My caseworker and my parents are trying to get me into a long-term care facility. I really don’t want to go back to one of those. I despise the idea of losing my freedom and finances. I just as well be sent to prison as far as I’m concerned.

I live in a house with no stairs. But the doors aren’t wide enough for a wheelchair. Any suggestions I make to widen the doors fall on deaf ears. It burns me that I still have all of my intelligence but might still have to go to a long-term care facility because of lack of handicap access.

I would like to get a home health aide that comes in once a day to help with things. I had to fire my cleaning lady a few months because she wanted me to sign off on her billing her company for time she didn’t work. Can you say disability fraud? Glad I got rid of her.

I watch a lot of videos and news programs talking about the possibility of humanoid robot assistants becoming available to the public within a few years. Yet about the only people who don’t think I’m totally full of crap when I talk about this are some friends online and my older brother.

My thinking is that I hold on for a few more years and get a home health robot to help around the house since none seem to be available for me. Hell, it took a miracle for me to get onto a service where a doctor comes to see me in my house every six weeks. We found out about this, not through my case workers, but from a friend in my mom’s church.

I’m afraid that I will get sent off to a nursing home due to lack of mobility, lose my freedom, lose my money, and lose the family house just right before EVERYTHING changes with home robots, automation, AI, improved personalized healthcare, and possibly even Medicare for All.

One thing I despise about being on disability is that my earnings are limited before I’m totally thrown out of the system. And since the USA refuses to act like a civilized nation and institute Universal Healthcare, I’m stuck in poverty just so I can get my treatments. And I’m damn sick of it.

I lived in a long-term care facility once for eight months. Hated damn near every second of it. Had no freedom. Had no privacy. I was chastised for not socializing with the other residents even though most were senile and or nearly deaf. The only thing worse would have being in prison.

I don’t really tell my parents how much I despise the idea of going to a home. In the first damn place, I don’t think I would need one if the house was more wheelchair accessible. But they won’t entertain the thoughts of making the house more wheelchair accessible. All they would have to do is widen the doors to my bedroom, the bathroom, the front door, and the back door.

As far as transportation goes, that is being solved already in spite of the run around I get from social services. My brother bought a Tesla with self-driving capabilities back in the spring. Just the other day he and my niece had to go to Kansas City (which is about six hours from our town). During the trip up and trip back, the car did over 98 percent of the driving on autopilot. I was calling this almost ten years ago. Now it’s pretty well mainstream.

I had a car accident in late 2015 that really screwed up my back and knees. I was talking about how nice self-driving cars would be when they become available. I remember one of my Facebook “friends” said, and I quote, “It will be a cold day in Hell before self-driving becomes a thing.” That was less than 10 years ago. Bust out the parka and long johns, because it’s getting awful damn chilly these days.

I’m seeing the same attitude towards robotics that I saw against driverless cars about 7 to 9 years ago. I have given up on trying to convince people that humanoid robot assistants will be a bigger game changer than even smart phones, military drones, or even the internet itself. Most people don’t want to listen, let alone people of my parents’ generation.

Once during the pandemic, I joked in one of my futurists’ groups on Facebook about having a goal of riding in a self-driving electric car with a robot friend, smoking a marijuana cigar, while driving past a police station before June 14, 2030 (my 50th birthday). If I can hold out for long enough to get a home help robot and I don’t get sent to a home before then, I’m going to make that dream come true, so help me God.

Even if my parents go get too impatient and send me to a nursing home before I can make my dream of robot assisted independence come true, I’m going to do everything within my power to get well enough that I can leave. If my parents don’t want to make our house wheelchair accessible, well that’s their hangups. Sucks to be elderly and not see the possibilities that probably will come by the end of the decade.

Hell, I want them to fight me on this. I want people to tell me what can and can’t be done/ I want people to throw up roadblocks. I want to be told I’m a liar and I’m full of shit. I have made an entire life of coming back from setbacks and proving people wrong. Their hatred and nay saying will just make my story telling even more interesting than it already is.

After surviving 25 years of schizophrenia, 16 years of Section 8 Housing, 3 years of congestive heart failure and being wheelchair bound, I’ve lost most of my fears. I don’t want things to be fair or easy for me. Life isn’t fair. I figured that out when that I was six years old. I figured out that life isn’t fair before I figured out Santa Claus was fake. I’ve been fighting my entire life. Why should the next few years before some major breakthroughs be any different? I have nowhere to go but up. And I’ll be damned to let even family stand in the way of my freedom and independence.