It was supposed to be a relaxing weekend getaway, the kickoff to Jenny Mark-Babij and her husband Chris Babij’s fall vacation—a country music festival in Las Vegas before a week in Cabo San Lucas. The couple never made it to Mexico. That excursion to Vegas coincided with one of the deadliest incidents of domestic terrorism in American history, when Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd of concertgoers on October 1, 2017, killing 58 people.
Mark-Babij escaped without physical injury; Babij was shot. He was lucky, he survived, becoming among the 500 wounded on October 1.
But the couple experienced months of emotional anguish and bureaucratic red tape. The most traumatizing part of the ordeal turned out to be his treatment by his insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield. “I had to put Chris in the car and drive him across the Mojave Desert with a bullet in his shoulder because they wouldn’t cover the cost of an ambulance,” Mark-Babij told Newsweek.