Write for God

Hundreds lined up for a health event in Appalachia (NPR.org)

My kids call me a book nerd because I love to read. As much as I enjoy reading, there are some genres I don’t cotton to. Mass romance novels and science fiction don’t do much for me unless they transcend all of the conventions that are the very qualities their followers want in these books. What turns me off about these mass genres is that keeps them coming back.

I used to work in a bookstore years ago and the large number of romance readers who had no idea if they had read a particular number always amazed me. Are they all that similar and disposable that they would run together in their minds? You would never confuse Of Mice and Men with Anna Karenina, for example, but that all-purpose cover illustration of a bare-chested man embracing a woman with cleavage might make you wonder if you’ve read that book before or if was one of the hundreds you’d read before.

Live and let live, so romance readers are entitled to their choice of books without my opinions. Read what you like, I say.

My problem with some genre readers today arose from a Facebook post by a romance author whose list I joined on a whim because I liked how she was able to write while living a normal life with her husband and kids. I would never read her books, but her small slices of life about the struggle to finish 10 pages while life intrudes were sometimes interesting to read. A woman who writes is very different from a man who writes, after all.

In her Facebook post, the author asked her readers to educate themselves about HR 676, the United States National Health Care Act. Immediately, readers posted horror stories backed by information from conservative sites with political agendas as bare as the chests of those guys on the cover of romance novels. One site was called RedState, for goodness’ sakes. Talk about objectivity!

Socialism, fascism, old people Soylent Green-ed…you name it and these romance readers who aren’t sure if they’ve read a particular, semi-sordid tale of ill-written sex between women with cleavage and bare-chested men were offering their scenarios of how our nation will cease to exist if everyone had access to doctors.

July 28 must have been  HR 676 D-Day. On many other Facebook posts, people calling themselves Christians were railing against those who won’t go to work, who need to show humility by taking menial jobs listed in classified sections and who don’t want to be told how their taxes are spent for health care. (Italics mine as actual quotes I glanced at today.) All well and good if you’re employed and have adequate health care you can afford. It’s easy to be pharisaical if all the folks you hang out with are your fellow Pharisees.

The truth is that there are millions who want to work and can’t find a job because jobs are non-existent. For every one of those classified ads, there are hundreds of applicants. The majority who apply for any job they see never hear anything in response to a well-crafted resume backed by years of experience. I know an unemployed real estate professional who works 18 hours a week for just above minimum wage. Because she is 58 and has some health problems, she has looked for jobs in three states and is lucky to have found those 18 hours in Florida, she says.

As for being humble, I know professionals who would take a $10-an-hour job if it came with health benefits. They can’t even find those $10-an-hour jobs because of their age or their health conditions.

In 2007-2008, I spent five months looking for any job that would allow me to support my family. I sent hundreds of resumes, networked and practiced interviewing tips daily. In the end, I found a job that was never listed in the classifieds and which came via a friend of a friend who was hiring. It paid $11,000 less than I’d been making, but it was a job and I needed it.

A friend who lost her job just last Friday joked that she would be selling any makeup or home decor line she could find to make a living while she looks for another job.  Despite her many health problems, she could be uninsured soon if she can’t afford the $507-a-month COBRA coverage she qualifies for.

Instead of spreading horror stories about socialized medicine (did anyone say Medicare?), it might behoove those Facebook romance fans to take the author’s tip and educate themselves about the health-care bill and any alternative plans. In fact, all of us should read the text of this house resolution for ourselves without a political filter.

It’s easy to call a plan socialist if you have private insurance you can afford or if you are still well enough not to need health care. It’s more difficult to put yourselves in the shoes of a family that is either uninsured or has to forego health care they can’t afford.

Would you like to meet one of those families? Allow me to present ours, a devout Catholic family with a father, mother, two children still at home and two adult children who care for themselves.

After I lost my job in October 2007, we didn’t have the money to continue COBRA for two adults and the two children still at home. We were all very healthy anyway, so it wasn’t a huge concern at the moment. For five months, no one in the family was insured and we just trusted God to take care of us.

