The Roanoker - May/June 2021 - 33

Charlene Johnson

last year, she says her knee began hurting.
Everything went downhill from there.
For her knee, she took time off for
surgery. Then a respiratory infection flared.
COVID concerns meant she'd be home
for two more weeks. As she readied to
return to work, she says she was fired. She
watched her income, insurance and selfworth vanish in the course of a phone call.
She landed another job but still did not
feel well. So she made an appointment
with the Bradley Free Clinic, a Roanoke
nonprofit serving the area's uninsured and
underinsured.
The diagnosis was a punch to the gut:
Stage 3 breast cancer.
" It was all this past year, " says Johnson,
52. " It just seemed like one thing after
another got taken away. "
The Bradley Free Clinic stepped in to
make sure Johnson had what she needed,
arranging for phone calls from a therapist
to combat her depression, wigs when she
lost her hair to chemotherapy, bottles of
Ensure for her to drink when she couldn't
keep food down.
But Bradley couldn't put Johnson back
to work. By year's end, she had lost her
apartment and was living in a motel,
through Roanoke's ARCH program to
help the homeless. Her unemployment ran
out and she hasn't been able to get back in
the system since new benefits were issued.
She used her January stimulus check to

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put new tires on her car and pay down that
loan. But she worries she'll lose her car
before her unemployment kicks in.
For now, Johnson is focused on fighting
cancer. She dreams of a day when she can
work again, when she can travel to see farflung family.
" I try to keep it positive, look at the
bright side of the things, " she says.
" But right now, I live day to day.... I'm
just praying: All right, Lord, let me get
through this. "

In 2018, 61% of
Roanoke's single
seniors qualified
as ALICE or poor
-United Way of
Roanoke Valley
Linda Sisco has taken care of others all
her life.
She married young and had a houseful
of children in Rocky Mount. She was a
homemaker until 2000, when she and her
husband divorced. To support her family,
she became a certified nursing assistant.
It's a job she loves, but over the years
it's been hard to stretch her paycheck as
far as it needed to go. She couldn't make

Linda Sisco

the payments on the only house she's ever
owned. After food and utilities and clothes
for the kids, there never was much left
over.
More than once, she tried to go to
nursing school. But she couldn't fit the
puzzle pieces of childcare and work and
school together. So she gave up on that
dream.
As each of her six kids grew up and
moved out, " it got a little bit easier to
make ends meet, " she says.
But even now, " I'm the one who has to
hold everybody together, " she says. " It's
tough at times. "
Recently she's been working as a
night nurse for a single client. The pay is
good, the hours are flexible and she likes
caring for the man. But she cannot afford
healthcare. At 58, she has no retirement or
substantial savings. She buys most of her
clothes secondhand. Any trips she takes
are to see family.
Her 11 grandchildren are the highlights
of her days.
Sisco is not complaining. She's getting
by. Some day she'll take another nursing
assistant job at a retirement community or
hospital and have healthcare again. And
paid days off.
Until then, she's grateful to the Bradley
Free Clinic for filling the gaps.
" If I can make ends meet and pay my
bills, I'm happy, " she says.

MAY/JUNE 2021 33
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