Beyond At This Point.
Nov. 10th, 2015 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dodger_sisterYou guys, I am ass-to-the-ground tired, but I haven't posted yet this month, so I am going to commit a cardinal sin and copy/paste some stuff from my Tumblr and from a comment section with a good friend, to explain where I have been and what has been going on.
This bit here...-....The first week of the month has been a bitch and a half. Mom was suppose to go home to her house on Thursday, but instead Halloween night, around 3am, she went to ER by ambulance from the rehab. Sodium levels had dropped dangerously low and they couldn't get back up - from the heart stuff. Finally did, and released her back to rehab for a few more weeks, but in the meantime, she needs $2000 a day (nope, not a typo, it's 1k a pill, 2x a day) for helping to keep her sodium absorbing properly, cuz her insurance won't cover it. I am trying to find a way to get her the pills, also working on a stack of medical bills, a spend down on her Medicaid/Medicare she didn't know she had, and a year's worth of unopened mail we found shoved in her file cabinet. Taking care of my mother has become a full time job...-...
And then there's this...-...If your sodium level drops low enough, you can have seizures or, you know, die. Today we found out that the pill my mother needs to take in order to absorb her sodium pill properly, and thus keep her sodium levels up to a non-dying level, costs $1,000. Per pill. And she has to take it twice a day.
To put it another way - it will cost $2,000 a day to keep her alive. $14,000 a week to keep her alive. $60,000 a month to keep her alive. $730,000 a year to keep her alive.
And her health insurance will not pay for it.
She was just released from the hospital after nearly crashing completely on her sodium levels - causing her severe confusion and hallucinations. She is stable now, but without the medicine, she will be right back in the hospital in no time. And, eventually, it will kill her...-...
I am so tired. I just want some time to write again. I have ideas. But instead, here I am working almost 20 hours a week - on top of, you know, being chronically ill - on my mother's snafu-of-shit that (aside from the health stuff) she basically caused herself by, idk, Not Ever Opening Her Mail.
This bit here...-....The first week of the month has been a bitch and a half. Mom was suppose to go home to her house on Thursday, but instead Halloween night, around 3am, she went to ER by ambulance from the rehab. Sodium levels had dropped dangerously low and they couldn't get back up - from the heart stuff. Finally did, and released her back to rehab for a few more weeks, but in the meantime, she needs $2000 a day (nope, not a typo, it's 1k a pill, 2x a day) for helping to keep her sodium absorbing properly, cuz her insurance won't cover it. I am trying to find a way to get her the pills, also working on a stack of medical bills, a spend down on her Medicaid/Medicare she didn't know she had, and a year's worth of unopened mail we found shoved in her file cabinet. Taking care of my mother has become a full time job...-...
And then there's this...-...If your sodium level drops low enough, you can have seizures or, you know, die. Today we found out that the pill my mother needs to take in order to absorb her sodium pill properly, and thus keep her sodium levels up to a non-dying level, costs $1,000. Per pill. And she has to take it twice a day.
To put it another way - it will cost $2,000 a day to keep her alive. $14,000 a week to keep her alive. $60,000 a month to keep her alive. $730,000 a year to keep her alive.
And her health insurance will not pay for it.
She was just released from the hospital after nearly crashing completely on her sodium levels - causing her severe confusion and hallucinations. She is stable now, but without the medicine, she will be right back in the hospital in no time. And, eventually, it will kill her...-...
I am so tired. I just want some time to write again. I have ideas. But instead, here I am working almost 20 hours a week - on top of, you know, being chronically ill - on my mother's snafu-of-shit that (aside from the health stuff) she basically caused herself by, idk, Not Ever Opening Her Mail.
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Date: 2016-03-05 08:04 pm (UTC)She has Medicare and Medicaid, but they won't always cover certain meds. And they will cover rehab, but only for X amount of time and if she isn't better by then, they figure it isn't working and they stop paying. Never mind that some people take longer to heal than others.
The cost of the med she needs reminds me of what has happened with one of the AIDS meds. Maybe you've heard about it. The company that makes it has a new owner and he raised the price from a few dollars per pill to something crazy like $450 per pill. And there is no law preventing him from doing this. The prices of many meds is totally out of control in this country.
Oh yeah, I followed that whole thing real close! Because that is just a exaggerated version of what all drug companies do with life saving meds. They know we can't live without it, so they jack it up. I mean, if you need it bad enough, you'll pay any price right? Unless of course you can't pay any price and then oops, oh well, screw you.
Why did she have so much unopened mail? Does she suffer from a form of dementia, or Alzheimer's disease?
For the last year before all this began, we had been discussing with her siblings that we thought she was getting dementia. But now we realize that at least part of it was because she wasn't getting enough pumping from her very sick heart. We didn't realize she even had heart issues, let alone so bad as she did. She is still not great, slow and forgetful, but that can be explained by her general exhaustion and poor health from recovery. But the complete confusion is gone and that was from the heart. Still, I am opening all her mail from now on!
What a dreadful burden for you. I hope you can come up with a solution.
Think you. I love my mom, despite our off-kilter relationship. So at first it was just "family does for family" which we are big on in my family. But we just hit the six month mark of her fall/heart surgery and she isn't home yet, so I'm getting pretty tired of it all. And so is she!