No Cardboard Box under a Bridge for me!

Don’t leap to conclusions on what I’m about to tell you but I had an appointment with a person whose business card says he’s “a specialist in home care and assisted living placements.” I met him in March on a bus tour of independent and assisted living facilities and I was impressed with him enough to want to take advantage of a free service where he can estimate how long your money and assets will last in places like. I’m nowhere near wanting or needing to move into a facility but I wanted to get some footwork done for someday maybe. And don’t we all worry about whether or not we’ll end up in a fleabag Medicaid dumping ground or worse yet, get loaded up in a shopping cart and set loose at the top of a hill. Bye bye, there’s cardboard condo community down there under the bridge that you can afford.

 

He said I have enough assets to qualify to get me into most continuing care places---the kind where you start out in independent living and as needed they move you up in care levels plus they won’t kick you out if your money runs out. Not that he’s recommending that for me (far from it) but he said---and this is the important part---qualifying for those kinds of places is an great indicator that a person has enough assets to private-pay at nice/r places, with lower monthly fees for the rest of your life. (Continuing care places cost more up front in exchange for that life care guarantee and no one gets anything back if you die long before using up all your own money.) Of course, no one knows how long any of us will live but it’s the same principle as buying extended warranties---the companies selling them are betting you won’t need to use them i.e. continuing care facilities have developed extensive mathematical formulas and they are gambling you’ll die before it starts costing them money. And they are factoring into their calculations a two year stretch at the highest cost level at the end. I didn’t tell him this but the dark side of me wonders if when your money runs low if that's when you have a "tragic accident” like my sister-in-law did, chocking on a pill because no one was around who was certified to do the Heimlich in a timely manner?

The guy was here for nearly two hours and by the time he left I felt so much better---no eating cat kibble to save money for me! If there’s anything he doesn’t know about the various facilities around town, it isn’t worth knowing. For example, he asked if a religious affiliation was important to me and I said, “Quite the opposite” and I told him I didn’t like one of the places we toured on the bus trip because it felt “too churchy.” He replied that it’s common in this town for places to boast that they do prayers, devotions and Bible readings daily with their meals. “Not a good fit of me!” I said emphatically. And he named some places in my target area that don’t let religion bleed all over their mission statements. We covered the dog-friendly places, the view out the unit window, the ideal location for family support, the food and activities, etc., etc. Three pages of questions and answers and it will all be on file for my nieces when/if they need it. He’d take me and/or them on a tour of his top three recommendations when the time comes, or even next week if I wanted. I’m not ready for that. I hope I’m never ready but we all know our health can change in a heartbeat so when ‘hope’ fails it helps to have a plan. 

Change of topic to something else I’ve never done before: I had my first e-visit with my doctor’s office. I got diagnosed online for ‘acute cystitis’ otherwise known as a UTI to the ladies out there. I filled out the questionnaire at 9:00 Monday and by 11:00 I had the promise of an antibiotic called in to the pharmacy and orders left for a urine test. By Wednesday morning the lab order still had not shown up on my patient portal and I thought, well, maybe e-visits don’t do it the same way as office calls, so I went to the lab. No order was on file and I had to wait for them to call the doctor’s office. Finally, I got to pee in a specimen bottle.

I made three trips to the same medical building that day. One of those trips was for a mammogram and we all know how much fun that can be. I was getting pulled, stretched and pressed at the exact same time a lab technician two rooms down was leaving a message on my home phone that I’d failed at giving an adequate urine sample and I needed to come back and do another. Great! I’ve been peeing a million times a day and the one time it counted, I did a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am quickie that only satisfied one of us. The bummer part is the e-visit doctor told me not to start the antibiotics until after I’d taken the urine test so I had to spend over 48 hours lusting after the promised relief sitting in a medicine bottle on the kitchen counter-top. ©

Contrasts, Bag Ladies and Floods

our main street downtown

 
Yesterday I had to go to a part of town clustered around our former industrial base. I say ‘former’ because in recent years that industrial base has dried up or moved on to other cities. It’s a depressed and rundown area from what it was just five years ago. One thing that struck me was the billboards I saw advertising phone numbers where people can get help for drug or alcohol abuse, child abuse and neighborhood watch groups. We don’t see those on the other end of town where I live.

On one corner where I had to wait for a traffic light a woman about my age was sitting in a wheelchair holding a sign that read: “Need help and money for food.” Was she for real? A dozen questions went through my head as I waited for the light to change including why would she sit on a busy corner where there was no place a driver could pull over and park if she/he wanted to give the woman some cash. It wasn’t likely she’d spring up from the chair and walk over to a car to collect the money. Would she? She was old enough for Social Security, Medicare, subsidized housing and many other safety nets our community provides to needy people. Why would a person her age need to sit on a corner holding up a sign begging for money? Perhaps she wasn’t mentally capable of navigating her way through Social Services. Perhaps her grandchildren were using her to get money for drugs. I wish I’d had a sign I could have held up that read: “Call 211 for help!”

Whatever the woman’s back story, she was the personification of every fear I had during my younger years, of what my old age would look like if I didn’t play my cards right. Don and I both were both children of depression era parents who’d gone through a lot of tough times in their lives. It was in our DNA to believe that bad luck and hard times could be just around any corner. Consequently, we were workaholics most of our adult lives. Fast forward decades later and I didn’t turn into a bag lady and unless the whole world falls apart, I most likely won’t ever be one. Still, the woman sitting on the corner bothered me---the contrast between her life and mine. In the stroke support community I was a part of for twelve years I’d met a lot of people who thought their futures were secure but they watched it all slip through their fingers when their medical problems and lack of insurance caused them to go bankrupt. Sometimes people get beaten down through no fault of their own.

I drove back to my end of town taking a broad boulevard that makes its way past two well groomed college campuses, several upscale malls and a large botanical garden. I was driving a paid-for car that had just gotten its first anniversary “buff and shine”---warranty required for its clear coat---and I was feeling guilty because by the grace of God or good fortune or the forces of the universe I wasn’t the one sitting on the corner holding up a cardboard sign begging for money. Whether it was a scam, or not, she was still a woman who’d lost all dignity and pride. And that’s sad.

Oh cripe! I just thought about something else to feel guilty and sad about. We’re in the middle of dealing with a 100 year flood with the river that runs through town and record rain fall. I wonder if anyone helped all those homeless people evacuate who live under the bridges and viaducts. Where did they go, who took them in? The lower levels of dozens of buildings downtown are flooded including a five star hotel, the museums, and high-rise apartment buildings. Homes along the river near-by where I live look like little islands and the evacuation of a nursing home was well covered in the news. But my storm damaged yard was put back to normal with a phone call to my landscaper. My biggest flood related problem has been trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B because of road closures. More contrasts. More good luck versus bad luck. I might be alone in the world. I might be a lonely widow. But I’m one lucky, alone and lonely widow. And I hope I never forget to count my blessings as well as the tears. ©

2-3 miles from where I live