STATE CHECKS OUT ON CAREGIVERS
THE SAD TRUTH IS THAT ILLINOIS GOVERNMENT HAS WALKED OUT ON LOIS PORTER AND SO MANY OTHERS LIKE HER.
Nobody can say exactly how the old man fell head first into the bathtub, but Lois Porter knows in her heart that, if she hadn’t found him lying there four days later, he’d be dead today.
She knew immediately something was wrong when she got to work that Monday morning.
The old man reads his two newspapers religiously, but there they were — every paper since she’d left the previous Thursday afternoon — piled outside his apartment door where the deliveryman had left them. Porter hesitated to go inside. “I was frightened,” she told me. “I didn’t want to go in there and find him dead.”
But Porter isn’t just a caregiver by profession. She considers it her “mission,” and her concern for the old man overcame her trepidation.
Using the keys he had entrusted her with, she opened the door a crack and called his name. A grunt came in response from somewhere inside.
As she searched for the source of the noise, she noticed that everything in the apartment was as she’d left it, confirming that whatever had gone wrong was now some 90 hours old.
Porter found him in the bathroom, his feet sticking up from the tub, him face- down inside it, with a shower stool toppled over onto him.
“I said, ‘ Oh, my God. Oh, my God,’ ” Porter said. Then, she called 911.
She later would surmise he must have lost his balance getting up from the toilet and that the shower stool pinned him there, unable to move in his weakened state.
The old man was badly bruised and dehydrated, disoriented and lying in his own waste.
And Porter is sure that, if she had been scheduled to pay the old man a visit Tuesday instead of Monday, he wouldn’t have lasted that long.
But he did survive, and after a couple of months of rehab to get him back on his feet returned to his apartment.
I had hoped the old man would tell you this story himself and allow me to use his name and photo.
But I’d been warned in advance he was a loner, and Porter couldn’t convince him. I respect that.
The old man is 83, a retired postman who lives in a high- rise complex south of downtown. Very reclusive, he won’t even go downstairs to get the mail, and he doesn’t keep in touch with his family.
“I’m his only human contact,” Porter said.
She visits him twice weekly, four hours each time, to do his cooking, cleaning, laundry and shopping, help him bathe, pay his bills and do whatever else he no longer can do for himself.
It’s a strange sort of job insofar as Porter never knows when, or even if, she will be paid.
Porter works for Ashley’s Quality Care, which provides home care for senior citizens through the state of Illinois’ Community Care program.
Ashley’s is one of the many businesses and nonprofits struggling to stay afloat amid the state’s budget debacle.
With no budget in place, the state reimburses providers like Ashley’s only for people covered by Medicaid, and it runs up a tab for the rest.
Company owner Frankie Redditt estimates the state is $ 1 million in arrears on payments for services already rendered, and in turn, she is behind on paying her workers.
Most people can only work a job so long without getting paid, which means Redditt has lost many workers, and as a result can accept far fewer clients.
Porter, who is 74 herself, is among those who have hung in there without pay, unwilling to abandon the people for whom they care.
“I don’t have the heart to walk out,” she said.
The sad truth is that Illinois government — an extension of its citizens and a reflection of our character — has walked out on Porter and so many others like her.
And I can’t help but wonder: When it’s our turn to walk in the old man’s shoes, will anyone be left to knock on our door?