“Isn’t there anything I can do?”
She had arrived for her appointment with little left to lose.
A noxious black mold carpeted every inch of her condemned house.
Chemo was the only thing standing between White and a lifetime on dialysis.
“We had lost everything,” the single mother says.
“I couldn’t come up with that kind of money.”
The nurses simply shook their heads and sent her home.
By now, the stories of ruin because of Hurricane Katrina are heartbreakingly familiar.
And the massive job loss came on top of so many other miseries.
One year later, the survivors of Hurricane Katrina are being robbed of their health.
In New Orleans, White had seen a rheumatologist and kidney specialist monthly.
The private insurance she got through work had covered it all.
Living with a chronic disease for nearly a decade had made her toughstoic, even.
“Lupus has made me a stronger person, better able to deal with things,” she says.
“But the more stressed out I get, the more problems it creates.”
“We are looking at decades' worth of problems.”
On the eve of Katrina’s landfall,White had watched the news reports with weary resignation.
“We knew that we needed to get out.
But you could never have told us we would not be going back.”
They were five cars full, four sprawling generations who had lived in the city their entire lives.
One of White’s uncles and his wife were among the only ones who stayed behind.
“He helped build the levees,” White says.
“He was sure that they wouldn’t fail.”
“We loved our house,” White says wistfully.
They had shared a three-bedroom home with a backyard garden, often hosting family barbecues by the pool.
In Houston, the three crowded into a single hotel room for nearly two months.
“To have three people in one room for two monthsand one of them a 2-year-old?
It was miserable,” White says.
The job did not provide health insurance, so her only option was Texas’s emergency Medicaid offer.
Despite her persistence, White couldn’t find a lupus specialist who would accept Medicaid.
It was a pervasive problem.
Hundreds of patients had turned up at the University of Texas M.D.
Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, for example, not knowing which combination of chemotherapy they needed.
“The medical records were gone,” Abramson says.
“The medications were gone.
Patients had no way to get referrals or to show what drugs they were taking.”
Four days later, she left work early with a crushing migraine.
“It felt like my head was going to explode,” she says.
“I knew I needed to get back to the hospital.”
This time, ER doctors at Memorial Hermann Medical Center consulted a nephrologist.
“She needs to be admitted immediately,” he told them.
White’s kidneys were failing.
She pulled Hailey out of day carethe risk that she would bring home a virus was too great.
But the sacrifices seemed worth it: Tests on her kidneys were promising.
Then White’s Medicaid expired.
By day, she worked the phones, calling lawmakers and lupus advocates, reapplying to Medicaid.
At night, after she tucked in Hailey, she lay in her own bed, unable to sleep.
She stared at the ceiling and said a quiet prayer.
But they typically must pay the full cost, plus a 2 percent fee.
And workers at companies with fewer than 20 employees aren’t eligible.
Worse, the full extent of the trauma may not have revealed itself.
Even a strong thunderstorm can trigger PTSD in a hurricane survivor, sometimes years later.
Crowel sighs at the prospect.
“This is a continuing, slow-motion disaster.”
At press time, she was receiving temporary Social Security payments until the government could process her claim.
She restarted her monthly treatments May 1, and doctors have been encouraged by her progress.
In these moments, White and her mother remind themselves to be thankful.
“There are a lot of other people who have nothing at all.”
Additional reporting by Ana Mantica
Photo Credit: Polaris