Author Archives: sammozart

I picked two crisp jalapeños off our jalapeño plant in the pot on the front porch tonight. I cut them up and put them in the quesadillas I made for dinner, which I served with refried beans and the remaining quarter of the refrigerated cantaloupe I had cut the other day.

I once worked at a Southern California company that employed in our office a Japanese staff from Tokyo. A pretty, young non-Japanese coworker pulled the long strip of glue out of a magazine that some ad was stuck to and walked down the hall to our Japanese office. She had stuck the strip of glue under her nose, so that it dangled down below her chin. She stood at the office door and called to the sweet, young Japanese girl, “Look, look!”

That’s how Emma looked tonight. The freshly picked jalapeños made her nose run. She was eating her quesadilla with snot dripping down into it. I quickly gave her the napkin at hand, telling her to wipe her nose. She took forever to open the napkin and get it adjusted just right while meanwhile a lengthening strip of snot dripped down into her Mexican dinner.

We got that cleaned up. I continued to eat my dinner (well, look, I’ve kind of gotten used these episodes) and then looked over to see how Emma was fairing. Her nose wasn’t running, she had eaten some more and her left hand was comfortably resting in the remains of her sour cream-slathered quesadilla.

Jalapeños aside, I know you are waiting to hear how the state Attendant Care Services program worked out for us. I have held off telling you because I wanted it to be a cliffhanger so you’d keep coming back to find out. (Heh-heh).

Emma has become an employer. We were accepted into the program. Now we have to get her an EIN number, and I, holding her power of attorney, wield license to hire and fire employees. Would that it were that simple with everything.

The rep from the fiscal administrating agency, a nonprofit, asked me if Emma had had an EIN number before. Not anytime over the past century, that I could recollect.

The state provides the funds and this agency administers them. After a long afternoon meeting at our sweltering dining room table – this was Thursday, July 21, when the temperature was 102 outside, with the sun beating on our house and I wondering if our three window air conditioners were actually working – with the funds administration agency rep together with Geri, our Hospice social worker, and Tess, our Hospice nurse, whom I asked to be present, I signed an inch-thick stack of papers. We learned that the agency sets up a bank account and I, as agent of Emma, the employer, fax in time sheets, write out the paychecks, deduct the taxes from them, and pay quarterly taxes, just like any small business person. I can hire anyone I want, they don’t have to be certified – just undergo a criminal background check –, for as many hours up to 30 per week as I want, seven days a week. If an aide I hire doesn’t show up, I can employ myself and pay myself. It’s a sensible program, one designed by somebody holding public office who actually is in touch with reality, to keep patients out of nursing homes and thus save the taxpayers money, while simultaneously providing jobs and help, respite and sanity for the caregiver.

Now here’s the catch. You were waiting, weren’t you? It pays $9.75 an hour, before taxes and without benefits. So the persons I hire must love peanuts.

That’s it in a nutshell. I have some prospective employees in mind, and the agency provides referrals. I’ll fill you in on how it works out for us as we progress.

–Samantha, July 25, 2011

Central Delaware, July 23, 2011 – It is hotter than June in Everglades City, Florida, here today. It was even hotter yesterday, Friday. Today the temperature has gone up only to 99 degrees Fahrenheit. Yesterday it peaked at 102. By 7 p.m. it had plummeted to 97. The New York Times stated the temperature hit 104 in Central Park yesterday, saying it felt like Death Valley. Oh, I don’t know, out there it’s a dry heat. I’m afraid to find out what the humidity is here.

There’s a town in the middle of the Mojave Desert, near Barstow, called Baker. I can see why. In downstate Delaware there’s a town called Blades. Today someone down there may be introducing a resolution to change the name to Blazes. Then I suppose one could say that in Death Valley it’s hotter than Blazes. I see it’s going up to 113 in Baghdad, Iraq, today. But, there again, it’s a dry heat – humidity 15 percent.

I do remember a place hotter than Blazes. It was Tucson, Arizona, in June. We flew out there from Delaware in the year, well, let’s just say I was delighted to be in Cowboy Country, because I was watching Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger on TV at the time. Emma and her dad, Granddad, took my brother and me out there to visit second cousins. We flew across country on a four-engine Lockheed Super Constellation aircraft, state of the art in that day.

