NPR Morning Edition will air a segment about my cartoon series about my mom’s struggle with Alzheimer’s Thursday morning in the last nine minutes of the hour of their broadcasts.
My Alzheimer’s Comics on NPR Morning Edition Wednesday
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7 Comments.
that’s awesome! 🙂
Did it get bumped by the latest outrage from the Orange One?
https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/2019/09/25/764106385?showDate=2019-09-25
I didn’t hear anything this morning.
I heard it after 5:50 am CST on Thursday 9/26/19.
Unfortunately, I missed about half of it, assuming its length was about 9 minutes.
I will post a link if I can find one. If anyone can beat me to it, please do it.
https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-morning-report/aging-parents-cartoonist/
Thank you so much for this piece. I hadn’t heard of your work before now. I was crying on my way into work listening to this. I am in much the same situation although my mom was not as well prepared financially, and my father is now struggling to make ends meet. I am glad to have a sibling to help with this (2 of 4 of us are taking care of my parents). I am so filled with rage for the whole system of Medicaid and the way it works, but it has nowhere to go. I feel absolutely helpless in the face of this situation. It helps to know I am not alone in feeling this way. Thank you.
I’m sure you have already looked into this, but in case there are other people, when my grandfather was sick and in hospice, the care providers said to have him drain his bank account by transferring it to whoever was to inherit his estate, in order to have him qualify as indigent to receive the free care. We called the state agency and they confirmed this was fairly common practice and considered OK. It’s a shitty thing to have to do, but it did save (what little there was) of his life savings.
I can’t quite say I’m enjoying reading Dr. Atul Gawande’s book Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, but it’s very eye-opening. It’s about how the medical-industrial complex treats aging process and the aging people who are declining,what options we have when parents can no longer be independent. It reiterates to me that it is not an individual family’s “problem” to deal with, that we have inadvertently created this system where “….our elderly are left with a controlled and supervised institutional existence, a medically designed answer to unfixable problems, a life designed to be safe but empty of anything they care about.”(page 109)