Every night since I developed POTS, I listen to some version of waves crashing against the shore. I find that these sounds sooth me the most, and I sleep so much better with them…but only if they crash with a certain amount of force. Not too much, not too little. My inner Goldilocks gets it.
Life in a way is like spending time on a beach. Sometimes the balance of the waves is one we like, other times it’s maybe too much, too little, too dangerous, too tame…and sometimes everything just gets flooded one way or another. I have seen the ebb and flow of such moments this past week.
A kingly and elegant hummingbird with royal purple feathers flowing down his head stopping on a pomegranate branch about 15 inches from me while I was meditating and grounding as the sun was just starting to roll into the sky where I live- and stayed on the branch until I moved. Which I didn’t for bit, because it was such a treat being so close to a hummingbird. Trouble with our garage door, mostly resolved at this point. Tony staying at school for 4 hours and making it to his first full lunch period. Somebody trying to open a credit card in my name using all my personal information…including my SSN.
Yeah. That was a wave that crashed a bit too much for sure.
Ok, so that last part is definitely the kind of wave I don’t want, but that’s life. Sometimes it comes at you in ways you don’t want. But it could have been worse. Because I get notifications from Experian for any change to my credit report through them, I was sent an alert within a few minutes of the person submitting the application…and I know based on when the credit was pulled MST that they live in a time zone that hadn’t hit midnight for them at the time they did it based on when it posted to the credit card company’s system.
There are villains in this story (boo to the person who did this – because it certainly wasn’t me, I can’t see myself needing a card with frequent flyer miles since I don’t think I could even get my kiddo calmly through the airport, their security procedures, and on to a plane in the first place right now- and the original hackers who raided one of the health care providers I have seen that this information likely was scraped from) and there are heroes (like John from AZ who works for the fraud department at that particular credit card company getting the application canceled out and marked fraudulent for me before it was approved).
There are things that are lucky. Hurray that I get notifications from Experian (who alerted me within minutes to the hard pull on my credit that is done when an application is initiated), because even though I have monitoring for 24 months from one of the doctors I used to see who got hacked, their service is through Transunion, and that’s not where the credit report was pulled from…so I wouldn’t have known in time to do anything to prevent a big, ugly mess if I had waited for Transunion to register a new account.
There are things that suck. I’ve spent more than six hours total related to getting that application marked fraudulent and freezing all of my credit reports and putting fraud alerts on through the three credit agencies. And, I’m sadly not done. This person used my SSN, DOB, all my stuff…which is why I believe it was from one of the health care hacks that has exposed my information in the past year and not one of the retail hacks. Nobody I just buy stuff from gets that up close and personal enough with me to know my SSN.
Why do we even need three credit agencies anyways? Because what it looks like to me is that unless someone is getting notifications from all three, or paying for a whole lot of different monitoring services, it’s a little too easy for something to slip through the cracks if only one agency is providing your service as regards to that. And quite frankly, that’s not benefiting anybody but identity thieves and fraudsters. Maybe the individual agencies collecting monitoring fees are benefiting, but good golly credit fraud is costly and I vote for consolidating all of the credit agencies into one!
I didn’t initially freeze my credit when I got the notice from my former cardiologist because I’ve been getting these types of notices for years, I just monitor my stuff, and I like to have the flexibility of being able to do whatever I need to do without unfreezing, unlocking, etc. Now I’m kind of wishing I’d frozen it, but then I wouldn’t have know for sure someone tried to do this with that information. But truth is, I got lucky, because this account was closed before it was ever approved.
I have heard people recommend not to give health care providers your SSN, but the reason they want that is so that there aren’t medical records mix ups between individuals with similar or even idential names. I used to work for a hospital system, and those kinds of medical records mix ups can kill people, so they prefer to have something that is a super unique identifier like the SSN for patients. But it’s definitely unfortunate when data gets hacked from a healthcare entity that has access to all of that. However, if you are concerned after reading my story, you can probably ask your provider to issue you an organization specific computer generated ID number from their system for their medical records- it just won’t transfer well to other health care systems in my opinion.
But that’s life. It’s the good and the bad. Our son’s BCBA encouraged me to do something kind for myself this past weekend, like some colorful makeup on a day off from my job at the school. Today was the earliest I could manage that (spring break) with what’s been going on, but I also got to have breakfast with my good friend Gena. So even when the waves are pounding too hard sometimes, there’s always still a gentle stretch of walking in the sand and finding some bit of quieter enjoyment.
And before I get going, one quick video share: I found this soooooo relaxing after I spent 1 hour and 39 minutes on one phone call alone over all this. You can click on the title for a link.
Rainbow Curve and Relaxing Music, YouTube video by Lew’s Sensory Therapy