I found another job five months later when I accepted the first position I was offered. I could then afford to cover myself for about $67 a month. Coverage for my husband and our two children would have added about $500 to our monthly health-insurance bill, so we turned down family coverage. 

Thanks to the State of Florida’s KidCare program, I was able to insure the children for $20 a month. This socialist program is part of the state’s Medicaid system and works like Medicare for seniors. My kids were finally able to see a pediatrician selected by the plan and to go to a dentist to have their teeth cleaned.

My husband was another story. Adding him to any health insurance plan was again beyond our means. He’s much too young for Medicare and we were just above the poverty line for Medicaid. He remained uninsured despite his hypertension. Again, we just trusted God to keep us healthy.

In July 2008, my husband fell in the middle of the night. We don’t know what happened, but I awoke to a thud outside our bedroom door. I found him on his back and couldn’t rouse him. Blood and tissue poured from his right ear, so I called 911 immediately.

My husband was transferred by helicopter to the nearest trauma center. He remained in the hospital for the next few days with a skull fracture — and no health insurance. After leaving the hospital, we couldn’t find a neurologist who would see him without insurance. When I called the office of the doctor who had asked us to follow up with him the week after discharge, I was told that he needed an MRI to be done before he would see my husband.

The hospital wouldn’t schedule him for an MRI unless we had some sort of insurance to cover the procedure and they suggested applying for Medicaid. After some months of huge medical bills, Medicaid finally covered him as a short-term patient for the month when he was injured. Again, we couldn’t find a neurosurgeon who would accept his particular kind of temporary Medicaid for a follow-up. While I was at work, I made dozens of calls that yielded no results. We found one ear, nose and throat specialist who accepted cash. For $75, he told my husband that he was acting like a “goofball” and that he couldn’t do anything for his symptoms.  

To make a long story very short, my husband never had medical care after his skull fracture. He continues to pray and has adjusted pretty well to having lost his sense of hearing in one ear, his sense of taste and some vision on the affected side. He cannot smell the food he eats or the flowers in our front yard.

We felt thankful that we had ridden out his health problems when another medical emergency almost destroyed us.

In September 2008, my children and I were in a devastating auto accident. My son and I were able to walk away with minor scrapes, but our daughter was badly injured. The worst affliction was a traumatic brain injury (TBI) that left her in a coma for five weeks at a pediatric intensive care unit. The KidCare insurance that covered her paid for her care — thank God for socialized medicine there! Her additional five weeks of rehabilitation were paid by another form of state Medicaid which took over when KidCare would only cover two weeks of rehab. We are still receiving thousands of dollars of medical bills for expenses outside her KidCare coverage.

After our daughter’s injury, we strapped our belts even tighter and purchased health coverage for my husband at a cost of $177 out of every biweekly paycheck. We were living on a reduced income that was then cut 9 percent by my employer in January of this year.  At least I am still employed, which wasn’t the case for a co-worker whose job was downsized after our pay was cut.

My source of extra income, freelance writing, dried up during the months we spent caring for our daughter. Newspapers and magazines aren’t buying as much freelance as they used to, or so I’ve been told by editors.

We purchased private insurance for my husband and all seemed well. When we tried using it for checkups, but discovered that we had been misinformed when we purchased the coverage. Our plan had a high deductible that made any sort of medical visits other than emergency care out of reach on our budget.

The materials that we reviewed mentioned all the “well care” that was covered and the very tiny print we missed said that we had to pay $1,500 out of our own pockets before we could actually see a doctor to stay well. In essence, we had health insurance that we paid a lot for and couldn’t afford to use.

Because our family is struggling to put food on the table, we cancelled my husband’s health insurance this month and he is uninsured again. We are just praying that God keeps him in His care while we think of other options. Florida has a new adult program similar to the KidCare that covers our children and we are looking into that as an option for him as soon as he is eligible. Darn! There goes that socialized medicine again!

