Caregivers
daughter Taylor, now 26, was in an ATV accident the day before the pandemic locked everything down.
She was left in a wheelchair and Flaherty and his wife, Sally, of Clear Lake, Wisconsin, were left with almost no help and no instructions on how to handle their newly disabled daughter. Plus, Flaherty, 65, is disabled himself. He’s spent the last decade with a blood vessel disease that leaves him tired all the time and unable to work.
“I look at my situation and my daughter’s situation, and we could use a lot more support,” said Flaherty, who remains deeply loyal to President Joe Biden although he lives in a very red part of Wisconsin. “That whole situation I went through, nobody should have to go through.”
They were sent home from the hospital three months after Taylor’s accident with no resources, he said. From 7 a.m. until 10 p.m., 90% of his and Sally’s time was spent caring for Taylor with no one coming to the house to help and her medical team a 50-minute drive away, Flaherty said.
He had to go online to figure out how to help move her from one place to another. Once, when transfering her from the couch to a chair, he almost crashed both of them through the patio door window.
“There were days that my wife and I would just cry because we didn’t know what to do. We didn’t know if it would get better,” he said.
Luckily, Taylor has now learned how to transfer herself, and Flaherty said he and his wife are down to spending 20% to 25% of their time caring for her.
Still, he said, “we just need a system where we can take care of our own and not have to have senior citizens working that hard.”
Stuck in the middle
The Haas family has been struggling since early 2023 when Roy had a health crisis that left him unable to walk more than a few steps, confused and lacking in safety awareness.
“It was like having a 2-year-old,” Sandy Haas said of her husband, now 73, who had spent his life as a strong, capable person. “It just became all-consuming
Jane Cocking, 77, of Dallas, Ga., takes care of her husband, John, who has Alzheimer’s disease. The couple moved to the U.S. from England when Jane was 19 and John was 23 and was recruited to play soccer for a new professional team in Atlanta. all day, taking care of him.”
A former nurse with a doctorate in education, Haas has always leaned conservative politically.
“I don’t like to see government take over,” she said. “I’m very tempted to vote for someone who promises the moon, but I’m old enough to know there’s no such thing and somebody’s going to pay for it.”
She still manages to teach two online classes a semester, which at least for now means she can afford to have someone come in once a week to help Roy shower and with the heavy cleaning.
Haas gets groceries delivered, because she can’t leave Roy alone. He’s fallen before and once started a fire on the stove. She was able to quickly put it out because she noticed it right away.
“We’re certainly not in poverty, but we’re not wealthy,” she said. “We’re right stuck in the middle.”
Although Haas recognizes her privilege, in some ways, people like her are the worst off. They don’t qualify for the government support available to people without any financial resources, but if she moved into an assisted living facility where she’d have more help with Roy, she’d burn through their $120,000 in savings in a year or two.
And she could easily live another 20 years.
What she really needs is just a little help, a few hours a week of caregiving and medical equipment and physical therapy “to keep this patient as mobile as possible,” said Haas, who can’t even help Roy with physical therapy because of her own weakness and tremor. Medicare only paid for a limited number of physical therapy sessions.
Their two sons help out when they can, but one works nights. When she called the other “in absolute desperation” one night at 10:30 p.m., he drove the 45 minutes from his house to help her get Roy into bed.
All that has made it difficult for Haas to decide how she will cast her ballot this fall.
“Where I normally would have voted one way, easy peasy, nice and easy,” she said, “I can tell you that at this time, I am very carefully on the fence and trying to make a good decision based on what I think is best for our country and for the people I’m leaving behind – not just for my particular situation right now.”