The shocking murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson opened the floodgates of people sharing how health insurance companies’ denials have devastated their lives.

Most of us have heard stories of callous and capricious decisions by health insurance providers. I didn’t realize how common and cruel these denials can be until this past week.

I asked a Facebook group of moms if any of them could share a personal experience with a health insurance claim. I was taken aback by the outpouring of responses.

Ashley Berhorst, 43, of Wentzville, Missouri, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer in February. She underwent 16 rounds of chemotherapy, followed by a tougher type of chemo known as the “red devil” for its often-vicious side effects.

UHC denied her a shot, Neulasta, that is commonly administered during chemo to protect from infection. Her oncologist was stunned. After all, a fever is a potentially deadly situation for a cancer patient with a port. After going back and forth between the doctor’s office and a peer-to-peer review board, UHC still denied the shot.

The next week, Berhorst ended up in the ER with a fever and low white blood cell count.

“It put me in a very vulnerable position that I shouldn’t have been put in,” she said. “They don’t care if I die. But my kids do. And my family does.”

UHC finally approved the shot after Berhorst's hospitalization. She survived that close call, but how many others aren’t so lucky?

Jennifer Grotpeter, 57, splits her time between Webster Groves, Missouri, and Lawrence, Kansas. While driving on the highway in May, her vision turned into a kaleidoscope. She made her way over to the shoulder, hitting the guardrail.

“It was terrifying,” she said.

Based on her symptoms, her doctor suggested she see a specialist for POTS, a blood circulation disorder. The specialist in St. Louis was not accepting new patients, so she found a POTS clinic at the University of Kansas Medical Center -- only to learn that Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield would not cover treatment.

Grotpeter, who is retired, spent hours on the phone every day for a week with her insurance company. She waited on hold for hours at a time. Her doctor filled out all the necessary paperwork. She sent reams of faxes of her medical records. Of all the people she eventually spoke to on the phone, no two ever told her the same thing.

She asked one representative: “How do people who are not retired do this? Do you just let them be sick?”

When a representative told her to call back the next day, Grotpeter ran out of patience.

“I would rather let this condition kill me than ever call the number on the back of that card again,” she said. She switched to an insurance provider that cost her twice as much, but covered her care.

Her biggest issue with her POTS is low blood pressure, which can cause a medical emergency while driving.

“Maybe Anthem was trying to cure me by having their total s--- ‘customer service’ shoot my blood pressure through the roof,” she said sarcastically.

Laura Pogue, 42, of O’Fallon, Missouri, had a badly needed surgery in 2017 to repair a severe diastasis recti and an umbilical hernia. After giving birth, the fascia that encased her abdomen were shredded. Her abdominal muscles separated so far that she could feel her own intestines. It also caused terrible back pain.

After several meetings between her doctors and Blue Cross Blue Shield, her insurance provider said the surgeries would be covered. But after surgery, they denied the claims because of how the surgeon described the procedure in a report.

“It was not considered a complete repair of the hernia,” she said.

Pogue appealed the decision. It was denied. Her only option was to hire a lawyer, which she didn’t have the money to do. She fought the insurance company for a total of two years.

“Even when you do your homework and do all the things (they) tell you to do ... I jumped through all of their hoops, and I did everything right,” she said. She was still stuck with a $10,000 bill that took four years to pay off.

“So many people don’t realize this can happen to you,” she said.

These nightmare scenarios of near death and financial ruin should serve as a wakeup call for legislators, the insurance industry and all of us who put our health in their hands.

Tony Ramirez approached me 15 years ago at a journalism job fair after he had taken a buyout at The New York Times.

He had a blue-chip resume: He had also worked at the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine. He asked if the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was hiring, and I offered to pass along his resume.

At the time, I couldn’t fathom why he would consider moving to St. Louis. Now, I better understand the realities of job hunting in one’s 50s.

That was the only time we ever met in person. But that single interaction led to a friendship unlike any other I’ve had.

Tony was born in Manila and came to the United States as a young child for medical treatment for polio. He ended up studying at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on political science and history, along with some Greek and Latin.

He was one of those people who had read, and seemingly understood, every important book. He was chronically online, and consumed all the news he could.

He sent me a couple of emails to follow up about a job at the Post-Dispatch. He would also email me in response to things I had tweeted, which struck me as odd. A mutual friend assured me that Tony was a strange bird, but harmless, kind and whip-smart.

We connected on Facebook, as well, keeping in touch through Tony's next couple of moves: a brief stint at the Las Vegas Review Journal, and then to Arizona to take care of his mom.

In the years when I did much of my work in the wee hours when most people were sleeping, Tony was usually awake. If I needed a quick edit on an essay, he was happy to do it. If I needed to rant about politics, he was there to commiserate. Back before our news site had a strict paywall, he would read my columns and offer edits after they had run.

He was direct -- and sometimes brusque -- in his comments. He was also witty and compassionate.

His Facebook feed was a firehose of information about politics, news and movies. He never shared stuff about his personal life with me, nor did he ask any personal questions. The closest he ever came to complimenting my writing was when I would discover he had shared one of my columns on his feed.

