Hilary Fannin: My mother was right about health insurance

I wrote recently about catching a glimpse of myself in a shop mirror and being taken aback by the sight revealed by the fluorescent lights: the slack jaw, the saggy brow, the crepe-paper neck and a cloudy, hitherto unknown look of indecision and mild confusion that was more ageing than the tide mark of yellowish foundation at my neck and the harsh black crayoning around my eyes. It all combined to make me look like a spent air hostess on a retirement bash in a sticky-carpeted disco in Riga.

I have failed in the intervening weeks to shake off that perplexed look, which now seems to accompany me wherever I go like a loyal, if irritating, sidekick. I spotted it yesterday in the knicker department of a city-centre store, where I had gone to do some shopping for my ageing mother. She has been in hospital for a fortnight, each discharge date having had to be re-evaluated when her symptoms recurred.

I know why I look like an old dolly that’s been left out in the rain: I’m tired. And I know plenty of other women and men sleepwalking through similar situations, people caught in the crossfire of the individually entirely reasonable demands and expectations of children, parents, partners and work.

Two lots of shopping

There is nothing unique in my experience. I can spot us at 20 paces. We’re the ones in the supermarkets with two lots of shopping in the same trolley, ours and our mother’s or father’s. You know the kind of thing: a bottle of Shank Delight shower gel for your adolescent sons, a packet of crumbling Ginger Nuts for their granny.

As far as hospital care goes, my mother is one of the lucky ones. In a lucid and prescient moment during her largely skint 50s, when money was as fickle and hard to pin down as a starlet at a cocktail party, my mother took out health insurance for herself and my father.

“Health insurance!” we scoffed, dribbling Merlot down our chins and wondering when someone might turn up to pay the bar staff. “Whadda you need that for?” But she persevered, and to make money she got herself a job teaching drama to enthusiastic little children with pigtails (drama being one thing we were pretty well-versed in in our household).

And she managed, somehow, to keep paying the damn bill, albeit with the kind of fervour more usually associated with episodes of stigmata. Now, when she’s ill, the refrain is familiar: “Thank God I kept up the health insurance.”

My father benefited from her persistence, dying in a quiet hospital room with dignity. This was unlike the heartbreaking scene I witnessed in an emergency department a couple of years ago, where a family grieved behind a hastily drawn plastic curtain amid the shake, rattle and hum of an overcrowded room.

I wish that health insurance was redundant. I wish that the levels of care my mother has received in the past few weeks were universally available. I wish there were a transparent, equitable, easily accessible system of care available to all elderly people who are struggling to maintain their independence and who, when they are discharged from hospital, may find themselves negotiating a world that has become a little more frightening, a little less secure. In my mother’s case, there is no family home to sell and no pension to cash in. Now that she is coming out of hospital, she is dependent on herself, on family and on the State system for ongoing care.

Bouncing from call to call

And so we, her children, joined the queue on the telephone, bouncing from call to call, from district headquarters to local health centre, from overloaded social worker to overworked nurse, from one snippet of information to the next, picking up clues that fall randomly, like serrated pieces of broken glass.

Oh, so she is entitled to . . . Oh, so she’s not entitled to . . . We have to have that form signed by whom? Oh, that form doesn’t exist any longer . . . Okay, could you let me know who I should talk to next?

Although some warned my sister and I we would have to be more aggressive, that we were not being forceful enough, we did eventually secure some practical help, encountering en route some warmly supportive, though inordinately busy, people. But nobody should have to shout and rage for information and backing to help older people maintain their integrity, to enable us all to live the best lives we can for as long as we can.