Story of the Day 7/12/2011

It has been a long week.
And today is only Tuesday.
The long week started yesterday morning.

I have a cousin who lives in a group residence on the east side of town.
Her father was my mom’s cousin. Was because he died a number of years ago, when she was a kid. My cousin lived with her grandparents, her father’s parents, until they both died. At that time, my cousin was about 31, and then her mother came and picked her up and moved her to Anderson, Indiana where she lived with her mother and her mother’s mother.
Except that her mother left town rather suddenly, which she has done a number of times in her life for a variety of reasons, this particular time being that she owed a lot of money and it was easier to leave than to repay it; and then my cousin stayed with her grandmother.. Until that grandmother died, when my cousin was 32.

Then her aunts, her mother’s sisters, decided to send her to the homeless shelter; so this second cousin whom I hadn’t since I drove to visit her about 16 years earlier, called me to come get her.

Which was a bit of a surprise for me, since I hadn’t even known she was in Indiana. But I drove out to Anderson, as did Larry- each of us taking a car, since my cousin told me that she had quite a lot of things .

We moved her in with us for about 4 months until we got her a small efficiency apartment about 2 ½ miles away, and then I took to seeing her only once or twice a week, when I would take her grocery shopping and to doctor’s appointments.

But the apartment didn’t work out.

It turned out that amongst her numerous issues was the fact that she didn’t want to have to clean or cook or be left alone at all, and, to top it off, when she became anxious, she would take one of her anti-anxiety pills. And then she would take another one 10 minutes later, because the first one hadn’t’ helped, and a third one another 10 minutes later and so on, until the bottle was empty. Now, a person can manage to live without cleaning their one room apartment, heck, and lots of people do that. And a person can live eating a lot of yogurt and microwavable frozen dinners, and many people do that. But taking an entire bottle of prescription pills is another matter, all together.

So what could we do?

We had learned enough not to move her back in with us, because in addition to a number of slightly unpleasant to live with behaviors ( and I am not referring to the not cooking and the not cleaning ones, ), she also had a much more than slightly unpleasant to live with behavior which was that when she was jealous she hit- even if the person she was jealous of was 7 years old.,

So, after a bit of looking, we found a group residence that, as it turned out, she loved.
No cooking, no cleaning, and staff to talk to at all hours of the night and day. Oh yeah, and they doled out the anti-anxiety pills one at a time at the correct intervals.

So, my cousin has been living there for the past 9 years, almost 10. And she loves it.
And I go and visit her once a month and take her to the store and for a haircut and for lunch.

Which brings us to yesterday morning.
Yesterday morning, at about 9 AM, I received a call from the nursing home Ombudsman. Only she is a woman. And I didn’t’ even know there was such a thing.

The residence in which my cousin is living will stop taking Medicare/Medicaid clients, as of the last day of July. And my cousin is on disability and has Medicare/Medicaid and is about to become homeless. And there are 301 open beds in different kinds of care facilities in the state.
301 beds for people with Medicare and Medicaid.
And those 301 beds are not in Indianapolis, or only a very few are. And there will be about 80 people from this residence vying for those Indianapolis beds. And I am not really sure the facility with those beds is very nice. Actually, I kind of got the impression it isn’t.
And most of the other beds are nowhere near Indianapolis. I mean, they are not in California, but they are still no where nearby.

Tomorrow, at 1 PM, there will be a meeting at the facility to explain all of this to the residents; and I should expect a hysterical phone call. And I am expecting a hysterical phone call.

So, I spent much of yesterday, and a couple of hours, so far, today, finding out more about where some of these beds are located, and how many complaints each facility has against it, and how isolated some of them are (in a farm field, or surrounded by industrial plants and walking distance to exactly one store- a liquor store)

And trying to figure out what I will say when I get the first of what I expect to be a number of hysterical phone calls, tomorrow.

Except, of some reason, the plans were changed, and they told the residents, today. So I have already had one hysterical phone call.
At it is still early.

Like I said, it has been a long week.