When I fly, I like to sit next to the window. I like to watch the scenery and the white puffy clouds and the flaps and propellers. This day, though, was only my second flight ever. I looked out the window. “Yikes!” We called the stewardess. “There are flames coming out of the engines!” I exclaimed. Someone had to make that discovery. “Oh, that’s normal,” she assured me. “It’s when they don’t come out that you have to worry.” Well, OK, I thought. I remained a bit concerned that she knew what she was talking about.

Here are two YouTube video examples of that aircraft. If you love airplanes and flying, as I do, in particular the takeoff, you’ll love these. If you don’t, well, then, keep reading; I’ve included some hot day recipe suggestions down below.

Ahh, the joy of flying. I haven’t flown in 20 years. I can’t believe it has been that long. I have foundered in Lost Decades. I worked for a commuter airline. We flew a Beechcraft 1900C, a pressurized, 19 passenger, twin-engine turboprop. That was some aircraft. It was the BMW of its class. I flew it, one night ferrying (no passengers) from Los Angeles (LAX) to Las Vegas. The pilots let me sit in the right seat (the left seat is the captain’s seat) and pilot it for a few minutes. I did well, they said. My job was to keep the nose up and the wings level – flying on instruments and looking out the window. I lost only 500 feet altitude. They said that was good. And, maybe you can imagine the thrilling spectacle of the glow and then appearance of the jewels of the Las Vegas lights laid out across the black desert night in the far distance.

Back on the Arizona desert, our cousins drove us all over Arizona in their green Plymouth. The daily high temperatures were 114 degrees. Ah, but it was a dry heat. Indeed, speaking of Baker, my brother and I sat in the backseat. There was no air conditioning in those days. Homes, crouched low to the ground beneath cottonwood, acacia and mesquite trees, were cooled by a swamp cooler. As we rode all day on the straight, sparsely-trafficked, two-lane roads, of which, delightfully, Arizona still has plenty, we had to keep the back windows rolled up; otherwise, when we rolled them down, we’d get burned – the air felt like heat blasting from an oven.

We have three window air conditioners here in our Victorian house. The rooms with the air conditioners are comfortable; the rooms without are blazingly hot and stuffy. Again, we might want to open windows in those rooms to let a breeze through, but that only makes you feel like you’re steeping in a steamy tub in a bathroom with the door closed. The A/Cs keep the humidity lower. I have lowered the storm windows, as in winter. Down, they effectively keep out much of the humidity.

Emma is coping. I keep the house as temperate for her (for me, too) as possible. She gets more confused in this heat and humidity, even if it is kept at an ebb indoors. But, she’s managing. She always loved Florida, Southwest Florida, where the weather is like this nearly year round.

I’m making a Levantine dinner tonight – baba ghanoush, tabouleh, chopped tomatoes and cucumbers with basil, garlic and green onions in olive oil and lemon juice; and purifying green drink – green beans, celery and parsley cooked until soft, pureed and then taken warm or cold. Methods of making tabouleh vary, but essentially it is made with bulgar, finely chopped parsley and mint, green onion, chopped tomatoes and lemon juice and olive oil. The Pioneer Woman (http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2009/10/baba-ghanoush/), Ree Drummond, has a great and graphically depicted baba ghanoush recipe on her site. I make mine about the same, only this time, because it’s so hot, I microwaved my eggplant rather than roasting it – pricked it all around with fork tines first, then microwaved it for four to five minutes. I used two eggplants today, one purple, one white. As soon as they’re done cooking, I plunge mine into a bowl of ice water for a moment, then peel them easily.

I think now it’s time for me to go plunge my feet into a bowl of ice water.

–Samantha

My friend R was walking down the alley next to the historic building housing his place of business the other day when he stepped on the metal cellar door in the sidewalk and fell through onto the dirt floor below. The hinges, worn, gave way. I knew he had fallen, because I got an email hailing “Help!” in the subject line. He had lost his cell phone in the fall and needed someone to call him so he could locate it by its ring. Although he finally found it, he did not find it that way, though, because the ringer was turned off.

Besides body abrasions and fracturing the big toe bone and metatarsals of his left foot, he ripped the pad nearly off that left big toe. He drove himself, depressing the clutch to shift gears, a mile to the emergency room where the staff dressed his toe, took x-rays and prescribed a $20-a-pill antibiotic. Today, entering a convenience store, he ran into his landlord, whom he had phoned after the accident, exiting. The landlord, no doubt seeing a lawsuit coming at him head-on, barely acknowledged him.

Our July weather here in Delaware has been typically unbearably hot and humid this week. It finally rained yesterday, the 18th, after two weeks. Today we have a hazy sun, and when you step outside it smells like mildew.