That he considered something I had written worthy of sharing was compliment enough.

In the olden days, I suppose we would have considered one another pen pals. But in this modern, digital age, we didn’t have to wait on letters or pen one-sided monologues. There was no small talk in our voluminous correspondence. Imagine having a brilliant and informed friend with whom you could discuss politics, art, writing, sports and more -- someone who shared your values and interests, yet never made a single demand on your time or attention. He sent a lot of messages to many friends, but I don’t think he ever expected a reply.

In an age when technology frequently divides and isolates us, it brought Tony and me together. There are limits to an online friendship, but there can also be a depth missing in casual face-to-face encounters.

In recent years, as my children got older and busier and I felt more settled in my career, Tony and I corresponded less frequently. We still occasionally commented on each other’s social media posts, and I read the mass messages he sent to a large group of people.

On Nov. 17, police found Tony dead in his home. He was 71. One of his best friends and a neighbor had called the police for a welfare check when he had been unusually quiet. Police said he likely died of a medical incident.

I found out several days later through an email from the journalism organization we both belonged to -- the same one that hosted the job fair where we'd met years ago. The group included a tribute to Tony in its weekly newsletter.

I wonder if he knew how much I valued his correspondence and friendship.

I hope he did.

When I told my son about Tony, and about his death, I said that I didn’t have another friendship quite like that one.

“You probably never will,” he said. The truth of that comment hit me.

I didn’t realize how rare it was until it was gone.

My mother never baked cookies when we were growing up. She baked sweetened ricotta dumplings, soaked in a thickened, sweet milk and garnished with slivered almonds and pistachios.

Ras malai, a creamy, milky South Asian dessert, is now widely available at Indian restaurants and in the freezer section of Indo-Pak grocers. But in the '80s and '90s, I savored it straight from my mom's kitchen.

Not only is she an extraordinary home cook, she is a master at making the homemade Pakistani desserts of her childhood: gulab jamun -- fried balls of dough in a sweet, rose-tinted syrup; jalebi -- bright orange sticky spirals of fried batter; zarda -- sweet yellow rice with saffron, raisins and nuts; kheer -- a rich rice pudding; and kulfi -- a dense, frozen sweet cream.

My father, from whom I must have inherited my sweet tooth, used to say that dinner didn’t feel complete without dessert. We were equal-opportunity sugarholics: There was always a tub (or two) of Blue Bell ice cream and a Sara Lee pound cake in our freezer.

While I embraced every American dessert I encountered, none provoked the pure ecstasy of my mom’s ras malai.

Then, one day, someone brought tres leches into our home. The airy sponge cake was drenched in three types of milk and topped with whipped cream and fruit. It had a similar mouthfeel to ras malai, but its own distinct flavor palate.

I marveled at this newfound confection.

Tres leches became an important part of our Pakistani family’s traditions. If I was visiting my family in Texas for a celebration or holiday, I knew there would be tres leches. In the years before it landed on the bougie shelves of Whole Foods, we would get it from Fiesta -- a loud, eclectic Mexican grocery store chain in Houston.

Imagine my shock when I recently discovered the Ras Malai Tres Leches at Sweet Reserve Bakery in Lombard, Illinois. It’s described as a "super-moist sponge cake infused with cardamom and soaked in saffron three milks, topped with a cardamom-based whipped cream." They also have a gulab jamun cheesecake.

This is American ingenuity at its finest.

On Instagram, I saw someone making chicken tikka mac and cheese for Thanksgiving. A friend posted on Facebook that he was eating lunch at a ramen restaurant in D.C. that was owned by Mexicans, who were playing hip-hop music.

This blending and blurring and borrowing of cultures is a big part of what makes America great. We have more international migrants than any other country. By and large, we’re happy to embrace foods, festivals and cultures that are different from our own.

I saw this recently when I attended Dia de los Muertos celebrations in San Antonio. Some were on the same day as the city’s spectacular Diwali festival. I saw women with painted skeleton faces wearing floral crowns walking among the spectators in saris cheering the bhangra dancers.

I took in these scenes in joy -- we don’t just coexist, we co-celebrate, I thought.

Of course, this is the rosy side of the American story I like to tell myself and share with others. We’re also the same country that elects leaders who say immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of our country. We want our diversity contained to sparkly festivals and tasty foods -- not introduced into our boardrooms or our classrooms.

We will tolerate -- even admire -- culture differences until it’s more convenient to scapegoat those who carry those cultures.

We’re in a profoundly dichotomous American moment of both rising cultural fusion and growing xenophobia. It’s not as simple as one being a reaction to the other. There’s an unwillingness to connect a thing we enjoy to the humanity of the person behind it. That’s why some may love my mom’s homemade ras malai while also calling her a terrorist raghead.

But you can never truly appreciate a food, a style, a music or a culture without valuing its people.

My mom’s desserts made an indelible impression on my childhood not just because they tasted delicious. I could tell she made them with pride and love.

The ras malai was a way to share a part of her immigrant self with her American children.