Home care funds threatened [View All]

[merh]

Home care funds threatened

By Julie Goodman
[e-mail]

GULFPORT — Salome McCaffrey loves soaking in bubbles, dousing her honey brown hair in tropical coconut shampoo and moisturizing her skin with Mary Kay buffing cream.

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Salome's life also is defined by several cans of Ensure poured daily into her stomach through a feeding tube, by the suctioning of mucus from her windpipe and mechanical gushing of air into the hole cut in her throat. Her reality is flexi-tubes, ventilators and catheters.

With spinal muscular atrophy, a degenerative neurological disorder similar to Lou Gehrig's disease, Salome has fought one battle after another all of her 21 years — breaking barriers in the Gulfport school district when she showed up for kindergarten class with a nurse and ventilator, ready to learn. She watched in pain as friends left for college without her.

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And now, because Medicaid says Salome is no longer eligible for her current level of home health care, she is facing the possibility of life in a nursing home.

http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050331/NEWS01/503310379/1002

How about protecting the living Mr. President and members of congress?
How about worrying about their lives and passing laws to protect them?