Christmas Eve at her brother’s house in Port Orange, FL
Kathie Gagne died 4,639 days ago.
December 24th, 2006 @ 7:21 pm
December 23rd, 2006 @ 5:48 pm
At my mother-in-law’s house and laughing, just prior to Christmas, 2006
November 11th, 2006 @ 12:00 pm
I’m not sure how it happened. I was driving home from work. I was tired, a little stressed about moving and all the burdens I’ve been carrying for so long.
I’d finished a mystery on CD, and I put Celine Dion’s Christmas album in the player.
There was “Oh, Holy Night” in all its glory.
I’ve been thinking about God and backing away a lot, for a while now. Suddenly a random thought ran through my head. “I think I want God in my life.” As I sang and listened to the song, I felt a fleeting memory of loving Jesus.
There wasn’t any fanfare, no sparks or deep thoughts.
Something changed.
Since that strange moment, I’ve felt warm, almost protected, peaceful.
I don’t know what’s coming next, but I’m waiting for it.
I don’t feel guilt for before, for not believing. I’m not exactly sure what I believe now, but I’m waiting, listening, looking …
Kathleen A. Gagne
October 29th, 2006 @ 11:30 am
Anna Albanese 10/28/1920 – 05/04/2007
Kathleen Gagne 09/22/1948 – 08/12/2012
I really like this photo of my mother and grandmother. My grandmother was an amazing woman and I loved her dearly.
When Nana died it just devastated mom, and I have always been a little sad that my son never got a chance to know his great-grandmother.
And it pains me more than I can describe that he will never get to know his grandmother, and that she didn’t get to enjoy being his nana.
October 23rd, 2006 @ 8:37 pm
Here is a letter pulled from mom’s old computer hard drive. I have no way of knowing if she ever actually printed and mailed it to Dr. Akey.
October 23, 2006
Dear Dr. Akey,
In all the time I have been your patient, I have never received what I believe to be adequate support from your accountant/financial representative.
Recently, I received an invoice for $441.00 with a request for payment for office visits in 2005! Why is she sending out invoices a year old? I don’t understand the issue between Blue Cross and your office, but I suspect that much of the problem is related to the total confusion surrounding what patients were expected to do.
I understand that you have concerns about providing your patients with the best possible help and that taking on more patients to make Blue Cross happy is an ethical issue for you. At the same time, when I came in on numerous occasions, I was given conflicting information by different office staff.
In fact, based on conversations with your office staff, who were very helpful in general, but who seemed as confused as your patients over what was required, I actually submitted approximately 7 or 8 invoices for payment.
Frankly, I wasn’t sure who was supposed to get money from BCBS, and I honestly can’t recall getting any checks related to refunds for office visits from them.
I work really hard and very long hours. I love having you as my primary care physician, but I can’t spend hours trying to figure out what Valerie (?) did and why she can’t get an appropriate response from BCBS. Is there some legal reason why they will not respond to Valerie, or is she refusing to contact them? I have never had a doctor’s office finance person who was not available to discuss invoices and payments in person and who almost never answered the phone when I was able to get a few minutes to call. When it comes to healthcare, getting the billing right is a big deal, and getting courteous service from the billing person is important.
Now Valerie is asking patients to submit year-old invoices for payment. Why can’t she handle this? Is there some reason why she can’t deal with BCBS? She has certainly made a negative impression on me. I feel that she should be required to follow up on whatever mess was made. I’m not sure when the problems you had with BCBS started, but I can’t believe that it should have taken this long to contact me and demand immediate payment. I will have to go back into my records to find out what I paid over a year ago. I was really offended by the fact that she wrote “we will NO LONGER be sending out duplicate statements” when this is the first time I have heard about this in a year.
I will make a call to BCBS, and I will mail them a copy of the statement I just received. It would be nice if I could get copies of the original invoices. Apparently, however, there are no invoice numbers available, so I’m not sure how they can be tracked down. I’m also not sure how quickly I can get a response, but I will try.
I’ll make sure that you get payment one way or another, but I feel that your patients could have been better served by your billing person.
I hope all is well with you. Happy Halloween.