I am feeling cellarish. I am having trouble shedding the residue of the situation with our Hospice aide arising Friday, the 15th, spreading over the succeeding three days, and culminating yesterday, Monday, the 18th. Trying to seep through my body’s ethereal layer, it drips from it like the raindrops lingering on the dogwood leaves outside my window this humid Tuesday morning.

We ran out of toilet paper Friday morning – two squares to spare –, so while Emma was still in bed, I walked to the store towing our shopping cart to gather necessities and get home before she awoke. When I got home, I found a note stuck in the door from the aide saying she had been here at 10:30 but couldn’t stay because she was ill and therefore would not return later that day. She wasn’t due until 1:30. Had I known she was coming, I would have waited. Friday. I had pressing urgencies needing attention; I was overwhelmed. So I called our former healthcare agency aide of nearly three years – the one whose aide the agency cut off on a recent Friday night because I’d run out of Medicaid funds – and asked her if she would have time to get Emma up, bathed, dressed, fed and exercised, that I would pay her. The aide came in 15 minutes, thankfully.

Monday, the Hospice aide came, completely healed, at her usual time, 2 p.m. Two weeks earlier, for a week she had been caring for two extra men, substituting for a vacationing aide. She asked me, therefore, if she could come to our house earlier than scheduled during that time. I said yes, if it would help her, and that it would help me because she could get Emma up in the morning, a chore. Emma likes to turn away from me and roll all around in bed, ever so slowly, like a breakdancer in a sweet potato and prune puree. Now that the vacationing aide had returned, I assumed that we were back on schedule as usual, that she would not show up arbitrarily to accommodate herself, whether or not I had plans – you know, like sitting around finishing the last of the bonbons while watching Oprah reruns and trying not to get the remote all chocolaty.

A few years ago, I got my keyboard all buttery while lounging at my computer writing my novel and eating popcorn. I love this keyboard. I’ve had it for years, since way back in my PC days. Now that I have my Mac, I was thrilled to be able to connect this, my buttery keyboard, to it in addition to my Mac keyboard used for specific Mac commands. I emailed R to find out how his toe was and told him I needed to spend the day writing a new post for “my glob – er, blog” – a genuine typo, glob, for which I blamed my buttery keyboard. It types things like that sometimes. Yet the term is apt: many blogs are unabashed globs. I therefore will get back to my subject before this becomes one.

Monday I asked the aide if she had used Emma’s little footbath tub to wash her feet. She was sitting at the dining room table tilting Emma’s lunch bowl so Emma could spoon out the last of her soup. My question and subsequent reaction launched her into a protracted song and dance that made me glad I had time out on the historic Maggie Myers oyster schooner on the Delaware Bay on the fourth watching the fireworks and Chinese lanterns float across the night sky. Her performance played like this:

Aide: Well, I do that on Tuesday.

Me: On Tuesday?! She hasn’t had a bath since Friday. And besides, you owe me twenty-five dollars [I didn’t expect her to pay, but I thought I’d lob it out there] because I had to hire another aide Friday to take your place since you showed up in the morning while I was at the store instead of coming at your usual one-thirty time and I couldn’t do all I had to do by myself.

Aide: Well, I came in the morning instead of the afternoon because I was doubled over sick and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…

Me: Yes, but–

Aide: Don’t interrupt me. Let me finish. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Me: That’s it. Leave. Just leave.

Aide: (To Emma) I’m sorry you have to listen to this.

Me: {{{{   }}}}

Her superior, the nurse, when I told her later: {{{{   }}}}

Twisted and finessed as a breakdancer’s moves. Anyway, why would you come to take care of an elderly person if you were doubled over? Not only are you ill, but what if you gave that to the elderly, 96 year old, person? Why not double over an arm at the elbow and make a phone call saying you’re too ill to work?

I sent her packing. She told me not to treat her like she’s my daughter. Well, she’s not, and my daughter didn’t act that way. Nor did I when I was growing up – not if I wanted to keep my teeth.

I didn’t care whether the aide ever returned. If she did not, that meant I would have sole bathing, dressing, feeding and toileting duties for Emma. So be it. Rather that than taking the stress.

Now it is Thursday. The Hospice nurse spoke to the aide and told her to arrive on schedule and just say yes when asked to do something and not argue. She returned and she has been compliant.

