Mylin’s Angry Pancreas

05/02/2026

As we head home, it has me thinking about the travel it took to get here and back. This might help those of you considering this procedure also living outside of driving distance.

Insurances are tricky, even when they like to seem like they have it all spelled out. We have very expensive high level premium insurance and still it only covers up to $3,000 annually for the sick client. They are more inclined to pay if it’s a transplant surgery (which My’s would be), but still don’t guarantee. Blue Shield suggested to us to book it, turn it the receipts and see what happens. However, that can get crazy fast! We wanted to make sure that if insurance stuck us with the bill that our travel would be affordable. I began searching some of my favorite flight search engines (kayak, google flights, Priceline, etc). I also looked on maps to figure out what other airports were in driving distance of Columbus.

In our case I found a cheap Frontier Flight round trip to Cleveland. Cleveland is a 2 hour drive to Columbus. I belong to the Frontier Discount Den, so I get the flights even cheaper than listed. I believe they were $120 round trip. We then did an electric car. They were the second cheapest under the economy cars, and with current gas prices of just under $5 a gallon even in Ohio, this was a saver too. There is a charging station in the silver lot at Nationwide. There are also some around the city if you happen to have time to grab a meal or explore. We stayed at the Ronald McDonald Charity House, so that was a huge saver too! They provide almost every meal for one hour per meal (ex. 8am-9am breakfast, 11am-noon lunch, 6pm-7pm dinner). With all the appointment some of those can be impossible to make, so they also have some first come first serve wrapped leftover, a fridge of random first come first serve pizza/frozen mini pancakes/eggs/milk (depends what’s left) and always tons of snacks, coffee, and juice. This definitely helps with the expenditures.

For us, we’re currently on our way home. Again not the most ideal flight, but it got us here and back. We drove the electric car two hours from Columbus to Cleveland, fly from Cleveland to Denver for 3 hours 33 minutes, have over a 3 hour layover, fly to San Diego for 2 hours and 36 minutes, land at midnight, wait for our bags and then wait for an Uber to grab us. 😴😴😴

We are so exhausted, but leaving feeling so glad we came.