It has been a pretty slow week at Inkreadable. The weather in the first part of the week didn’t cooperate very well, leading a late cancel for Sander. That’s been a bit of a continuous thing in lessons over the last few weeks, February has turned out to be ferocious in terms of weather. Getting to the location where we meet has been treacherous. I would’ve been happy to switch to online, but there just wasn’t enough notice to let TEC know to cancel the room where we meet. There was no lesson this week so I spent yesterday teaching extra VIPKid classes.
My Lingueo classes have also been relatively slow between having to cancel for a doctors appointment and not having my third student on my schedule this week because she had a break. Consequently, I was able to set up my lessons through 1 March. Of course, it helps that one of my lessons was planned for 15 February but will have to be for that first of March instead. But I generally like the trend where I’m able to plan the lessons for all of my students by the beginning of the week before. It lets me chill out on the weekends and do other things.
My Sunday schedule went back to normal with Karolina back after a Valentine’s Day break and ready to study. Our IELTS prep is going well, but some of that has to do with the fact that she hasn’t actually scheduled the exam nor does she know when she wants to take it. On Sunday, before we got started with exercises I talked to her about her potential timetable and her own research and self study. It would be interesting to see how she does on an actual timed exam, so I am going to try to find a couple of mock exams if I can.
This week I also had a consultation with the doctor about my MRI results. He feels that the numbness in my feet were a one off neurological events due to a virus. He proposed myelitis as the reason for the numbness. But he said that of more concerned for him is the fact that I do have lesions on my brain that he wants to monitor. So it’s to be quarterly MRIs for the next year and then possibly ending the monitoring if nothing changes. I am not unhappy with the way that he is handling my case and can be thankful at his briskness because it keeps me calm. There are 1,000,001 reasons for lesions on the brain so I’m trying not to worry about it. In the first place, a lesion is simply an abnormality, and in my case could have been caused by contracting Hydrocephalus at birth. While I am not happy by all of that forthcoming visits to the hospital, at least I am not in America, where I could potentially be beggared between insurance costs and hospital bills. Having not been part of any employment insurance Skim through an employer when I left the US, If I was living there I would have to be a consumer on the open market paying upwards of $500 a month in premiums. Is it any wonder that I’m quite happy to be in the Netherlands where they are a little bit more reasonable about insurance prices and don’t have the same Me me me mentality as people in the US? I am quite happy to be paying a quarter of what I was paying in the US. In addition, I haven’t received a bill for any of the MRIs or visits to the doctor. In America I would be getting bills every day.
That’s all she wrote for this Inkreadable installment. But stay tuned. As always, there is more to come.
Inkreadable 