06/16/2026
I am Ron Ayers. I run Classic Cars of South Carolina, located about 20 minutes east of Greenville, SC. Several years ago I started writing stories of my life’s adventures. I was sure that my friends and acquaintances might enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. I will be posting these chapters on my Classic Cars of SC page over the next few weeks. This is Chapter 36 of my story. I hope each and everyone of you who read these stories will enjoy them. I am 99% certain that the Land where Classic Cars of SC is located is sold and I will have to clear everything off of the property by February of next year. I have a LOOOOOOOOOT of vehicles and other stuff to sell or dispose of by then. If you, or anyone you know, might be looking for anything that I might have, please, you or have them, contact me at 864-313-2908. I hope you enjoy this chapter as well as the other chapters. Please leave a comment if you enjoyed it. Thanks for reading and may you have a BLESSED day. Ron at classiccarssouthcarolina.com
36) My insurance experience after getting married.
In May of 2006 Helga’s sister, Valerie, and brother-in-law, Bob, were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary. Bob had planned a cruise with 20 of their friends and asked us if we would like to go. I found out that Bob was planning to have a surprise renewing of their wedding vows for him and Valerie on the cruise. We decided to join them.
On the cruise, after the ceremony, Bob ask us if we were ready to get married. I had already proposed to Helga, and she had said yes. We decided to go ahead and get married on the ship. Right after Bob and Valerie renewed their vows we decided it was our time. Bob had been ordained as a minister and he preformed the ceremony on the ship. It was a wonderful cruise.
After we got home, Helga added me to her health insurance plan at Progressive Insurance Company where she worked. She worked for a major insurance company and had a lot better health insurance than I had at the time.
About a year after we were married, her company wanted to see our marriage license. We did not have license. We had a Marriage Certificate, but it was not a license. We sent them a copy of our Marriage Certificate and we sent them a copy of the law in South Carolina about Common Law Marriages. South Carolina was a Common Law Marriage state at that time, which they are not any more. With everything we provided to them, they were not satisfied. They kicked me off of her insurance.
I was able to get Cobra insurance for a year and then I had nothing. I found another insurance company that really sounded good. They all sound good until you need them and then you find out what you really have. In late 2010, I was suppose to have a colonoscopy. I had an appointment with the doctor. He ask me how I felt. I told him that sometimes when I would be working hard and running around my shop and car lot, I would get a tightness in my chest. He said he wanted me to get my heart checked before he put me under anesthesia for the colonoscopy.
He said he did not want the anesthesia to be the cause that would make me have a heart attack. So I made an appointment with my dad’s heart doctor, Dr. Eichmann, in Spartanburg. He checked me out and scheduled me for a stress test. I flunked it. Then he wanted me to have a CT scan. That’s when I found out how good my insurance was.
I called the hospital for a pre-op and found out that a CT scan was going to cost $3,000 and my insurance was only going to pay $100 of the $3,000. I told the person I was talking with that I would bring a thousand dollars cash with me when I came in for the scan and I would finance the balance.
He said that was OK. Then I scheduled the scan and had it. It showed that I had some spots on my lungs also. After I had the CT scan, I received a bill from the hospital. The bill showed that I still had a balance of $3,000. I called the billing department and informed them that I had been told that the CT scan would cost $3,000 and that I had already paid $1,000 and the bill that I received showed that I still owed the $3,000 that I was originally told the procedure would cost. The person told me that the $3,000 quote was just an estimate.
I asked the person how many of these procedures had the hospital done in the past. The person informed me that they had done thousands of these in the past. I said if you have done that many in the past you should know how much the procedure should or would cost.
My next procedure was to have a heart cauterization and determine how much blockage I had. I had an appointment to have the cath done at Spartanburg Regional Hospital in January 2011. There are 2 ways that the procedure can be done, the doctor can go through a vein in the arm or go through a vein in the groin. I certainly chose to have the procedure in my arm. While being prepped for the surgery, the nurse prepped both places for the procedure. When the doctor started inserting the instrument in my arm, it went up to my shoulder and stopped. There was a loop in that vein and the instrument would not go around the loop. Then the Doctor had to redo the procedure by going through the groin.
During the procedure, I was groggy but awake. I remember the doctor saying that, were the blockage was located, I was not a candidate for a stent. He said I was going to have to have a heart bypass. I almost had a heart attack right there on the spot.
