The Wheelchair They Took Away
We had a chair already. Medicare bought Glenn his first power chair five years ago, a heavy gray one with a joystick on the right arm, and he drove it everywhere: the church, the co-op where I keep the books three mornings a week, the Friday football games. Then last August it quit in the middle of our own kitchen. Just stopped, with a click, like a clock.
The supplier in Des Moines came out and looked at it and said the controller was shot. A new one would be $1,900. Medicare would pay most of a repair, he said, or a whole new chair, now that this one was past its fifth year, but either way it started with a new face-to-face visit with the neurologist, a written order, and an approval from Medicare before anyone touched a screw. Ten weeks, he said, if nothing came back wrong. Our share would be twenty percent.
Something came back wrong. The neurologist’s note left out a phrase the form wanted, and the papers went back to the start, and then they went back again. For all I know they are still in somebody’s queue.
We did not have ten weeks. Glenn’s disability check and my part-time pay cover the mortgage, the pills, the gas, and the electric, and then they are done. For nine days he sat in the kitchen chair or lay in bed while I added numbers in the margin of the Marlow Mercury.
Then I drove to Hadley Junction, fifteen miles, and walked into the rent-to-own store next to the Dollar General. The sign in the window offered mobility chairs, no credit check, $40 a week. I did not think much of it. A girl showed me a chair. A man in a short-sleeved shirt put a contract in front of me, and I signed it with a pen on a chain.
It was $40 a week for 104 weeks. That comes to $4,160 for a chair a medical supply place would sell used for about $1,800. I knew that. I did the arithmetic in the parking lot and I knew it, and I drove home and put Glenn in the new chair, and I watched his face while he rode it down the hall. He said, “Well, look at that,” and I decided I would pay $4,160 for that sentence.
That was last August. Now we were 61 payments in. We had paid $2,440. We had been late once, in April, when the furnace went, and I had paid it with the next week’s, and the girl at the counter had said it was fine.
I had not read the part of the contract that said fine did not count.
The deputy at the county dispatch office is named Tonya, and I have known her since her daughter was in Sunday school with mine. She listened to the whole thing without interrupting me.
“Jackie, honey,” she said when I finished. “I can send somebody out to take a report. But if Glenn signed that paper, and it says they can take it back, then it’s a civil matter. They’ll tell you to go to court.”
“How long does that take?”
“A while,” she said, gently. “I wish I had something better.”
A letter from a lawyer takes weeks. A hearing takes more. Glenn needed to get to the bathroom by supper, and at a quarter past four he was still in the kitchen chair with his hands in his lap, and I was standing at the counter with my thumb over the store’s number.