. (And there still was no end in sight for the Frontier outage when I switched.) When the TWELVE days of Frontier outage up to the time I switched to a cable company (11 days and 15 hours to be exact) is added to Frontier's ridiculous NINE DAY outage in March, that is over TWENTY days of COMPLETE phone and Internet OUTAGE thus far in 2024. That comes to 10.4 percent Frontier service downtime (20 outage days and change / 194 days) for the year to date by the time I bailed. Abysmal. The July Frontier outage lasted even LONGER than this. My phone number still had not ported over the cable company by mid afternoon on 19 July, and there was still no dial tone from Frontier even by then. So the July outage exceeded TWO WEEKS. That brought the Frontier system downtime for the year to date at my address to over 27.5 days, for 13.6 percent (27.5/201.6 days). Their downtime got worse from there. A few days after my phone number ported over, I called Frontier on the evening of 22 July to cancel service with them. Their automated system said there was STILL an outage, and that they were closed. (Seemed odd they'd be closed when I want to cancel service, but not closed for other purposes.) I called again mid day 23 July, and the outage was still ongoing. This time, I reached a real person (one in the USA for a change) and canceled the Frontier service. It was a tussle to get them to waive the July bill, as the PUC said they were obligated to. At this point, their service had been out 22.5 days in July alone, bringing their year to date outage to 31.3 days, for a YTD service downtime of 15.2 percent. (31.3/205.4 days). The take away is that Frontier's service in my area has become worse every year, yet their prices kept going up. As of this year, they cannot be relied on for service when it is needed. Thus far in 2024, the availability of their phone AND Internet service has been WORSE than 90 percent. And when it has worked, the Internet connection was no where near as fast as what they charged for. Most Internet and phone companies promote how many "9's" are in their availability numbers, such as 99 percent or 99.9 percent. But Frontier wasn't capable of providing even ONE "9" of availability. As of mid July 2024, Frontier could not even make 90 percent availability for EITHER phone or Internet over the entire year! That is a third world level of performance. Yet they charge first world prices for their schlock service. LONG TERM (months of) TEN PERCENT DOWNTIME of both phone and Internet, and in even the ability to use a land line to call 911 in an emergency, is abysmal. Frontier cannot be relied on as the only means to reach emergency services, or for much else. And if they cannot be relied on even for this, there is little point in using them, or for their even existing for that matter. There was a time when a land line phone was reliable enough to rely on even in emergencies. It used to be unheard of that a land line phone or Internet connection would be down for days to over a week at a time in the absence of a significant natural disaster. But in my experience, this is not so when the services are provided by Frontier Communications. In my entire lifetime of more than six decades, I have never experienced such unreliable service. Nothing else was even close. Monopolies Don't Care. And Monopolies that Don't Perform Shouldn't Exist: Perhaps the unreliability is because: A local monopoly has no incentive to perform. And if this is how monopolies are going to behave, they should not exist. Maybe they are not a true phone or telecommunication company? Maybe they sold off resources required to perform basic repair on phone lines, to make stocks perform better in the short term? (Sacrificing long term performance for short term gains seems increasingly common with publicly traded companies.) It is my impression that they may be little more than a line leaser, only re-selling use of existing phone lines, and adding their overhead and institutional inefficiency to the mix - while bringing nothing to the table that benefits the customer. A person could cope with disabilities just fine if it was not for unreliable companies like Frontier having monopolies on local land lines and related DSL Internet service. (I again did not pick Frontier. Instead, people who used to have Verizon land lines and DSL got stuck with them.) And Frontier was repeatedly informed that I was disabled, had no backup Internet, and was at the time reliant on the Internet even to get groceries. When one has to order things online, and interface with doctors online, unreliable Internet service is a big deal. And Frontier blindsided this customer with sudden and repeated LONG duration outages in 2024. Maybe Frontier will eventually realize that we are in the 21st century, but I don't want to wait around to find out. Since their service repeatedly goes down (and then it takes them over a week to fix it, even when there is not a local disaster), I don't want to have to rely on them in the event of a disaster. I can only imagine how long it would take them to restore service after a natural disaster. In that situation, maybe they won't be able to restore service at all? With companies like this in the mix, it is no surprise that our nation's infrastructure is falling apart. HARM Caused by BOTH of Frontier's LONG 2024 Outages of Phone AND Internet: Was the SOLE cause of NOT being able to go to the 2024 TOTAL Solar Eclipse. Prevented seeing my 94 year old Dad and my Brother for the first time since early 2020. (They both went to the Texas motel I had reservations at so we could meet at the eclipse.) Cost $229.98 to cancel the eclipse motel reservations I could not use because of Frontier. Interfered with Medical Treatment in March and July 2024. Caused cancellation of a 5-week lead time doctor appointment in July 2024. Prevented notification, filling, and delivery of prescriptions in early July. Caused me to run out of medicine from two prescriptions for over 2 weeks. Prevented getting groceries online, and I ran out of some staple and other items. Delayed resolving final details on my late friend's grave marker. (Must be done online.) Delayed locating and notifying a few of my late friend's other friends about his passing. Delayed updating my late Mom's, plus TWO of my late friends', memorial