Today I’m to meet here at home with the funds administration organization rep for explanation and paper signing for the 30-hour-a-week state Attendant Care Services program. We will see how that goes. I am hoping that in fact does mean that I will have Medicaid-paid help 30 hours a week.

–Samantha

I bought a locally grown cantaloupe yesterday and set it on a plate on the kitchen table to ripen a day or two. This morning the kitchen smelled like a farm market, with textured aromas of full sharp citrusy Mexican coffee brewing and the fresh cantaloupe. The aroma wafted me back to when my brother and I were growing up. Emma would bake a pie with flaky homemade butter crust, and then lay out the crust trimmings in thin strips, sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar, roll them into little wheels and bake them. I loved those special bite-sized treats.

Yesterday my friend Paula, after having read on my blog that I now have no car, emailing me and offering to drive me wherever I needed to go, chauffeured me around for three hours while I stocked up on our supplies. Paula is a gourmet cook and asked if she could “foist off on me some ravioli” she had made because she had made so much it was outgrowing its space in her freezer. Homemade pasta and a dinner prepared by a gourmet cook, how could I resist.

I must tell you that the raviolis were superb – delicious flavor and delicate pasta. Emma finished her dinner before I did. OK, I did give myself the larger portion. Nonetheless, this was a testament to an exquisite dish, since Emma picks at her dinner, shoveling some of it over the rim of her plate, long after I have finished. This delicate pasta, too, reminded me of Emma’s cinnamon pastry rolls.

I told Paula I am going to hire her as my personal chef — that is, when my ship comes in, but I think it struck a tree stump somewhere in the muck in the marshes of the Delaware Bay and catapulted the captain overboard; so who knows when I shall see it.

Personal chef on the shelf for now, we have been managing with less help since the healthcare agency fired me and my aide of nearly three years on July 1 because we had run out of state Medicaid funds for that particular program. Our Hospice organization has covered a few extra hours – so that Paula could chauffeur me shopping, for instance. It is thoughtful and kind that people have rearranged and extended their schedules.

Today, though, I received notice from the state Division of Aging that our application for 30 hour a week Attendant Care services has been accepted. As I understand it, the way this program works is that I become the employer, the state funds are administered by an outside agency, and I hire and pay an aide out of those funds for 30 hours a week, seven days. The aide could be me, but I choose to write and to build this website – to raise awareness and a dialogue for caregivers and to develop a following and monetize the site – so that I can earn a bit of an income while simultaneously creating a caregiver network and retain my patience and sanity. I will be meeting next week with an agent who will explain the program and bring papers for me to sign. These state and healthcare programs often come with pop-up issues, no matter how many times you level and sift the questions. Let us hope the program will roll out as the recipe appears.

–Samantha

Maggie's Bowsprit

One day in 1998 – The weathered face of the old waterman standing alone on the beach, gazing out onto the dull, gray bay; an old wooden schooner, hull rotted with holes, lying on her side on the sand by the creek, gutted of her soul – her motor and masts: This could have been the fate of yet another wooden schooner, had not her new captain and his wife fallen in love with her at first sight and saved her the moment before the sun set upon her bow forever.

July 8, 2011 – I awoke this morning with a song to the Maggie in my mind. The Maggie is a 118-year-old Delaware Bay oyster schooner, the Maggie S. Myers, owned for 13 years by my good friends Jean and Thumper. The Maggie is believed to be the oldest continuously working oyster schooner under sail in the United States. She has never been out of commission. Thumper sails her out of Bowers Beach, Delaware, onto the Delaware Bay nearly every day where he and his crew of two or three or more work her dredging for conch, oysters (when ever-tightening regulations permit), blue crabs and more. A few years ago, Jean and Thumper restored one of the Maggie’s two masts; Thumper sews his own sails. Thumper often works her under sail, thus saving fuel. The Maggie is 50 feet long and 18 feet wide with a five-foot draft. She sits low in the water like a fat white goose.

Fat Maggie

For the evening of July 3, Jean and Thumper invited a group of us out on the Maggie to watch the Bowers Beach fireworks from the bay. For this annual event, Jean lays a seasoned red Oriental rug across the Maggie’s deck and spreads the workbench with a lace tablecloth. Jean, a vegetarian (as is Thumper), has traditionally prepared the food for these events to which we are so honored to be invited; but this year she had it catered by the same guy who catered the food for the Green Eggs & Sand (a curriculum teaching teachers to teach kids about horseshoe crabs) 10th anniversary celebration in May 2010, where he prepared the cedar-plank grilled salmon, among other amazing dishes. The fare this year was equally as dazzling. Delicious. I’m so glad I went.

