friend in need of help

[shirl]

I have a friend who is having such a difficult time in her life I don't know how to help her. She has to have surgery as soon as possible from a ruptured herniea, that was suppose to be taken care of last year,except a mesh material that was placed inside of her has be a recalled. She is in so much pain. She works three jobs just to pay her rent barely and not enough food to eat. She is talking to me right now and saying I don't know how long I could go on like this. She is so scared when she goes into the hospital she will not have a home to go to. She is a good lady always. Can anyone help.

[ThePhiant]

Barry, it may be time to open an "altruism forum", it seems that there is about once a week a request for help,

[Tars]

shirl - the help your friend needs would seem to be in the form of a guarantee of a place to live, or funds to help her with her medical bills. Unfortunately, I can't help her with either of those, as I am in a situation myself which is not terribly far removed from hers. I hope your post reaches someone who is able and willing to step forward. I replied to your post though, because it brings up a subject that is, or should be important to several who frequent this place. I hope you don't feel I'm hijacking your thread by discussing it.

shirl's friend is on the leading edge of a huge population trend.

During the next three decades or so, unless there are huge societal changes, large portions of the U.S. population will find themselves in the same situation. I forget what the statistic says exactly, but it's something like - 90% of the medical expenses of our lifetime occur in the last 5 years of our life.

Not to apply this statistic directly to shirl's friend, I hope she has many years. But the point is that a large percentage of the U.S. population is nearing an age where their medical expenses will skyrocket. This, while over 40% of the population has no medical insurance at all. This, while a majority of workers are "two paychecks away from living on the street". Obviously, as more people become unable to work as they used to, and become increasingly infirm, they will experience major shifts in their lifestyles.

Is our society prepared to undertake the huge financial burden of caring for these people? Well, whether it wants to or not, it will have to. Not because people will all of a sudden sprout dollar bills of generosity like leaves. It will happen only because it's an unavoidable social problem, and it will be addressed by market forces, which are much larger and stronger than laws, or mores, or generosity. We will see that many MANY boomers will have to sell every non-essential thing they own, just to cover their horrendous medical bills. This is already happening on a wide scale. It's a typical progression in peoples' lives, but it will happen to Boomers much more widely than it has to any recent generation.

Many will be in a marginal situation where they are lucky enough to still maintain ownership of their home. But to make ends meet they will need to host ailing aging Boomers. In effect, many will become miniature convalescent hospitals. There will be big demand during the next few decades for people who can retrofit homes with wheelchair ramps, widened doorways, converted kitchens, etc.

An ideal of the Boomers when they were twenty-somethings was the collective lifestyle - "communes". Careful what you ask for.... The Boomers are a generation that is used to having "roomates" - sharing a "one-family" home with other non-related adults. As the expenses of staying alive shoots up for Boomers, and as society struggles to address the problem, many will find themselves economically highly inter-dependent with their "roomies" - people they aren't related to by blood. Households of roomies will need to find new ways of depending on each other for survival, even though they each of them, are frail.

Those of us who may currently own or rent our own individual home, will find ourselves going back to either hosting or becoming roomates. It's an implacable financial market force that will compel aging people to reduce their lifestyle & posessions down to one room's worth.

Boomers will experience "Love The One You're With" in ways that CSN almost assuredly did not foresee.

Am I being too cynical about this? I don't think so.

Tars

[AnnaLisaW]

The harsh reality is, if you can't work and don't have rich relatives, it is best to be prepared to lose everything. The social safely net has fallen apart. I know. I have been there.
I finnally won my SSDI (disabililty) appeal, have a new home and am putting my life back together. I was lucky. I managed to keep it together for a year after I could no longer work so I was only homeless for a little over a year. Friends and family kept me off the streets and out of shelters but no one had the room for me and all my stuff. I left a lot of irreplacable things with friends, scattered them around so that no one person felt used as a free storage unit. Some things I got back, some I didn't.
Shirl, if you love your friend, help her to face reality and encourage her to knock politely and repeatedly on every social service agency door she can. Most will turn her down. Every now and then she'll get a little help. It is hard.
She needs you to be strong. Do not let her pull you down emotionally or financially. Don't give more than you can comfortably give. She needs your moral support more than anything else. I was told "we can't help" ten times for every once that I got a little help. If it hadn't been for the constant encouragement those who knew me before my life fell apart, I would have just given up and died. They didn't give me money; that would have damaged relationships and cost me the emotional support that I so desperately needed. They gave me love and compassion. What more do you need? Food, shelter and clothing become Food Stamps, a friends couch or a spot in the shelter and a warm jacket. It is the compassion and encouragement that matter most.
Good luck.