Divorced by 2016

[adinva]

Hi - I'm starting a separate thread for this because there are some very wise people around here and it's not really appropriate for divorcebusting but maybe enough analagous to be a resource for advice or at least commiseration.

My sister has big problems, doesn't know where to turn for help, doesn't think she can afford help anyway, and has a few issues that stand in her way of receiving help anyway (think ADD and anxiety/depression - untreated, possibly borderline personality disorder). But those aren't her problems, these are:
1. Her H is an alcoholic, had a medical crisis either from withdrawal or something else, and has been in the ER and ICU mostly nonresponsive, since the beginning of May. (Same sister who lost her 32yo daughter to heroin OD a year ago.)
2. The doctors can not figure out what's wrong with him and continue providing basic maintenance type support like IV feeding, and order many tests, currently talking about CT scans of head and stomach, last time I spoke with her it was a spinal or bone biopsy (I don't know really, I'm not in medical profession and didn't really understand, but suffice it to say that every day there's something they want to try in order to get at the problem.)
3. He lost his job many months ago, was out of work for a long time, got hired around March and lost that job in a couple of days for showing up drunk. My sister added him to her health insurance plan as she's been the only income source during that time.
4. He has no will and no living will but has only told her verbally that he does not want to be intubated.
5. She has had a shopping addiction and has debt on multiple credit cards, and has not been able to pay all of her bills for a while. She chooses which ones to pay on a case by case basis and for the credit cards only ever pays the minimum. They kept their finances separate and used a joint account for certain things, but he paid his own mortgage and now obviously isn't. He also has car payments. She also has a mortgage on the house she owned before she married him - they live in a depressed area where their houses might be very hard to sell at all. She also has car payments (a whole other story, but you can see the money management is not good there). She is paying her income taxes this year with one of those checks that come with your credit card bill. In short, she probably has a negative net worth right now although she has a small retirement savings account.
6. She works as a nurse and is working extra as much as possible to try to make ends meet, and spends the rest of the time visiting her H or getting minimal sleep at home so she can do her job. She has very little time and no money for counseling or lawyers.
7. She doesn't know, and doesn't seem to be getting any information from the hospital or anyone, how much this will cost, how she'll pay it, and how broke she's going to need to get for him to get on Medicaid and go into a nursing home as he will need to if discharged from the hospital.
8. She can't afford his mortgage this month. (That's the house they live in. Hers is about an hour away.) She's afraid they're going to lose their home, and that she's going to lose everything she has too.
9. Even if she had time, she's so scattered and overwhelmed that she's talked herself into a frenzy about the impossibility of finding time to call a lawyer, inability to pay anyway, maybe she'll just pay it on a credit card, they're probably not going to be able to meet her for weeks anyway, and so on until she just doesn't make the call. No one else can make it for her though.
10. She is hard to give advice to even if you do know some answers. She will listen and then tell you 15 reasons why she can't do what she must do, and then a week later you'll have the exact same conversation all over again. This is where her new-car payments fit in the story BTW - it was impossible for her to consider buying a used car that she could afford because what she really needed was a brand new car she could not afford.
11. I feel guilty not helping but I'm a 10 hour drive away, and have my own financial concerns and my own kids to be responsible for, and I believe if I pay a mortgage payment or a cell phone bill for her, I'm just delaying the bankruptcy that is going to and probably needs to happen. And we have history, so when I've been tempted to pay for a plane ticket for her to visit our sick mom [and didn't], the next thing I hear is she and her H just bought new computers. And a mail-order doll, and an exercise machine. All I can do, and try to do as much as I can, is listen at the end of a phone since she has no friends or support system to vent to there. She scares off friends by coming out of the gate extremely needing and wanting to talk at length about her problems which are admittedly enormous, but which she never takes any steps to change.
12. She recently started going to AA or AlAnon meetings but believed everyone there was telling her to get a divorce, and even if financially that would be wise, emotionally she thinks it would be mean to divorce him in his time of need. And would probably be expensive, and would require her to give up 50% of her assets to him, and many other excuses she can list.

Whew. I don't have the knowledge or resources or emotional bandwidth to help her right now. I tell her how much I love her, and I can distract her with conversation and make her laugh for a bit, and let her cry, but she needs actual help, and isn't getting it.

- There must be some way to access some pro bono legal advice? She has no idea what to do to protect herself or even if it's possible to. It seems impossible to me that she needs to become homeless and penniless in order for him to be in a nursing home. She'll lose her job too, if she has to give up their cars and other assets. This is what she believes is going to happen.
- Isn't there a social worker type role that can help someone navigate this stuff pro bono? I would have thought that was a person at the hospital but based on her situation I can say that if there is such a person at this particular hospital then they are no help whatsoever.
- I'm considering making a gofundme for her, but then again, there's a lot of very personal stuff that I wouldn't want on the internet for the public to view.

I don't know, just had to get that off my chest. It's pretty awful. Just in case anyone here's dealt with extreme money / marriage / health trauma and knows what to do, I thought I'd post it here.