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When 15-year-old twins Alexander and Penelope began developing a myriad of symptoms, it was a mystery until a series of visits to a nearby hospital’s sleep clinic began to produce some answers. Their frantic parents would have been even more in a tizzy if the hospital bills hadn’t been covered – thanks to their California Health Insurance agent Matt Lockard.

 ”Asleep” The Smiths

Alexander and Penelope were identical twins except for their gender. Blonde and blue-eyed, with perfect skin and on the cusp of being adults, the twins thrived during a marvelous summer.  Tennis camp, sleepovers, surfing and swimming, camping, parachuting from 15,000 feet in their Dad’s twin-engine aircraft, the Smith kids played hard and slept hard, uninterrupted, for the months trailing the June solstice in the land of Ventura night. But when school began just before Labor Day, the teens began to change before their parent’s eyes.

Alexander developed a cyst under his left eye. Penelope began stumbling as if she were nearsighted although her vision had been tested in July at 20-10 left and right. Adolescence suddenly bred entire tribes of pus-filled pimples.   Alexander became injury prone: When he tried to run he tripped most times, his perfectly proportioned legs no longer coordinated.  “Something’s wrong,” Ashley their mom told Gary, their father, who was sure that there wasn’t. “It’s just the awkward stage,” he asserted.

“Are they both just being awkward?” Ashley Smith countered.

“They’re both teenagers,” Gary shrugged.

But the twins kept getting worse.  Finally, because they did have a family plan purchased from California Health Insurance agent Matt Lockard, Gary relented and took both 15-year-olds over to Dr. Nicole Tesla, the family’s trusted primary care physician. When she examined them, she knew the answer almost immediately. “How much are they sleeping?” she asked.

“They go up to their bedrooms,” Gary said. “The lights are out. Of course they’re sleeping.”

“How do you know?” asserted Dr. Tesla. When she spoke, electric sparks seemed to give a bluish tint to her waiting room’s tepid air. She suggested they find out for sure.  Both twins were wired to biofeedback equipment on school nights to satisfy Dr. Tesla’s medically-based hunch.  

Was this equipment covered? Gary called Matt Lockard to find out. It was.  

The results were amazing. The kids weren’t getting their REM, the productive kind of rest signaled by rapid eye movements. “Teenagers need their beauty rest,” Dr. Tesla concluded.

“Alexander needs his too?” Ashley wondered.  

“He sure does,” Dr. Tesla pronounced.

“But they have to go to school!” Gary said. The solution seemed simple: a modified school day built around later mornings and longer afternoons, a 9-5 adjustment. It was as if a solstice had returned to the land of Ventura night.

All 13-year-old Billy Blalock wanted to do was rake his neighbor’s leaves to earn some spending money. When the sneezing fits began, the boy’s plans were threatened unless he could swallow a potent antihistamine prescribed by the family doctor. Thankfully a California Health Insurance Agent had made the price of the pills a little easier for Billy’s parents to swallow.

Billy Blalock was eager to earn extra money. He needed a new skateboard and Playstation 3, but his parents were scrimping just to get by. His “job,” raking leaves at the Jones next door in their modest Rancho Bernardo ‘hood’, seemed like a no-brainer. When Sally Jones, a pert brunette thirty-something whom Billy considered “a second mom,” agreed to Billy’s raking after school, the teenager was elated.

“I can rake!” he exclaimed to Betty, his first mom, “I can rake!”

“Yes you can,” she replied deadpan, sort of like a 34-year-old feminine version of a Caucasian Barack Obama.   

But a strange thing happened on the way to Billy’s raking. Underneath the Jones’s imported maple tree, an exotic from New England, Billy sneezed. He returned to raking. He sneezed again.  He started raking again, a bit more tentatively this time. Suddenly he sneezed in a burst, once, twice, three times, perhaps a hundred times as he couldn’t stop sneezing. Billy was sneezing so hard he was crying. He ran away in tears from the poisonous tree straight to Sally’s ample bosom. “Second mom! Second mom!”  Billy cried, “I can’t.”  

“You can’t what?” Sally asked, noticing the tears in the eyes of her neighbor’s son.

“Rake,” Billy blurted, sobbing.

Billy’s real mom Betty decided to seek a medical solution since they’d purchased an individual child’s plan from a California Health Insurance agent.  Dr. Quag was friendly to Billy at his office and patted his belly several times, which seemed a bit weird to the boy. The prescription, however, gave Billy hope. The doctor prescribed sixty milligrams twice a day of a drug called fexofenadine, also referred to as Allegra, and the funny thing was, Billy had even heard of it, having seen it recently on a TV commercial. 

“Allegra,” Billy said, “I’ll be taking Allegra so I can rake by the maple tree!”

“Yes, you can,” said Dr. Quag, “if you remember to take your peach-colored pills!”

Betty was there too. “It’s peachy that Billy’s Allegra isn’t costing me out of pocket,” she said.

“Are they peach flavored?” Billy asked.

He was the biggest-boned kid in the 16-member Pedroia clan. At age 14, Rudy was downright husky as Pedroias went, graced with good looks and a sturdy physical stature freshly bestowed upon him by puberty. But in the harsh glare of the stadium klieg lights, he weighed only 87 pounds fully dressed in pads and gear, and a California health insurance agent triumphantly emerged as the family’s hero.Bakersfield’s Rudy Pedroia was a born athlete. At age ten, his father Randy first spied his son’s potential. When the kid pranced barefoot in the summer heat, “My boy has an athlete’s foot,” he casually remarked.  

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Rudy practiced. He knew every play. Fleet of athlete’s foot, the day came when he made the varsity squad. A freshman, the Pedroia’s little star sat on the bench on that fateful night. His wise parents had purchased a child’s individual health insurance plan for their son, just in case. Rudy was third-string; at four feet five and 87 pounds, no one beyond the Pedroia clan figured that Rudy would actually play. Still, the entire family watched as they always did. Randy was proud.  “He has athlete’s feet!” he would brag to anyone within earshot while attracting looks of mild disdain. Finally Rudy’s big moment came. The home team’s first-string tackle broke an ankle and was carried off the field on a stretcher. The second-string tackle got clotheslined in the groin and nearly lost his tackle. When that unconscious 200-pounder was carted off, the coach looked at the bench and saw … “You!” he barked, “Get in there!” The crowd uttered a collective gasp.  “He’s so shrimpy!” somebody’s grandmother screeched. But Rudy knew the plays.

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It didn’t really matter. While attempting to trip up the touchdown sprint of a monstrous fullback, Rudy’s outstretched toes served as a launching pad for the opposing team’s end zone. The sound of a Pedroia metatarsal crunching could be heard at the fifty-yard line.   Gathered around Rudy’s bed in his semi-private room where all three of Bakersfield High’s wounded players were hospitalized, only Rudy’s family was smiling. “What?” Randy Pedroia said, “My son has athlete’s feet!” Since they had purchased a teenager’s plan from a California Health Insurance agent, they could afford to smile.

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