Medical Card Expired

My wife and I drive team and our medical cards were due to expire on August 1st. We got our physicals on July 16th and our company's safety dept. faxed and e-mailed both to the only office in Tennessee that can accept the cards and that is in Nashville. You can not just hand carry them in in this state. We thought everything was fine until we got home on August 10th and got our mail only to find out that both of our licenses had been suspended on August 2nd. We had been driving all over the US with invalid licenses and are just lucky we never got stopped anywhere. According to the office in Nashville they never received the medical cards. (that was 2 faxes and 2 e-mails, kind of hard to believe they didn't get even 1) Renewing our CDL's was easy enough, just go in pay money and they are reissued. BUT we had HazNat endorsements and that has to be started all over again from scratch. New background checks at $87.50 each and new hazmat tests. Plus we had just bought a house in February and have to have 2 proofs of domicile and it can't be copies or something printed off the internet.

Ok we are paperless on all our bills so we don't have to worry about mail theft. The state has mailed us letters notifying us that our licenses were suspended and they mailed our new CDL's to our address, do you think we live here? They mailed us proof that we passed the background checks, do you think we live here? We will get the proof but the whole thing is stupid and according to our local office (where everyone has worked for years and are by no means incompetent) Nashville is losing medical cards all the time and there are horror stories about drivers stranded all over the country because of it.

Oh forgot we had our licenses (just the CDL part renewed on August 15th) and we had to produce our medical cards to do that. I watched as our local office faxed our information to Nashville but 2 days ago we found out that they had lost my wife's medical card again. HOW?

According to one of the agents at our local office Tennessee is raking in 10's of thousands of dollars over this. Gee our Governor is Bill Haslem. Sound familiar? His family owns Pilot and Flying J Truck stops. They got the trucking companies with their fraud on the rebate programs and now he is following in his families footsteps and ripping off the truck drivers in this state. This won't stop until one of the big trucking organizations gets involved or OOIDA but so far they have been quiet on this issue.

 

How many threads are you going to start on this?

 

This is the right answer! I recently had to get a duplicate as I'd left my license at home and needed to fly. I didn't have my medical, so she just checked the box the said 'exempt from xxCFRxxx.xx' meaning I was only using my CDL in a way that did not require a medical card. When I needed to drive again, I just had to go in the DMV and self-certify with my medical forms and card. In SD the medical exemption is not shown on the license, only in the computer. Cost me nothing, took 5 minutes.