Flurries with a Chance of Panic
“Breathe into it.” I’ve heard those words a lot in my life. In movies. From coaches. From midwives. The concept of using breath to calm oneself isn’t new, but today I started looked at breathing into it in a new way. A good friend was scheduled to come and spend part of the day with me. He’s one of my favorite people. We touched base last night about the snowstorm that was scheduled to arrive later that night and today. It definitely arrived. It was not a good day for driving 45 plus minutes, especially when you never know how well the roads will have been plowed or where black ice is hiding.
I ended up getting a flurry of phone calls about the ongoing dental care I had secured for my mother. My mother has dementia and lives in a care facility in Florida. There’s a trust that controls the money she had left before she went into the facility. She was approved for Medicaid and has a specific amount of liability toward the facility each month. It’s far less than the actual amount they usually change, an amount we couldn’t afford. Today I found out that the trust did not have confirmation that DCF had approved the dental care expenditure for my mother. I thought I’d have to go back to the lawyers and do another long drawn-out process to secure this coverage for my mother. This would involve a lot of threads including: her care facility, the dental group, Florida DCF, Medicaid, and the organization that manages her trust. These threads have a tendency to become easily snarled.
Years ago I would have immediately started imagining the worse possible outcome. I also would have been completely overwhelmed by the paperwork involved. I would have let my worry bleed into the other parts of my day causing me to miss the joys around me. I would have allowed my worries to make my soul just a bit heavier and more difficult to carry through my day. But today that didn’t happen. I realized that though the pathway to figuring this all out might get a little bumpy, we’d get there eventually. I had professionals who knew the answers. All I had to do was breathe. Breathe and continue forward without letting my insides hamster wheel me. Breathe and take in the whole situation and let it flow through me as I listened for the little bits of gold during my conversations with people from different agencies. Nuggets appeared that helped me to understand and to ask better questions. I took my time when I asked my questions. I did it slowly without any sense of panic. That listening, that calmness on my part helped the people on the other end of the phone to hear me. I also made sure they knew that I was grateful for their aid. I kept reminding myself not to panic ahead of time.
At some point I realized that I had so much extra time to deal with this today because of that snowstorm, because I didn’t get to spend time with my friend. My mother’s situation was resolved by the end of the day. All the agencies involved were happy. I was also happy, not just because everything worked out well, but because I didn’t let myself hyperventilate into a physical or an emotional meltdown. Today was a gift. Saturday will be too when I get to see my friend.
Cinse Bonino
2023