Cordially,
Kathie Gagne
October 15th, 2006 @ 5:45 pm
Mom was very, very proud of the work she did for Americorps. She worked there from approximately 2002 until 2008 and I know she was thrilled to be doing something that reminded her of Camelot. Here’s a letter she wrote to prospective volunteers. On her old computer hard drive I found this file titled volunteer letter.doc dated October 15th, 2006.
Hi, Everyone!
Thank you so much for your interest in tutoring at-risk children in Alachua County elementary schools!
This year, we have 21 AmeriCorps Members who are serving thousands of hours to make a difference for kids who need a little help.
Statistics consistently demonstrate that, if a child cannot read independently by the end of the third grade, he or she will have over a 90% chance of dropping out of school!
You can be a part of changing children’s lives! By helping them to become better readers, by instilling in them a love of reading because you make it fun, and by letting them know that reading is the key to becoming whatever they want to be.
What we are looking for are tutors who can reasonably commit to tutoring a minimum of two hours a week for about
20 weeks. (More is great!) We’ll train you to use a simple tutoring session developed by an Alachua County Reading Coach. We have several schools available, all waiting for your help. Whenever possible, you pick the school, and you pick the time or times you want to serve.We’ll be having a recognition party in April, and everyone who participates will receive a certificate showing hours served and the location in which you tutored. You’ll also have access to trained AmeriCorps tutors at most of the schools we serve for support and information.
We have three training session scheduled in October. All will be held in the Board Room at the Kirby-Smith Center. We are located half a block east of the downtown library just before you get to 7th Street.
If you would like to join us for orientation, please select from 10/16 5:30-6:30, 10/18 4:30-5:30, or 10/24 5:30-6:30. To get to the Board Room, just come in under the arch and follow the signs. If you would like more explicit directions, please email me or call me at [redacted].
I hope to see you at one of our trainings in October. We will also be scheduling at least two more in November and two in January. If you can’t make a scheduled training, give me a call, and we’ll set a time to get you ready to tutor.
Again, our thanks,
Cordially,
Kathie Gagne
Program Director
AmeriCorps Alachua County READS!
August 6th, 2006 @ 12:31 pm
I have no idea where this photo was taken. Surely someone who knows mom will be able to tell me. There simply can’t be that many ten-foot tall chickens in the world.
The file is stamped August 6th, 2006 at 3:31 PM Eastern, although I cannot confirm whether that is accurate.
May 26th, 2006 @ 12:00 pm
From: Gagne, Kathleen
To: [redacted]
Subject: Hello Again Again (2)
Sent: May 26, 2006Hi, Brenda, Robin, and Tony (I hope)
David ran in the Los Angeles Marathon on April 19. He is 32 and has never run a marathon before. His number was 23647, and I think you can see pics of him if you go to lamarathon.com. I actually went to LA on April 27 and came home May 3. It was great! I got a chance to really spend some quality time with David’s girlfriend (soon to be fiance, I think). Jen flew in from Chicago to meet us there. She turned 31 on Monday. God, I’m getting old. David and [redacted] are renting a really nice house. They have two dogs and two cats – right up my alley. We went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park (not to be considered the Zoo) and had a great time. We also went to the La Brea Tar Pits. That place is really cool. There’s a great museum, there is tar popping up all throughout the park. David got some on his jeans and shoes. The best fun was just being with David and Jen (Except when we’re shopping. I hate browsing, and both my kids still have to touch everything in the store). We did the Santa Monica Pier, but I had seen it last year. It was nice to have Jen there. By the way, the Pacific Ocean is just like the Atlantic, only facing the other way. HeHe!
Someone told me today that they thought I was around 50. Yea!!!!!
Jen and her roommate in Chicago have been hiking the Appalachian Trail for a week at a time for several years. They started at the southern end and are all the way up to Virginia this year. Jen loves the great outdoors!!! She and [redacted] are on the trail as of today.
I’m heading for Daytona this weekend. I try to go every two weeks to see Mom. She turned 85 October 28. It’s a 2.5 hour drive, but I really miss her and want to see her and my niece and nephew (and Dic).
What are you guys up to? Maybe I will be able to get up there in a few months. I’m sooooo glad we got connected again. I really love you guys!
