Thank God for Elderly Assistance

 

It is a pedestrian fact that we get older. I am now retired and I feel my age everyday. My muscles ache. My lower back aches. My neck aches. My knees are less mobile. My hands are looking a lot like those of Mr. Burns. It is increasingly hard to sleep and simultaneously increasingly hard not to sleep. It is increasingly difficult to get out of bed. My ears and eyes are increasingly fuzzy. I get dizzy spells and sometimes have to steady myself by putting my hands against the wall. My stomach constantly hurts. I have acid reflux issues. The muscles in my abdomen and chest area are tight and limit my ability to breath in. Getting older, as someone once reportedly said, is a massacre.

I am also getting sicker. For about three years now, ever since I had a negative reaction to a generic version of the asthma medication Advair, I have been seeing more and more medical specialists. I have been sent to a cardiologist, a pulmonologist, an allegist, an ear, nose, and throat specialist, a gastro-intestinal physician, and a urologist. And it doesn’t end there. In January I am off to see an immunologist. 

These increasing health problems have, to say the least, put a strain on my limited income and the budget such a limited income mandates. As a retiree, of course, I receive social security and Medicare. Thanks to working for the state of New York for almost twenty years I am one of the few and the proud who also gets something fewer and fewer Americans now receive, a pension, in my case a New York State Local and Retirement System pension. In addition I also get New York state retirement health insurance. Before my increasing health issues these combined allowed me to scrape by.

Health care costs, however, are eating ever more into this budget and have put a strain on my limited budget, a budget that also includes car payments until November since I bought a car before I retired assuming, wrongly it turns out, that I would be able to teach part-time for several more years. The pandemic put an end to that as SUNY essentially forced me to retire by only offering me one class and, as a consequence, no health insurance (they hid my other class making it impossible for students to register for it) which made driving from Albany to Oneonta three times a week irrational.

I have tried to supplement my income by working. Social Security and the state of New York retirement system do allow you to work in addition to collecting both pensions though there can be financial consequences and there are limits. I got jobs at the Albany School of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Friar Tuck, and the Albany Public Library but had to quit each one for health reasons and, in the case of the former also for personal reasons. So, what I get from Social Security and the NYSLRS is it for me at this point in my elderly life.

Because of these increasing health care costs I had gone from a couple of thousand dollars in my savings account to a hundred. Concerned with how I was going to survive I applied for additional aid benefits to get me through the hard times and particularly until my car payments were complete. I applied for SNAP or food stamps, from the Albany County Department of Social Services. After a few hiccoughs I got limited but very helpful aid. I  also applied for assistance from Medicare to help with my pharmacy costs—which are increasing exponentially—but was denied. What helped more than anything else, it turned out, was when, at the request of my SNAP contact, I sent records of my health care charges since last October (charges for doctors, for three cat scans, for two MRIs, for numerous blood drawings, for three urgent clinic visits, and for four emergency room visits) to the Albany County Department of Social Services. Now the state of New York is paying my Medicare premium and my financial situation has improved dramatically. I am no longer, at least for the moment, treading water. I am actually above it for the first time in some time.

It is easy to whinge and whine about welfare and about government bureaucracy. Personally, I have found government bureaucracies to be far more efficient and effective than corporate bureaucracies like Tracfone and Amazon. Sometimes, however, we need a bit of help, from the government. At those times I am more than thankful that the government—local, state, and federal—is there to give  those of us who need it the much needed help we need just to survive. This help has allowed me, for example, to supplement my food, buy and allergen barrier for my mattress and to buy hypoallergenic pillows to replace the chemical laden memory foam pillows I should never have purchased and should have known more about when I did buy them. Hopefully it will also help to improve my health and it will make the never ending crisis management that is an essential part of being an elderly retiree less stressful and less consuming.