I used to read stories with headlines that said things like “Most American households are one major health crisis from bankruptcy” and I’d think “Oh, those poor people” and mutter a quick prayer for those folks.
Nowadays I see those headlines and I just think “Yup.”
Our health crisis has receded from something major, acute, and life-threatening to something merely chronic and, it turns out, life-altering. We’re managing that, mostly (see below). But we’re still dealing with the financial repercussions of all the bills we struggled or failed to pay during the weeks, then months, then years, in which our first and sometimes only concern was that my wife was in constant pain and in real danger. That put us in a deep hole.
I like Kelly Clarkson, but it’s not really true that “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Sometimes what almost kills you lingers. And sometimes it takes all your time and energy and every cent of your family’s finances.
We’re still behind. Way behind. We’re not sure how we pulled off last month and not sure how we’re going to pull of this month. And next month ain’t looking great either.
So this is a fundraiser, a plea for help to anyone who is able and inclined to provide it.
Here is my PayPal link. And here is my Venmo: @George-Clark-61.
Once again, I am enormously grateful to all of you who have supported this blog and my family in the past. And I thank you in advance for whatever support you can provide for us now.
If you’re interested in a longer, more personal discussion of where we’re at now, that follows below.
Two years ago, our longtime next-door neighbors sold their house and moved away.
They were older than us — in their 70s while we’re still in our 50s — and had encountered some health problems. They’d reached the point where the yard and the upkeep were just too much.
And the stairs were too much. Our neighborhood is made up of two-story houses with basements. That’s two staircases, which becomes two too many when stairs become a struggle.
“We just can’t handle the stairs anymore,” our very nice neighbors had said.
We understood what they meant because back then, two years ago, the Slacktivixen couldn’t handle the stairs either. That had been true for a while, ever since her month in the ICU dealing with severe sepsis from our inability to get her the surgery she needed all that time. (We live in America.) But that was just temporary. Once she got the surgery, she’d be back on her feet and then the downstairs living room we’d converted into what we half-jokingly called the “invalid suite” could go back to being a living room.
We finally got her that surgery early last year. No more constant pain, no more sepsis, and after a few months of PT the stairs should be no problem.
But that’s not how it’s worked out. What doesn’t kill you sometimes makes you weaker. You’ll get random electrolyte crash-outs that send you to the hospital for a week for a menorah of IVs. And that sepsis it took a month to flush from your system will leave you prone to infections in the future, so a bit of botched dental work can almost prove deadly and put you back in the hospital for another week of antibiotics.
And the stairs will always be a problem.
That’s not easy to swallow when you’re still only in your 50s. It took me too long to realize that my job wasn’t to be a cheerleader, constantly saying “Come on, you can do this!” but to be more of a counselor helping her to accept that she can’t. It’s not easy convincing someone you love to accept something that you don’t want to accept yourself. It hurts them and it hurts you. It hurts.
But we’ve finally realized this is where we are now, unable any longer to keep up with the house and the yard or to manage the stairs.
It’s our turn to move.
We need to sell this place and downsize to something smaller, a place without so many stairs.
And some place cheaper. We need to sell this place not just because of the stairs but because we need to use a chunk of whatever we’re able to sell it for to pay down some of the debt we’ve racked up during the Sick Years. That should be possible — we’ve been making mortgage payments on this house for almost 20 years, so we own much of its equity. And on paper, houses in this neighborhood “go for” a lot more than they did when we first signed all those papers. But the years of sickness and debt have also been years of deferred maintenance that we simply couldn’t afford. Our home is now a fixer-upper — in need of not just a new coat of paint and some driveway sealer, but a new roof and some tear-down-to-the-studs drywall work in a few places. Some renovator is going to make a nice profit flipping this place, but we hope that we and our creditors will still come away with something.
On the plus side, it’s Spring at the Big Box, and it’s possible the company will go back to allowing the overtime that it used to encourage and all-but require me to work during its busiest season. I think maybe they’ve begun to realize that cutting overtime in the Spring makes as much sense as a football team trying to save money by only putting six players on the field. So that could help.
Also, over the weekend, we moved my wife out of the salon “suite” she’d been renting ever since she’d lost her last job when she lost her health. Some weeks she’d been able to work there enough to pay that rent and still turn a profit. Some weeks she hadn’t been. But she’s reconnected with an old friend who understands that my wife is still among the very best at what she does and offered her a new job in a new location. Most of her loyal clients — dozens of men with the best damn haircuts in the area — will follow her there, helping to grow her friend’s business without us having to pay that weekly rent we couldn’t afford.
That helps a lot, in terms of our household finances. Not, like, a pay-for-the-roof or get-us-out-of-the-hole amount of help, but it’ll keep the hole from getting any bigger.
It’s a deep hole, and we’re trying to climb out of it. But that’s tough to climb when you have trouble with the stairs.
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