web pages. Caused online property tax payment to be late, resulting in over $200 in penalties. Prevented any and all online banking during both outages. Prevented starting my retirement income in time for the Summer of 2024. Hindered checking on my elderly Dad's status and preparing to care for him. Delayed looking into roofing companies, reducing selection for a summer re-roof. Prevented observing July Vandenberg rocket launches. (Launch times on Internet.) All of the above caused stress, and Frontier outages interfered with even more things. Exploring (and Selecting) Alternatives to Frontier's Abysmally Unreliable Service: As for alternatives to Frontier (none of these use phone lines due to the local monopoly): Shortly before Frontier's July 2024 outage began, I had narrowed down the most likely possibilities to Starlink and a regional cable / telecomm company that can provide Internet and phone over their cable. Between these, I would have chosen Starlink hands down (since it could be used in other locations), EXCEPT they apparently took down their Dish Web Portal web site in 2024. This means that a smart phone (with service) is now required, in order to download and run an app to align their antenna. My Tracfone is not a smart phone, so adding a smart phone and cell service to entry criteria for Starlink would excessively increase both the front end cost and the learning curve. (Also, touch screens such as those on smart phones are not very compatible with my medical situation.) As for the cable option: Frontier had already admitted that they don't even offer fiber in my area, so Frontier had nothing other than an unreliable phone line. This alone is ample reason to promote local competition, especially in areas where Frontier doesn't even offer the fiber service that they frequently advertize. With the Starlink Internet option, I'd probably have to use Voice Over Internet (VoiP) for a home phone. VoiP is not known for reliability, but I assume it would be more reliable than Frontier's abysmal 90 percent phone availability thus far in 2024. If a backup is needed for the phone service from another provider (I found out the hard way that a backup certainly is needed with Frontier, and that makes one wonder why they even exist), I might as well use a company that can also provide enough Internet bandwidth to reliably stream at least 720p video without choking. Another reason that it will be good to be shut of Frontier is that dialing out on their land line has always been quirky, in that, about half of the time, the dial tone did not stop when dialing out. That always prevented the call (or fax) from going through, so dialing had to start over. It could then take 3 or 4 attempts to get the dial tone to stop when a phone number was dialed. In the end, on 12 July, 2024, I SWITCHED away from Frontier and to a combined cable and telecomm company (rather than Starlink) as the alternative. Switching to the cable company instead of Starlink was partly due to cost, but was mainly because, after the Starlink Dish Web Portal became unavailable, what I read indicated that the Starlink antenna could no longer be set up properly without a smart phone. The cable company's current WiFi device seems to be app dependent (meaning I can't configure it beyond its default yet), but the Internet connection is about SEVENTY TIMES FASTER than Frontier's had recently been even on a good day, and it cost less. Initial speed tests showed 115 mbps download speeds, compared the paltry 1.5 mbps that was typical of Frontier over the previous year or so. (There was a time when Frontier provided 3 mbps. woo-eee!) Less than one full day after Internet and phone service were restored by using the cable company and quitting Frontier, I learned of the unfortunate 13 July events in Butler, Pennsylvania. Those events are not otherwise noted in this web page, because most of this subsection was written offline during the second LONG Frontier outage of 2024, and before switching to the cable company. After finally having Internet again, I also learned of problems restoring power in Houston, TX, almost a week after Hurricane Beryl. Perhaps another case of a complacent monopoly? My phone number (and its parameters of service) were not ported over to the cable company until 19 July at about 4 pm. And Frontier service was still down at that time. Frontier (Pointlessly) Shows Up to Restore Service AFTER I Switch to the Cable Company: About half an hour after my number was ported to the cable company, a tech came to my door. He said he was there to restore my phone and Internet service. I told him that a tech had just been here, and that everything had worked fine since then. The tech looked puzzled, then he said it must have been the cable company tech. It was only then that I looked in the background to see that this tech was from Frontier! I told him that I had switched to a cable company for phone and Internet, and he did not seem surprised by this. As though other customers may have done the same thing. I told him that (even though Frontier service was not working) I had to leave my Frontier account active until my phone number was ported over earlier that day, and that made sense to him. He asked what day I switched, then he relayed that to Frontier. It turned out that he may not have been able to restore service anyway, because the Frontier outage in my area continued for at least four more days. The Frontier tech said that there had been THREE incidents of their phone cables being stolen in my area so far that month. They would replace one stolen cable, only to find that another length of cable had been stolen a block or two away. Each theft was the interval between phone poles, or about 200 feet in these cases. (This differed from the "copper construction" and "regional outage" stories from overseas, but sounded more accurate.) I mentioned that if they ran fiber everywhere, they may not have that problem. He agreed, adding that their fiber cables had not been stolen. At that point in July 2024, Frontier service had been out for about 18 days and 15 hours, or about twice as long as their outage in March. And this was the first time I had been able to speak to a Frontier person who was NOT overseas all year! If Frontier had provided a way to speak with people in the USA, their outages may not have lasted so long. This is partly because, each time an outage was reported, it appeared to take Frontier at least 3 to 5 days before anyone knew anything, and several days beyond that to actually do anything. Jurisdictions that Effectively Decriminalize Theft and Vandalism are Bad for Business! If Frontier's claims of cable theft are true, the above also shows that effective decriminlalization of theft and vandalism in Los Angeles is NOT good for business! If there were significant penalties for such theft, and/or penalties for the harm to multiple parties that phone line theft causes, it would not happen as often, and companies like Frontier may not lose as many customers. Los Angeles and many other cities set the stage for all of this by tolerating and even encouraging mouth-breathing rioters who exerted themselves while in large groups during the 2020 "summer of love" riots (during a so-called pandemic), while arresting others who merely gathered to sing hymns outdoors. (I say so-called pandemic because unequal application of restrictions was used for political purposes in many liberal areas, and increased spread of the virus coincided with the riots, after accounting for the incubation period.) Maybe corporations and cities that back movements associated with repeat rioters should stop and think - about what the lawlessness they encourage will do to their bottom lines a few years later! Also, it seems that someone could make more money for a given amount of effort if they worked even a minimum wage job than they would by scaling TWO phone poles to steal each 200 foot length of cable. Whoever steals Frontier's cable is obiously able-bodied, and capable of working a real job. As a disabled person, it bothers me that able-bodied people waste their capabilities on such counterproductive things. Being able-bodied is a gift, and should be treated as such. This subsection may later be appended to briefly indicate how the selected alternative Internet and phone services worked out. Thus far, the Internet connection has been over 30 times faster than even the best (3.3 mbps) speed I ever had with Frontier. Beyond the faster Internet speed, the cable company has also been better in terms of customer service, in that ALL calls thus far have been answered by people in the USA. And most of them seem to know what they are doing. Hold times have also only been about 25 percent as long as they had been with Frontier. Of Monopolies, and the False Notion that Capitalism is the Same as Freedom: Before Frontier provided phone and Internet service in this area, it was provided by Verizon. I was not a fan of Verizon, but at least Verizon's service (which presumably used the same lines, as Verizon then owned the lines) was more reliable than Frontier - in the years before Frontier took over here. (I did not choose Frontier. They just took over service in this area several years ago.) When Verizon provided service here (essentially as a monopoly, since any other carrrier had to lease their lines), they did not honor their price for the first two years. (Their "reason" was quite amusing: They said that their "Revenue Assurance Department" mandated that they violate their 2-year customer agreement in terms of pricing.) Verizon had the same brief (seconds to minutes) outages that happened several times every day (which prevented downloading my webmail archive to a local email client). But the speed was occasionally a little better (could handle 720p video more often), and outages lasting for hours were less common. And they didn't have any outages that lasted entire days or weeks. Either way, it is an argument against monopolies. And if even a regional company has a local monopoly and fails to perform, it should be broken up just like AT&T was in the 1980's. After a few years, lower prices and better service followed that breakup. Because then, there was competition. Either that, or Internet service should not be privatized at all. No essential service should be privatized as the only customer option. At the very least, non-privatized Internet service should be available to everyone, then those who want more bandwidth can go with private alternatives. Had this been the case, Internet service would be more reliable, and I would have both made it to the path of totality and been able to interact with my doctors at a critical time, etc. Not to mention the greater benefit that increased Internet reliability would have for everyone else. Even without the above telecommunications debacle: As noted earlier in this journal, it was the "Ethics Board" of a corporation (an HMO) that presumed to act as a death panel in regard to my late friend. They acted in a brazen manner, with an attitude that implied: "This is what we are going to do, and there is nothing that you, even as POA, can do about it!" If that doesn't reveal an attitude that there will be no corporate accountability, I don't know what does. Unfettered capitalism that allows monopolies is not the same as freedom. We need only look at the censorship that corporations imposed in recent years to see the truth of this. Unfettered capitalism may even be a threat to freedom. Any case of power without accountability is a threat to freedom. And at the current time, there seems to be less accountability in corporations than in government. Rant complete! Now, on to the 2024 eclipse goals and instrumentation!

Goals of the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse Expedition (that didn't happen because of Frontier):

2024 Total Partial Solar Eclipse Images: Sequence, Partial Phases, H-Alpha, etc.:

2024 Total Partial Solar Eclipse Images: Partial Phases, H-Alpha, etc. (Sequence)

Appendix A: 2024 Total Eclipse Image, Video, Data Acquisition Procedure (Timeline):

Appendix B: Comparing My Total Solar Eclipse Instrumentation and Results (1979 to 2024):

Appendix D: Other (Partial) Solar Eclipses:
(Total Solar Eclipses are in my other web pages at this site.)

Appendix E: Solar Transits of Mercury and Venus:

Appendix F: Solar Prominences of Note in Current and Past Years:

Appendix G: Photos of Falcon 9, etc., Launches from Vandenberg SFB, as seen from L.A.:

Appendix H: Details About Some Items I Use for Eclipses and Other Astronomy:
(I am NOT paid to mention these items.)