One of the hardest parts of our long term nicu stay — beside the obvious of having a sick baby — is the fact that life doesn’t stop just because you’re in the nicu. The dishes and laundry still need to be done. Bills need to be paid. Groceries need to be acquired and turned into meals. It’s all of the normal life stuff plus spending all of your time at the hospital and feeling guilty when you can’t be there. (Talking about the guilt is for another day.) Of course, all of this is compounded by LP being at a hospital that was 60 miles away from our house.
One instance of life carrying on occurred a week before LP was discharged. I had just returned from dinner at the family room and sent Justin off for his time away when I got a text message from Chase asking if I had made a $300 charge. Unfortunately, it wasn’t me. I called the fraud department and verified that two other charges weren’t us and verified all of our pending charges. Since there were three fraudulent transactions, Chase canceled my card and sent us new ones. All of this took about 10 minutes and I’m thankful that Chase notified me.
What’s most frustrating though is dealing with the aftermath. I’m working through updating my autopay accounts with the new information. I also spent two hours getting mint on the same page and removing duplicate entries because both accounts show up there and I didn’t want to entirely delete the compromised account since all of my long term history would be deleted as well.
It took two weeks to get things reorganized and back to normal. I’m still keeping an eye on my credit report just in case something strange happens there. It was stressful to deal with, bit that’s how we grow and build grace.
Smith Happens 