I am so glad I went not only because of the food but also because of the camaraderie, the friends onboard who have dedicated their lives to humanitarian achievements. I, among them, am the bumbling writer who writes to let the world know about the better place these leading exemplars create for humans, animals and the environment. There are Thumper and Jean: Jean buys and prepares the meals for a periodic series of soup kitchens for low-income watermen and others; she rescues cats (mostly dumped on her doorstep or in the marshes). Thumper created an innovative bait bag whereby he could use a quarter or less horseshoe crab for bait rather than using a whole crab; now he no longer uses horseshoe crabs; he uses mussels. Gary won awards for his Green Eggs & Sand curriculum.

Maggie's 50-foot mast

Glenn travels the world advocating for horseshoe crabs (ERDG, horseshoecrab.org – see the left sidebar with my list of friends and nonprofits); Glenn is also a Tibetan Buddhist Rinpoche. Glenn’s wife Mariko has family in Japan affected by the recent disaster (see the Tomodachi Project in the left sidebar); Glenn and Mariko’s daughter, Julia, is an extraordinary textile artist; and Glenn’s mom (who was not on the Maggie this night, is an acclaimed watercolorist and Sumi-e artist). Thumper plays the guitar, writes songs and performs these and sea chanteys, often playing for funerals. Another friend, who could not be there this night, Michael Oates, is an Emmy-winning independent documentary filmmaker, of 302 Stories. His PBS horseshoe crab documentary “Dollars in the Sand” was the progenitor of “Green Eggs & Sand.” Mike is an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Delaware and he and his partner, Jeanne, regularly engage in projects to help the less fortunate. Thumper and Jean have spent 13 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars restoring the Maggie: they fondly call this effort “The Maggie Myers Restoration Project.” Yes, Maggie must work to support herself.

Day's End - Photo by Robert Price

My friend, R., a most talented and versatile creative artist – he calls his painting technique sharp pointillism – (Assemblage 333 in the left sidebar) drove me to the Maggie, while a Hospice volunteer drove to my house in her Prius to stay with Emma. Kindle in hand, she was assured of having plenty to read while I was out on the bay.

I climbed down the ladder onto the Maggie’s deck. We waited at dock until the tide rushed into the creek enough to carry us through the cut where the Murderkill Creek meets the bay. While we relaxed out on the bay, the tide rushed in, rushed in so fast that when we returned to dock and Thumper was backing the Maggie into her berth, he had difficulty going against the tide: “She only backs up at six knots,” he said. But, Thumper’s a skilled captain, the Maggie did her best, and we made it.

Out on the bay, Thumper’s crew raised the main and jib sails. We ate, chatted, and Thumper got out his guitar, sat among us and sang us a beautiful song, one he did not write, “let me flow like the river” went the words. People had set two huge bonfires along the Bowers beach. Platoons of torches lit the yards of several big beach houses. The fireworks were unique one to the next and extraordinarily beautiful for a small town budget, and they lasted a long time. Someone lit a Chinese lantern or two or three and set them off. Then they set off more. Then hosts of them with their orange flames floated in the black night over the bay above us, like spirits floating across the sky.

–Samantha

If you are interested in the Maggie and the waterman’s life, I think you will like reading the story I wrote for the Spring 2009 issue of Delmarva Quarterly, “The Low Whistle of the Wind.” Find it here under the menu heading “The Ocean Bar and Seaview Grill.”

Emma parked her walker in the usual spot one recent morning, to the left of the credenza behind her dining chair at the head of the table, and instead of turning to her chair, overshot the dining table and headed for the corner. After much coaxing, I redirected her. On her way back, grasping the credenza, she grabbed the candelabra and then the candlestick holders. At least she didn’t bean me with one. Phew. She’s so afraid she’ll fall, she grabs onto everything in reach – bed quilts, candelabra, doorjambs…. Kind of like building your house on sand – nothing that will hold.

Emma is hard of hearing and belligerent. She thinks she knows best. And, true, sometimes she does, but she can’t communicate her reasons; I find out later. But, most of the time, she only thinks she knows best – and she tells me about it, vis-à-vis, “I’ll have you fired!” “Keep your fingers off me.” “You leave my walker alone!” She can talk when she wants to. Thank goodness that kind of talk doesn’t happen often. Although, now, she’s become combative at times. I’ve learned to stand back so when she swings, she won’t hit me. She sits in her chair next to the bed and grasps her bedpost with that firm grip only women of her generation can (accustomed to kneading dough, flattening it out with a rolling pin, rubbing laundry against a washboard, wielding a laundry iron made of iron, scrubbing the kitchen floor on hands and knees with a scrub brush, to name a few routine activities), so that her health care aides and I cannot get her arm into or out of her shirt. I try to pry her hand off and she swings at me. She is kinder to the aides.