As it stands, I am covered by private insurance that I can’t afford to use to stay well, my husband is uninsured and our children are covered by Florida’s Medicaid-lite for children. Our son just had a checkup and his vaccines were updated; our daughter can see doctors that accept her brand of  Medicaid for TBI care. My husband is out on his own trusting in God only. In fact, sometimes all we seem to have left is God.

I love hearing all the complaints about HR 676 from people who actually consider RedState and groups like them viable sources of information. The rights and freedoms they tell themselves will be lost when everyone has access to health care are just so precious to hear about.

Never mind that a lot of working families can’t afford health insurance: It’s those lazy people who won’t work and those who can prove President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii who are trying to ruin this nation. In the end, it’s not as much about health care for the poor as it is about profits and the status quo for the rich.

The doctor who circulated that offensive picture of President Obama as a witch doctor with a bone in his nose happens to practice in our county. I recall seeing the good doctor at county commission meetings as he clamored for lower taxes. A fellow county employee used to call his tirades Neurosurgeons for Tax Relief.

The Tea Party folks who enjoyed seeing President Obama as a witch doctor with a hammer and sickle in the copy really think that they will hold back the tide on the national health care that is coming in some way or another. Their arguments against it are about as realistic as seeing the average romance reader in a clinch with a muscular, bare-chested man who wants to kiss her throbbing lips and whisk her away to his well-appointed ranch.  (Edwardian mansions are out now in those novels, I hear.)

NPR ran a report this week about hundreds of people who camped out to see doctors and dentists during a health event in Appalachia. They began arriving days in advance to wait in line for basic health complaints: pulling out aching teeth or having someone look at a suppurating sore. It’s a good thing they didn’t lose their freedom to suffer from rotting molars and cancer.

I have not gone through all of  HR 676 yet. The sections that I’ve read have contained good and bad points. I know this nation needs national health coverage for all, but I’m not sure that this resolution will provide the best option possible. It may be time to go back to the drawing board on some areas, but so many people are willing to dismiss the very idea of accessible health care just because they have theirs locked in via private insurance they’re lucky enough to afford or because their health care comes from socialized medicine that is part of their retirement package.

Many of us can see that the opposition to HR 676 is rooted more in political agendas than in a genuine concern for the fates of those who are less fortunate. A mishap here or there and those well insured folks could be on the other side. HR 676 is not a perfect plan, as I’ve gathered from a partial reading of it, but it shouldn’t deter this nation from formulating a national health care initiative that restores dignity to each American.

I can’t imagine that we’ll stand before God and have a good excuse why we didn’t care for the least of our brothers. I don’t think God will accept the arguments RedState offers. The Father may ask what we did with the talents He gave us and, if He gave us more than He gave others, why we buried them in the field instead of multiplying them.

In the past year, our family has both given food and money to our church’s Society of St. Vincent de Paul and accepted food and money from the same source. I would like to think that what we gave when we were more prosperous a year ago helped others who are where we are now and that we may be able to repay their generosity as we’re able. Thank God that others in our church community donated food for families like ours.

The blood that I donated a year ago may have been given to my daughter when she was in intensive care last fall.  The homeless man I gave my last dollar to on the street a few weeks ago may find the help he needs to pull himself out of his circumstances. I guess I could have told him he was lazy instead of giving him the dollar in my wallet. I could have been guided by RedState’s rhetoric instead of by Matthew 25 before I placed a dollar in his calloused hand:

Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.

35

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me,

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naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.’

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Then the righteous ¹⁶ will answer him and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?

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When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?

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When did we see you ill or in prison, and visit you?’

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And the king will say to them in reply, ‘Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’

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¹⁷ Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

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For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink,

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a stranger and you gave me no welcome, naked and you gave me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for me.’

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¹⁸ Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to your needs?’

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He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for me.’

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And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

The face on the Shroud of Turin

Either we go up together or we go down together. (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)

We are all busy during our workday and sometimes even a break or lunch eludes us, but we are always nestled in the hands of God and that He shows us His face in others. I had the blessing of experiencing that today.

A random post on a social networking group I joined recently led me to deep prayer for a stranger. A fellow communications professional asked for prayers for her nephew, who is in critical condition after a car accident that left him with a traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Since last September, our family has been dealing with our 13-year-old daughter’s TBI and its aftermath. I’ve posted entries about our ordeal here before but, in short: Our beautiful daughter was in a coma for five weeks and in rehab for another five weeks before she joined us at home. Young people with similar injuries are very special to me now because I know the hell that their families endure when they see their child with a TBI in intensive care.

When I read about the young man accident on my social networking group, I contacted the family and we’ve been in touch all day today sorting out this terrible event.  The young man is 17 and today he was due to be anointed with a glove that belonged to St. Pio of Pietrelcina, the beloved Padre Pio whose intercession we sought during our daughter’s worst days.  Please pray for Daniel Perrino today. He is in God’s hands today and our prayers are desperately needed for his healing.

As Dr. King put it, we can either rise or fall together. After a busy morning working and praying for Daniel, I finally made it to the bank to make two deposits for my employer. I was thinking of TBIs and beating the rain as I walked the block to the bank. Ahead of me, there was an old woman in shabby clothing. She had a tote bag hooked to her walker as she laboriously walked the few steps from the bank’s parking lot to the main entrance. Seeing the face of God in her, I hurried to open the two bank doors and she thanked me for my “beautiful heart.”

I walked to the line in the lobby, still thinking of how quickly I could leave before the rain began. As I waited, the same woman eventually stood behind me. I gave her my place in line so she wouldn’t have to wait longer than I and, again, she thanked me.

My deposits in, I walked out and the same woman was walking to the two bank doors to leave. It was as if God had put her in my path today for some good. Again, I helped her out.

On the sidewalk, she told me that she had come in for cash to pay for her handicapped tag. A state employee had been thoughtful enough to tell her that Florida is raising its fees on September 1. Paying for her tag early would save her a little cash instead of waiting to renew on her birthday, she said. I mentioned that I wanted to do the same thing with my tag because my birthday was coming up in October.

She stopped and looked at me: Her birthday was in October, too, and she asked which day. The 17th, I told her and, with a big smile, she told me that was her birthday, too. It turns out that she was exactly 30 years older than me. She told me that her name was Georgietta and I told her mine. We shared a moment and I told her to be safe as she drove across the street to the registration office to get her tag.

The odds of walking in and out with this stranger who shared my birthday are astronomical. Most of the times that I make a deposit at this bank, I walk in and out without talking to anyone except the teller. It seems that Georgietta needed someone to be kind to her today, and a stranger who shared her birthday and just wanted to beat the rain was God’s instrument to do that. 

I could be Georgietta in 30 years walking into a bank and hoping that someone I don’t know will care enough to hold a door for me or to chat for a minute. This afternoon, God showed his face to me as a disabled woman without much money but with the capacity to let me be kind.

Praying for a boy I don’t know or holding a door for an elderly woman who shares my birthday showed me that we are always in the hands of God, ready to love his people as He commands us to do, and that those he puts in our path bear His face.

St. Pio of Pietrelcina's stigmata

Time is relative–thank you, Albert Einstein. In the past six months, our family has lived a century. Moments have become weeks, weeks have become years.

Six months ago today, my 13-year-old twins and I were in a serious car accident. My son and I had minor seatbelt injuries, but our daughter, Tally, took the brunt of the car that smashed into us. For five weeks, we were at her bedside at the pediatric intensive care unit and, for another five weeks, my husband and I took turns staying at the rehab hospital with her. The six months since September 17, 2008 have been the worst time of our lives; our darkest night of the soul began when we thought we had lost our daughter.

Through prayer and the intercession of St. Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio), St. Therese of Lisieux and Servant of God Dorothy Day, our daughter has been regaining her health daily. She is in homebound school eagerly awaiting a return to “real school” in the classroom. After a Gethsemane-like night of prayer, our daughter opened her eyes for the first time in the intensive care unit on the anniversary of Padre Pio’s stigmata. (God had given and taken away the stigmata on September 20 fifty years apart.)

Six months later, I was dismayed to read that actress Natasha Richardson, daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and wife of Liam Neeson, was in critical condition after a skiing accident yesterday. Her injury sounds very similar to our daughter’s.

I don’t know the Richardson/Redgrave/Neeson family, of course, but I’ve been praying for them. Only families who have been through an ordeal like ours know the bitter pain of seeing a loved one in an intensive care unit–intubated, in a coma and hanging in the balance. It’s the worst hell on earth for those who vigil by the bedside of a family member with a traumatic brain injury.

About a month ago, my daughter and I had a mother/daughter movie night with The Parent Trap, a charming family film in which Ms. Richardson plays the mother of twin girls who want to reunite their divorced parents. My daughter and I laughed and enjoyed the movie, but my real joy came in being able to share a simple gift like movie night with her.

Movie night, laughter, a hug, a text message: all of those little things are so precious when they come from Tally. May Natasha Richardson’s family know the same simple joys again. Please pray for her recovery.

NOTE: Natasha Richardson died on March 18 at the age of 45. She leaves a husband, actor Liam Neeson, and two boys as well as her celebrated mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and sister, Joely Richardson. May Ms. Richardson rest in peace.

Almost a year ago, I started this blog as a way to stay sane after losing my job, my health benefits and my retirement savings. As the only working parent in our household, my income meant the difference between eating and not eating for a family that included 13-year-old twins and two college students. My husband’s calling as a peace activist and stay-at-home Dad kept him busy serving God for no pay.

As the first anniversary of this blog approaches on December 28, what had seemed as an insurmountable tragedy as 2007 was ending became just a blip on our radar screen as 2008 progressed. The post before this one was on July 1 and things would change dramatically that month to take me away from writing here for many months.

In early July, life seemed to be settling into a safe routine. I was employed at a research organization and the twins were looking forward to outings at the beach with family. We kept our baby grandsons for a week while our college-age daughter vacationed with her partner’s family in Puerto Rico. On an evening when my husband Kevin and I were exhausted from caring for an infant and a toddler, we went to bed and woke up to new reality in the middle of the night.

We think that Kevin got up to go to the bathroom after I had finally come to bed. I woke up shortly after when I heard a thud. Thinking that our oldest grandson had fallen out of bed, I got up and opened our bedroom door. Kevin was snoring on the terrazzo floor next to the door. Thinking that he had gone to sleep in a strange place because of a backache, I didn’t think much of his napping spot. (He has slept on recliners, couches, chairs, yoga mats, camp cots and everything else in between.)

I told him to come to bed and he didn’t respond. I said it louder, to no avail. I shook him several times and he seemed out of it. Alarmed at this point, I turned his face to me and suddenly noticed blood and bloody matter coming out of his right ear. I ran to the phone to call 911 and, before I hung up the phone, paramedics were in our house in the middle of the night while the twins and the grandbabies continued sleeping.

A medical helicopter transported my husband to the nearest trauma center 25 miles away as I called family members for help at about 2 a.m. Thank God that my parents and siblings are about 25 miles east of us. Some of them arrived to care for the children while I dressed and drove to the hospital on a deserted highway.

Kevin spent three days in the hospital with a fractured skull. He still has no sense of taste or smell and his right eye won’t close properly. Other than that, he’s with us and God has kept him out of serious harm. The best that a neurologist could guess was that he had fallen, had hit one wall and then ricocheted onto the hard floor.

All of this without medical insurance, since I had lost the health benefits we had all barely used while I worked for Pinellas County. At my new job, family insurance cost so much that I would have lost a third of my small salary to insurance premiums. Kevin was uninsured, but I was able to use Florida’s Kid Care program to provide low-cost benefits for the twins. Medicaid had to help us cover his trauma center care.

