When my mom's doctor decided to put mom in a nursing home permanently, it was devastating to the both of us. If I were able to care for her on my own at this point, she would be at home. Everyone always tells me you can get Home Health Care. What they fail to understand is, Medicare only pays for these people to come twice a week at the most, and after six months they're done. My mom needs medical supervision and care that I am not capable of providing 24 hours a day.
Before she got sicker, I was already going from sunup to sundown and beyond. I provided her meals, personal hygiene care, dispensed her medicine, flushed wounds, changed bandages twice a day, and physical therapy. It was not unusual to be awakened by sounds of distress in the middle of the night because she had another muscle cramp that needed to be massaged away.
Our house did not make caring for her any easier. It has been severely neglected over the years. There was so much violence and chaos in this house, we were too busy just trying to survive to concentrate on remodeling or repairing. The house is also not handicap accessible. Our "wheelchair ramp" is actually a ramp from a truck that somebody nailed to our porch. It was barely wide enough to accommodate her chair, and you have to back the chair down. I nearly dumped Mom out into our gravel driveway on more than one occasion trying to maneuver that chair down the ramp.
We have a step up into the house, so I eased her chair backwards over it to get her out of the house. It put her at a sharp angle, which made her very nervous. To get in, I had to pop a steep wheelie with her chair, then lift the back end up to get her in. Very dangerous, but it couldn't be helped.
Mom and Dad also kept everything and taught my brother and I to do the same. The house is a mess. The basement is full of a lifetime of things thrown everywhere. The upstairs isn't as bad as it was, thanks to the help of an Aunt and a Cousin. They live very far away and were only able to stay for four days. I haven't been able to find any help since. With the magnitude of stuff to go through, I would need a dumpster to throw things away in. They're very expensive, and with a good forty years of accumulation to sort, there's no way I'm going to get it done all by myself...especially with this foreclosure looming over my head.
I have until the 27th to come up with nearly 1500 dollars, and there's not a snowball's chance in hell of that happening. There are holes in the walls from things being thrown and from my brother's fist. The walls are stained with nicotine, dusty, filthy and dotted with cobwebs. The kitchen floor is warped from the refrigerator leaking.
There is a huge hole in the shower wall that is covered with a garbage bag. It has been that way for nearly thirty years. A friend of my brothers fell into the tub and busted the hole in the wall when he was drunk. He refused to pay for it. My dad and brother also refused to pay for it, so they taped a garbage bag over it and never fixed it. If the Credit Union takes the house in this condition, there is no way it is going to sell. If by some miracle it did, Mom would never get full price for it. It's going to sit empty, and I will be homeless for nothing.
No comments:
Post a Comment