Last night she made it to the table OK, but when she proceeded to eat the salad with baby arugula, she picked each arugula leaf out by the tip of its stem, as if lifting out a Southwest Florida lizard upside down by the tip of its tail, and placed it on her folded paper napkin beside her plate. At least she eats. I’ve been told that many dementia patients are more combative and ultimately, they stop eating and their bodies shut down. So, thankfully, we’re not there yet.

Her first major fall happened when I was helping her get out of the tub and she folded up and got wedged on the tile floor between the side of the tub and the front of the toilet. It was her birthday. Her legs and an arm were bent at odd angles. She could not get up on her own and I could not get her up. So I ran next door hoping to get my neighbor. She is strong and has had experience with these kinds of occurrences. But she wasn’t home. Her brother, however, in his early 40s, was. Stunned momentarily by my request, he rallied quickly and immediately helped. It was his indoctrination. He looked away as he helped her up. Emma was, of course, dressed appropriately for her birthday – in her birthday suit.

She experienced a major fall soon after that. This was about four years ago. She didn’t have her walker yet. Even then, though, she was grabbing onto furniture as she made her way around the house from one piece to the next. This time when she fell she hurt her arm. She couldn’t climb into her king size bed. I had to help her, but I couldn’t lift her. I called the wife of my lawn care guy to see if she knew anybody who could help me. I didn’t know whom else to ask. I thought possibly someone in their Mennonite congregation might do such work. She came right over herself, even though she lives 20 minutes away, has six children and it was dinnertime. She stayed for two hours while Emma finished her dinner and we got her undressed and into bed. She would not accept pay. (I did pay her something later on, though; I felt she helped us kindly, patiently, and cheerfully above and beyond the call of duty.) I placed a small stepstool beside Emma’s bed after that. She still uses it every night, although she can climb in the other side of the bed without it.

Somewhere around that time, I had a party, and a friend said to me, “You need help. You really need to get help with her.” I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it. I thought I couldn’t, I suppose. But, then, I spent weeks calling various healthcare agencies and the state Division of Aging learning what was available, financially and healthcare-wise. Most agencies did not return my call. One agency, Bayada, jumped on the task, got an aide – the best aide I’ve had – right out to me and organized everything within our case. Medicare paid for this, since Emma was injured and required a physical therapist. The therapist gave her range of motion exercises. The aide bought a foot tub for Emma in which to wash her feet, applied body lotion, face cream, perfume and jewelry, all of which Emma would have done on her own had she been able. And Emma got a walker. Medicare paid for the walker. You get one such support instrument a year paid for by Medicare, it is my understanding.

Our time with Bayada was short. Once Emma’s therapy was finished, Medicare no longer paid for her aides. And Bayada was not a Medicaid-paid agency. Emma never thought she’d live this long, so she spent all her money. There was no way we could afford to pay an agency for her care. But with Bayada and her walker we were set on the right path. All I had to do was spend weeks making dozens of phone calls and hoping an agency would respond, and hours with the state Division of Aging and a Medicaid attorney learning about the Medicaid Waiver, the Miller Trust, and our options, signing papers and taking care of as many legalities as were necessary at the time. I already held power of attorney for Emma; that we had set up a few years before when she was still of sound mind but had forgotten to pay some bills.

Finally, we got signed up with a Medicaid-paid healthcare agency and got an aide who is very good and has been with us for two and a half years. In fact, if it weren’t for this wonderful aide, I wouldn’t be using the agency. I find their lack of communication and general thoughtlessness astounding. Maybe it’s just because I am old and things have changed; for it seems that most business entities slack off these days – yet get paid, nonetheless.

Two nights ago, Friday, July 1, at 7:40, as I was stirring my homemade spaghetti sauce with tomatoes and basil from the garden, a guy from this agency phoned me. “I just called to tell you,” he said, “that your aide will not be coming back. You’ve run out of Medicaid hours; that is, until October.”

That’s how you fire people: tell them at end of the day on Friday. Our aide had been with us faithfully, patiently and reliably for two and a half years.

–Samantha