In most blog posts, we discuss the happy times in life or the lessons we learned during hard times. We could do that or we could actually say what we're feeling. We're sad. Actually we're devastated by the loss of someone we cared about. 

We lost a great woman this week and the truth is she should still be here. She should be at home right now recovering with her husband and their beautiful 10-month old babies in her arms. She's not.

Whenever someone dies young, we usually say the same thing—"She was taken from us far too soon." Well, she was. "God needed another angel." It wasn't God's doing unless God sits at a desk denying medical coverage.

She was denied the medical care she so rightfully deserved and paid for. As an American with private insurance, there is no logical explanation why she should have been denied. Someone at a desk played roulette with her life and now she's gone. That person still has a job and she's gone. 

Had things worked out the way her doctors and family had planned, she would have had the surgery she required. Instead, she died waiting for an approval for emergency transportation. She fucking died waiting for a solution to the solution her doctors already had come up with!

Her three beautiful babies will now grow up without their mother. They will never hear her laugh or see how passionate she was about saving animals and helping broken-down ponies recover and find a family to love them. They will never see her skunk face when she's just taken a sip of poor-tasting wine. She will never have the opportunity to terrify her children when she tried to parallel park (but she could whip around a gooseneck trailer like nobody's business).

She's not here because someone at a desk with significant less education than the physicians ready and willing to treat this young mother was told to say no. She had a diagnosis. The insurance company knew what that diagnosis meant. Those 16-hours of waiting for a decision and executing a plan-B could have been used to save her life. 

A 34-year old woman with her whole life ahead of her is gone. And for what? To save a few hundred thousand dollars? To follow protocol in some manual written by an incompetent politician or insurance executive who only cares about money?

What happened to her is nothing new. Open up the newspaper and you're likely to read about a lawsuit involving the loved ones who lost someone because of an uninformed, uneducated decision by someone other than the physicians ready to do right by a patient. Our lives shouldn't come down to that. The system is so broken it's difficult to find a way to fix it. But it needs to be fixed. 

To our favorite moody girl, we love you and already miss you terribly. Rest easy knowing the ABC kids will grow up knowing what a horrible driver you were and how excited you got when you found an error in someone else's work. Despite taking two weeks to name the trio, you loved them with every fiber of your being—even if you were in a panic the first five months while pregnant! We promise to smell the wine before we drink it.

Most importantly, we're sorry for talking about you on social media; we know how much you hate that shit. 

With love,

N&R