The Waitlist Was Longer Than the Drive

Sandy and Bobby left Florida for Poplar Bluff, a city of about sixteen thousand in the Ozark Foothills, and found what Bobby calls a medical desert. They kept traveling back to Florida for his appointments. Then they waited more than a year to get off a list to see a specialist in St. Louis. Neither of those is a story about a family making a bad decision. Both are stories about geography.

Roughly 7.4 million Americans live with dementia. The map of people qualified to treat it is far smaller than the map of people who have it, and no amount of intelligence on a phone screen closes that distance. A chatbot can name the condition in nine seconds. It cannot shorten a yearlong wait, and it cannot put a neurologist within an hour of the Ozark Foothills.

What Sandy and Bobby did instead was build the thing that was missing where they actually live. That is the slow, unglamorous version of solving this, and it is the only version that has ever worked. The answer to where do I take him is a place, and places have to exist before they can be found.