Write soon,
Kathie
May 15th, 2006 @ 3:26 pm
On mom’s old computer I found a file dated May 15th, 2006 named Dr. Akey 5-25-06.doc.1 It’s clearly a letter to her doctor. We always joked that mom was a hypochondriac, primarily because she spent so much of her youth living upstairs from a funeral home and surrounded by death and stories of it. The letter is painful to read; it’s clear that she was desperate for some sort of help.
I know that she had health insurance when she wrote this, which makes it even more frustrating.
May 15, 2006
Dear Dr. Akey,
I’m writing this so that you can understand how I feel about my health right now.
I’m doing it in the form of a timeline because I hope that you will be able to tell my when I might start to feel better.October 2, 2005
I went to Orlando for training in Conflict Resolution. The weather was cold and wet the whole first day. People in the training had colds. My daughter came with me, and we stayed in a hotel that was being renovated. Lots of dust and noise.On the 3rd, we went to Downtown Disney and had a great time. By the time I got home, I had the broncho-spasms you diagnosed early on.
Mid-November
I think you gave me a Z-Pak which I took, but I kept getting worse. I was missing work (6 days) because I was so exhausted and having trouble breathing. I felt a little better for a few days with the antibiotic, but I got worse again within a couple of weeks.December
I worked really hard in December to develop a grant proposal for the program I run, but I was totally exhausted and still having breathing problems. At some point in December, I think, you gave me a nebulizer, and prescribed Xopenex, and one other one to use with it. You also gave me Advair. . You said I had atypical pneumonia.January
I don’t know if you can understand how awful I felt for those first couple of months. I had no energy, barely made it to work, and I couldn’t think because I was so uncomfortable. I believe it was in January that you said the Advair had damaged the lining of my esophagus and sent me to Dr. Punja. He said my lungs were fine but agreed about the esophagus. One of you gave me Aciphex, but it didn’t help with the burning in my throat or my stomach.I had never had acid reflux of any kind. Prior to that time, I had probably purchased no more than 3 or 4 small packages of TUMS in 20 years, and I rarely has more than one or two out of the packet.
February/March
You gave me Nexium, which I took, and told me to use Maalox as needed which I did. Neither gave me any relief. I couldn’t eat the foods that are good for my weight because they are more difficult to digest, so I continued to gain weight. I had no energy to walk or exercise.April
I had Spring Break and did virtually nothing. I felt awful. I felt, in fact, as if my throat was getting worse. At the end of April, I went on my long-anticipated trip to Los Angeles. I went with some trepidation because I didn’t feel very well. When I got off the first plane, I could hardly walk and was shaking from going up the ramp to the terminal.I managed to have fun with my kids and my soon-to-be daughter-in-law, but I had the burning sensation all the time, my left ankle was swollen a significant part of the time, and I couldn’t really enjoy my food.
By the time I got home, my throat was both burning and aching. My head was stuffed, and I knew it was from more than just the plane. I missed my first day back at work, and worked only part of the day on the Friday.
I spent the next week going in late and leaving early and feeling sicker and sicker.
I really need to know what can be done about the damage to my esophagus. That’s a huge problem, especially combined with the cold I’m dealing with. This has been going on for seven months.
When I came in last week, you listened to my chest and said I had broncho-spasms again, but you didn’t realize that I had a raging head cold until I pointed it out to you. Then you gave me the Ketek and told me that I should come back in two weeks if I wasn’t 100%.
I have one more day of the Ketek, and I feel only marginally better. My ears are no longer plugged all the time, and I am not sneezing or coughing as much.
WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO ABOUT MY THROAT? WHAT IS A REASONABLE AMOUNT OF TIME FOR IT TO GET BETTER?
If you have some thoughts about this, please let me know. I can’t tell you how awful I feel. I was even wondering if I had something like thrush in my throat. I’m functioning at about 30% right now. I’m missing work. And, beginning May 16, this will be the busiest time of the year for me.
What can I do?
Kathie Gagne
1 I don’t know if it is a typo in the filename or if she waited ten days to send it, or what the story is there with that discrepancy.
May 7th, 2006 @ 12:00 pm
Mom and Jenny came to visit me in Los Angeles in the Spring of ’06 and we had a great time. We went to Disneyland and the La Brea Tar Pits and I got to show them my new home.
Once they returned to Florida, Mom sent me a greeting card with Tweety Bird on the front saying, “Thank you…” and inside, “…from the bottom of my widdle heart.” This is what she wrote inside: