Caring for Tommy
In a fix
In January, she got the call she’d been dreading from the Adult Care Center: Tommy kicked a patient. We’re sorry. He can’t stay.
Worse, while veterans’ benefits covered most of the cost of his full-time day care, it will only cover 15 hours a week of in-home care. Day-care funds cannot be diverted to pay for the sitter, a social worker explained. Sorry, there’s no program for that.
Tommy Rhodes watches as people at the Adult Care Center dance with staff members. (Click image to enlarge)
At the going rate of $14 an hour, a full-time, in-home sitter will cost Linda $20,000 a year — more than half of her take-home pay.
She can’t afford to quit her job, and she’s too young to retire.
Driving Tommy home from his last day at the center, Linda couldn’t help herself. She sobbed.
She knew he couldn’t offer solace, but she said what she was thinking anyway, exasperation and all: “Now what are we gonna do?!”
Tommy reached for his wife’s hand, and something extraordinary happened: His heart took over for his brain.
“It’ll be all right because I love you,” he said. “And I’ve loved you from the first time I saw you.”
Linda thinks of that moment every time her children suggest she put Tommy in a nursing home. If they could have witnessed it, she reasons, maybe then they’d understand.
“At some point in their lives, I think they’ll regret not being more active in his life,” she says.
For the time being, she’s pieced together a network of three different sitters, and she works from home at least one day a week. She’s got a new hospital president to keep happy at work, though — new initiatives to implement, new problems to solve.
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At night, she stays up late catching up on hospital work and combing the Internet for advice: where to buy a bidet attachment for the toilet to help clean Tommy, how to install an alarm on the bathroom window so he can’t climb out, how to tap into their home equity to pay for his care.
When a new personal-care aide arrives and Linda has to leave for work, she makes him a name tag that says: “Mason. Linda’s Friend.”
When Tommy gets upset, the aide points to the tag, and most of the time he calms down.
