Monday, November 30, 2009
Clerical error took a bite out of couple's income
Social Security overpayments resulted in a temporary halt to a couple's checks.
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"I've always been small," said Jaqueline Dennis, 60, but she never associated her short stature with the medical symptoms she began experiencing in 1996.
"Those hallways seemed to get longer and longer," she said about the corridors of the hospital where she worked in the X-ray department. She was tired and short of breath and was experiencing unexplained weight loss, but never had any chest pain.
Her doctors took a while to figure out that she had been born with a heart defect, she said.
"They couldn't believe I had lived this long," she added.
The diagnosis was followed by open-heart surgery to replace a valve, and Dennis went right back to work.
But in 2004, she said, she was told she had three kinds of skin cancer and underwent both radiation and chemotherapy treatments. She also has high blood pressure.
The list of ailments spelled the end of Dennis' working days.
Shortly before her heart surgery, Dennis and her husband of 34 years, Harrison Dennis, bought a house in Northwest Roanoke.
They have a fixed-rate mortgage, Dennis said, but the value of their home has gone down because of the poor housing market, and they owe more than it is worth.
"It will probably never be paid off," she said.
Although Harrison Dennis, 69, is retired -- he was employed by the same hospital as his wife -- he likes to work when he can to supplement his Social Security check. With her disability payments added in, the couple have been able to get by fairly well on their own.
But last spring and summer, when the amount of his check suddenly increased, the couple didn't think much about it.
"We just thought it was stimulus money," Jaqueline Dennis said. It turned out to be an error on the part of the Social Security Administration, and in July, Harrison Dennis' checks were stopped. They will resume some time next year, when the overpayment is made up, Jaqueline Dennis said. In the meantime, they must make do on her $1,220-a-month check.
It's enough to pay the bills, she said, but they all are late because they arrive on the first of the month, and her check comes in during the third week of the month.
There is never enough money to pay the utilities and the co-payments for her medications in the same month, she said. Most of the time, she chooses to pay the bills.
"I'm gambling with my life."
In August, Dennis chose the medications, and at that point, she realized she needed some help. If the bills weren't paid, they would undoubtedly be followed by cutoff notices and expensive reconnection fees. If she paid them, she might not be able to make her mortgage.
Until then, Dennis said, she had never in her life asked anyone for assistance, and she didn't know where to turn.
"I saw a girl on TV" talking about how she had been helped by Roanoke Area Ministries, Dennis said, but with no idea where the agency was, "it took me a while to find it."
Because she hadn't received any cutoff notices yet, RAM couldn't help with the utility bills. Instead, caseworkers chose to give Dennis a grant toward the mortgage payment, so she could have a little breathing room. The money came from the agency's Emergency Financial Assistance Program, which is supported by The Roanoke Times' Good Neighbors Fund.
Dennis is glad now that she asked for help.
"It's a nice place to have if you need to depend on somebody," she said.
