Driving Sideways by Jess Riley

Author:Jess Riley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345507440
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-05-19T16:00:00+00:00

Nevada: Wide Open

Most people don’t become dependent on someone else, even a family member, overnight. Usually, it’s a gradual process: an elderly aunt falling in the shower, breaking a hip, first needing help buying groceries and eventually requiring round-the-clock supervision…a grandfather unable to keep up with his house over time…a mother slowly succumbing to multiple sclerosis.

But some do become dependent on others overnight: a kid in a car sideswiped by a drunk driver…a father who has a heart attack in the middle of a business meeting…and me. After I got sick, there was really no way I could stay in school and afford my apartment, which had finally begun to reflect my personality. I was always tired, I was always in the hospital (or so it seemed), and I was always broke. So I said good-bye to my professors, to the people who would have rounded out my circle of friends, and to my roommate, a cloyingly nice girl in braces whose favorite outfit was a blue nylon tracksuit. James and Marissa helped me pack, helped me move all of my boxes and my bed and my dresser back home, drove me to dialysis appointments, shuttled me to and from doctor visits and tests. For their support, I will always be grateful. But it was as if I’d tasted real life on my own—danced on the sparkling stage of it—and someone in the wings had yanked me off with a huge cane. Late at night, thinking of the parties I was missing, the dates my friends were on, the careers they were preparing for, I curled into a little knot of resentment and sadness.

Then the medical bills started piling up, eating raggedy holes through the money Gram left us. I applied for Social Security disability benefits and Medicare, but as a transplant recipient under age sixty-five, my coverage expires in three years—isn’t that a nifty little clause? I also applied for assistance under the state’s Chronic Renal Disease Program, and let me tell you, nothing will make you feel like a senior citizen who lives in a refrigerator box like submitting the application forms for all of these programs. After a late night around a kitchen table smothered in bills and paperwork so confusing it could have been a home PC-assembly tutorial written in Bengali, James and Marissa decided the best thing would be for me to “limit my income” in order to qualify for maximum coverage with Wisconsin Medicaid. (Mindy, my boss at Fuzzy Navels, loved the whole “limiting my income” angle.) In the end, I was scraping by with a patchwork of cobbled-together funding streams that served to keep me walking and talking. It’s a huge pain in the ass just to keep up with the paperwork, but you’d be surprised at what you’ll do for just a few more sunsets, a few more episodes of The Golden Girls, a few more root beer floats.

And I was trapped. Every job for which I was qualified paid little and failed to offer decent health benefits.

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