You’d think the shock of it would be stress enough. The words “breast cancer.” The sympathy in your doctor’s eyes. The onslaught of information and, beneath it, creeping uncertainty. But you also have to worry about losing your job, keeping your kids calm, paying the mortgage when you’re bone-tired and queasy and sad and scared…
At Gateway to Hope Breast Cancer Lifeline (314-569-1113), two nurses and a social worker send those checks for you. Their goal is to lift the practical burdens from anyone in active treatment who’s making less than 450 percent of the federal poverty level.
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Social worker Keri Koehler is asking, “You should be starting radiation about now. How’s it going?” Information pours through the phone. The woman is switching to Medicare but had no idea she needed to sign up for a separate prescription plan.
Across the room, program nurse manager Jane Roodman Weiss is detangling bills: “You have a lot going on right now,” she says. “We’ll help you get through this.”
Some callers are in their early twenties, and their cancer’s aggressive; others are in their eighties, living alone, not always sure what to do next. Some are pregnant or have small kids; most are in their mid-fifties, with scared husbands and long lists of daily responsibilities. If they have to stop working, they must either pay an astronomical sum for COBRA or give up their doctors and find new ones. Gateway can pay that premium and keep them with the doctors they trust.
The hotline was founded 12 years ago by two physicians who were seeing too many patients with late-stage breast cancer who’d put off treatment because they had no insurance. If the cancer’s stage 4 and being held at bay, Gateway keeps paying. Meanwhile, its Thelma’s Gift fund covers car payment, rent, mortgage, gas, prescriptions, and other overlooked items until treatment’s over or a $1,000 maximum is met.
If the staff had a magic wand, they’d increase that $1,000 max, because sometimes just about all it covers is one month’s rent. When you take away the toxic financial anxiety, Koehler says, patients can focus on their treatment. Study after study links money worries to poorer health outcomes.
“You see people who go into the diagnosis already with huge challenges,” Weiss says, “and you think, ‘This is just one more thing she didn’t need.’” A heartbreakingly grateful note just arrived from a woman who’d reached the $1,000 max, and all Weiss could think was how she wished they could do more. This diagnosis turns a person’s life upside down, and a lot of the little stuff can shake loose or break. But these days, patients are nearly always upright again in eight or nine months, she adds, restored to health and “returning to their life as they knew it.”