Kevin was healing and we were all looking forward to better days when a Wednesday night trip that the twins and I had taken regularly ended tragically on September 17. I made a left turn into a shopping center to pick up some items at the market when a Jeep came out of the darkness and broadsided us. Ethan, our boy twin, and I walked out of the car, but our girl twin, Tally, was unconscious.

Another member of our family took a helicopter ride to the same trauma center where Kevin had been received about two months before. I won’t describe the horror of that night for our family because this blog will be inadequate to express what happened, but Ethan and I were on emergency room gurneys with minor seat-belt contussions when we found out that our daughter was in critical condition with a traumatic brain injury, eight broken ribs, collapsed lungs and three pelvic fractures.

She was unconscious and a bolt drilled into her skull was monitoring the swelling in her brain. A trauma crew was trying to save her life as the swelling threatened to become so severe that surgery to relieve the pressure seemed to be a possibility. Those moments as our daughter was wheeled to All Children’s, the pediatric hospital attached to the trauma center, are still unreal. A respirator was keeping her alive and the pressure measured by the bolt seemed dangerously high.

For the next 10 days, I lived in our daughter’s hospital room in the pediatric intensive care unit. I slept on a fold-out chair, I bathed in a sink or sneaked a quick rinse in an area reserved for patients. Our daughter remained in a coma for more than five weeks and was then transferred to a pediatric rehab hospital for another five weeks as she relearned how to talk, walk, write, brush her hair and come to terms with her injury. My writing project became updating friends and family via a daily blog that outlined her care and her struggles. A nurse working on the night shift during our daughter’s darkest days in pediatric intensive care suggested the CarePages blog as a way to update others, but it also became a way for me to work out my feelings of grief by writing.

Tally’s traumatic brain injury has changed our lives. Her personality has been altered tremendously: the driven perfectionist who was ranked first in her grade at school is now trying to remain at grade level in homebound school and a deep spiritual glow surrounds her. She uses our phone to dial into her classes from the kitchen table and does the work while she’s guided by a teacher on the other end. Tally walks slower, talks in a very low voice without much expression and has very little short-term memory. Still, she’s alive and she’s with us at home.

God was all over her recovery, which I’ll detail at another time. Suffice it to say that she opened her eyes for the first time on the 90th anniversary of Padre Pio’s gift of the stigmata and the 40th anniversary of his having been healed of the same stigmata. When our daughter was well enough to describe what her weeks in a coma had been like, she said we woke to angels hovering over her telling her they loved her. She’s very sure of what she saw and how she opened her eyes to see her big brother sitting near her.

Tally came home for the first time on November 25, just two days before Thanksgiving. We still don’t know what her traumatic brain injury will mean in terms of her schooling, her self-management and her health. Doctors are telling us they’ll know more a year out from September 17. Many wonderful people have told us about children and young people who survived similar injuries and are living fruitful lives now once they were able to make adjustments. Personality changes and short-term memory loss are very common for these patients.

We have been in prayer since July as Kevin and Tally have suffered and recovered. God has been with us in a real way thoughout our ordeals. As the one-year mark of this blog nears, we are still a family struggling with the aftermath of several major tragedies in the span of a single year.

In the span of 12 months, we have had people that we don’t even know praying for us. Internet peace community friends of my husband’s in other states and nations have sent their prayers and vibes. Churches we don’t belong to have prayed for Tally’s recovery. This Thanksgiving, we all felt grateful for their presence in our lives.

As Christmas nears, we are filled with love and thankfulness that Kevin and Tally are with us. If we could have been grateful for everything every year, we would have been farther along on our spiritual path already. It seems that none of us thinks about what we already have before we wish for what we don’t really need.

Losing my job, my benefits and my retirement was just water under the bridge. The prospect of losing my husband and my youngest daughter were far more serious. It’s been a year of tears, desperation, grief, thankfulness and spiritual growth.

May 2009 find us wiser and more grateful as we journey toward spiritual enlightenment. God has us in His palm even when we think all is lost. Our family has learned that the hard way this year and, while the road seemed very dark at times, He was always with us. Because of our sufferings, we have been kissed by God.