No one can make you feel inferior without your consent so don't ever give it.

Recently, my mother's health took a turn for the worse. She got severely dehydrated and is now in a care center where she's being "rehabilitated." This week she gets to come home, and we are excited about this prospect. My experience with the private world of care centers though has definitely been negative. The few times I've visited mom there (she is in another state so I have to take time off of work to travel) I've been very disappointed at what we've been getting for the price of $8,000 a month. For this huge amount of money, the meals that I fed my mom via spoon included essentially tilapia, sloppy joes, and mac and cheese. All of these are cheap cheap meals. My dad has been feeding her twice a day for a while now, going diligently to the care center to spoon food into my mom's mouth. She's gained some strength, can talk now when she wants to, and when I was there just over a week ago, she cleaned her plate (and I mean she ate everything).

Well a few days ago the care center called and said they wanted to put mom on a feeding tube. Absolutely not. No way. You know why they asked this? Because they are lazy. They don't want to feed mom. It's not part of the $8,000 a month. I just am flabbergasted. I can't say how angry our aging health care system makes me. I wanted to drive up there, haul those nurses out into the parking lot, and beat them with a rod. They are crooks, the whole lot of them, who just want to get by with the bare minimum effort and get paid handsomely for it until a person dies.

I'm so glad mom is going to be able to come home, where I've made the house she's used to living in handicap accessible by getting a ramp installed. I've also hired a full-time care provider that will be attentive (singularly) to mom's dietary needs and who will feed mom (by spoon not tube) specially prepared dishes that mirror what she is used to eating (my mom is Japanese). None of that cheap mac and cheese crap and the cheapest ground beef mixed with Manwich.

My mom has lived a long and difficult life, and it angers me that there are vultures just circling in the healthcare system that want to rob old people of all the money and resources they've accumulated in a lifetime. My telling that care center "absolutely not" on the feeding tube reminds me of a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt: "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." My mom survived Tokyo being fire bombed in World War 2. She survived moving to a foreign country where she knew no one and was expected to raise a family around strangers a world away from her two brothers. And this is how it's supposed to end? With a feeding tube stuck down her throat, wearing a diaper that's full of crap because the nurses only change the diaper twice a day at specified times, and in a wheelchair under a flickering fluorescent light bulb? This is what $8,000.00 a month buys? Are you f'ing kidding me? It's highway robbery, and the people that own this care center drive expensive cars and live like the 1% live everywhere. It's such bullshit.

Maybe you can take that quote and make something of it. Maybe it's applicable to this month's Insecure Writer's Support group. No one can make any of us feel inferior without consent. So don't ever give consent. Force people to be accountable and expose the con artists in any industry who are trying to exploit honest, hard working people (whether it be in publishing or in health care). Report fraud, fight back with lawsuits, and don't ever be anyone else's doormat. And if you possibly can, stand up for someone else that doesn't have the means to defend themselves anymore.