I remembered, in 1994, my dad had gone to the hospital to have a cauterization and it was discovered that he had 4 blockages. One of the blockages was in front of where 2 arteries branched off. The doctor said that was alled the widow maker. If that blockage went, he would be dead before he hit the floor. The doctor would not even let my dad go home.
He scheduled the surgery for the next morning. I called my uncle Fred, my dad’s brother, in Connecticut and told him about dad’s surgery. Fred immediately booked a flight to be here the next morning. The surgery was delayed a couple of hours for some reason, just long enough for uncle Fred to get there. He arrived about 15 minutes before they wheeled dad out of the room to surgery.
We were told that the surgery would take about 6 or 7 hours. About 9 hours later the surgeon came out and told us that there had been major complications. My dad was a bad diabetic. The medicine that dad took for his diabetes comes from Swine. One of the medicines that the doctor used during the surgery comes from Salmon. These two medicines had had a major reaction.
Dad looked like he had swelled up a hundred pounds on the table. The doctor told us that, because of the complications, he would only give my dad about a 10% chance of making it. Dad was in the ICU heart center for 2 solid weeks. During that time, he had to have 2 more surgeries and one of those, they had to crack his chest open again. After the 2 weeks in the ICU, he was out on the heart floor for another 2 weeks.
He was in the hospital the entire month of March, 1994. I spent the entire night with him many nights during that last 2 weeks. Dad had had back problems most of his adult life. I would rub his back many times during the nights. Sometimes, I would rub so much that I felt like my arms were going to fall off.
One night, dad told me about a dream he had. He said he was standing in front of an arched gate overlooking a field of big white puffy flowers for as far as he could see. He said the gate was in a fence line that was covered by roses and there was a lot of people standing behind him.
He said he turned to the people and asked “Where are the Angeles?” They said, “They are out there” and pointed out over the field of flowers. He said he could not see the Angels so he turned back to the crowd and ask again “Where did you say the Angeles are?” They pointed out over the flowers again and said “They are out there. Can’t you see them?” He said he never could see the Angels.
The doctor who did my dad’s surgery was a friend of my Pastor, Dennis S. About 6 months after my dad’s surgery, I was talking with my pastor and shared the dream that my dad had told me about. Dennis told me that the doctor had told him that my dad had arrested a couple of times during the surgery. The only thing I can presume is that dad had that dream during one of his near death experiences and it was not dad’s time to go to heaven.
When dad was released from the hospital, the incisions where they removed the veins from his legs to do the bypasses opened up They looked just like the V that they cut in the top of a Subway Sandwich when the sandwich maker is getting ready to put the ingredients in the sandwich. The V was about an inch deep, an inch wide and over a foot long.
We ask the doctor why they didn’t sew it back up. He said that it would heal from the inside, and since there was no tissue removed, it would heal up like it had never been there. Over the next 6 months, a nurse would come to the house a couple of times a day to start with, then once a day, then to a couple of times a week and finally to just once a week until the wounds were completely healed.
With only a 10% chance of living in March 1994, my dad lived another 16 years before he went to be with the Lord on April 15, 2010.
Now that the recollection of my dad’s heart surgery was out of my mind, I decided that it was now time for me to have my surgery. Since I had already discovered that my insurance was just about worthless, Helga and I decided that it was time to bow down to her employers request and get a marriage license, which I do not believe in, and have a legal wedding in addition to the lawful wedding that we had already had. We went to the South Carolina marriage license bureau and got a marriage license.
Then we got remarried by our pastor on January 26th, 2011. Her company let her add me to her insurance plan the very next day, never asking to see the marriage license. I ended up having my heart bypass just a few days later and the insurance paid for almost all of my $150,000 heart surgery.
I was very fortunate, I did not have to have my chest cracked open like most heart bypass surgeries require. I only had one blocked artery, therefore, I was a candidate for a new procedure where the surgeon went through my side with a robotic arm, disconnected an artery from my left shoulder and reconnected it to my heart. I was told that the doctor could have been setting in front of a computer in London and have done the surgery just as easily as he did it while setting in the operating room.
I was back at home, on my couch, less than 3 days from the time I had gotten off of the operating room table. I was told that the doctor who did my surgery was the doctor who is put on call when any dignitary comes into our area.
Before dawn the next morning, I was up and walked the entire way around the hall of the hospital floor I was on. My surgery could not have gone any better. How lucky can one get and the insurance paid for it all.
