Double bourbon, please. Leave the bottle.

So my wife is being sued for malpractice. It's a friend's client, whom she was assisting for all of 2 hours, in 2013. She isn't even called out by name in the paperwork, but she's on the charts (as she should be). Our guess is that the family is primarily attempting to get money out of the hospital that received the transport, but as lawyers do, everybody got shotgunned.

Midwives in California can't take insurance anyway and aren't required to carry malpractice insurance. This has led to the common practice of not carrying it. The idea being that the family doesn't see you as a giant meal ticket attached to a doctor, they see you as someone whose life they have to ruin and pickaxe apart if they want any money out of you. Neither my wife nor her friend had malpractice insurance in 2013; my wife had it (first one in California, so far as we know) four months later and her friend had it a year later. So this is a test of that theory, I guess, as insurance sure as hell don't cover stuff that happened before you were insured. Of course, they've got 90 days to file once they've served, and they served Monday. So we might not even know what we're looking at for another three months.

Meanwhile, the job from hell has outmaneuvered my union. Without getting into the specifics, they've managed to find a weird little corner of the agreement (that I haven't seen) that allows them to argue the union contract doesn't apply to me. End result? No back pay, no union hours, no benefits. It means I really was getting my ass kicked out in the woods for "lose my number" money, being away from my family while contractors hit us with a 2000% markup on simple work and generally delaying my life working 12 hours a day in hostile conditions for people I hate. Yesterday they basically said "yup can't help you, sucks to be you" until I pointed out that the conditions they're backing out on are something my union was aware of before I even got there and that I could have protected myself against these problems trivially had they only bothered to inform me. So now they're scrambling, but it's like expecting the Keystone Kops to arrest the robber. Really, the worst I expect they can do is feel bad for screwing up, and they aren't particularly good at that.

BUT THINGS SUCK ALL OVER. Nearly everyone I know has it worse than us. I mean - lose our jobs? DONE! Neither of us are working right now so we're inoculated. Lose our health insurance? DONE! it goes away in October if I don't get hired back to my big show. We've got a giant phatty loan we can tap into for the next 11 months come hell or high water and our cost of living keeps getting cheaper. I mean, shit. We're waiting to hear back on whether or not the rootin' tootin' private school is going to give us financial aid to send our daughter there. If they do, our daycare budget actually shrinks and if they don't, she keeps going where she goes, which we can afford.

And hey. My wife is about to get a lot more work from another friend because one of the midwives in her practice is about to have a baby, and the other...

...yeah. So you deliver babies for a living, you have a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old and your husband is a stay-at-home dad. And he's having difficulty swallowing and his back hurts but you don't do anything for six weeks and then you send him in for a checkup and he's lost 50 lbs. And then he goes in for an endoscopy and the question becomes "Hodgekins or non-Hodgekins." And you don't have health insurance and chemo ain't cheap so you need to stop seeing clients or earning money of any kind because you need to drop below the poverty line immediately so that you qualify for Medicaid.

Which means my wife needs to pick up the slack.

And our relationship is strong, and we're all healthy, and really, we may be losing a couple rungs from a very tall ladder and we're going to be fine. But it still sucks. And it sucks worse when you look around and realize that all your friends are dealing with suck.

So watch your backs, Hubski. Not sure if mercury is in retrograde or what, but things are getting eerily bad-newsy. Stay frosty.