Damascus, Ore. — You ask Matthew Loucks if he’s lucky guy, and he’ll probably say, yeah, all the way back since Clackamas High School. That’s where he met Becky, the girl he’d marry one day. He got a great job right out of school. They had great kids—Hope, Emily, Andrew and Cody—and a nice house in the country. Parents and Grandma close by.
Then came 2012.
“That’s kind of when the wheels fell off the wagon,” Matthew says.
First there were the cancers: two of them and warning signs for perhaps a third someday. Surgeries for other conditions. Unable to work, losing the job, the health insurance and then the home.
Yet today, lucky guy still seems like a good descriptor for Matthew. Family. Yet today, lucky guy still seems like a good descriptor for Matthew. Family. CareOregon, the Affordable Care Act and the Oregon Health Plan play a big part in Matthew’s story.
Before his illness, Matthew was a warehouse foreman, with great benefits through the Teamsters, including health insurance generous enough to be called a “Cadillac” plan.
One day on the job, Matthew noticed a sharp pain in his groin, almost like he’d been hit.
“I didn’t really think anything of it, but I went to the doctor,” Matthew says. “They gave me some ibuprofen for it and I was like, ‘OK, that’s fine.’”
But it wasn’t fine. Ten days later, the pain was still there, and doctors ordered an ultrasound. The next day, Matthew was on the operating table for testicular cancer.
Matthew opted to not go through chemotherapy, but he still needed to go through additional treatment and follow-up scans.
“When they were doing the scans they found out that I had lumps all over my thyroid,” he says. “So they went in and did biopsies, and from that they were able to figure out it was cancer, too.”
But treatment for the thyroid had to wait until the testicular cancer treatment was complete. By that time, the cancer had spread and the only option was to remove the thyroid, then more treatment and a lifetime of scans.
Scans that next revealed dark spots on a kidney. This time, luckily, it was only cysts, not cancer, but there are more treatments and occasional kidney stones to look forward to.
The Teamsters insurance plan was there for Matthew’s cancer treatments, again when he needed back surgery, and when he needed a full corneal transplant for a degenerative eye disease that left him legally blind.
Still, even great insurance only goes so far.
Paying 20 percent of the cost of Matthew’s treatments put the family in debt for more than $100,000.
Worse, the sick time in his contract was limited, and then the warehouse closed. The job went away and with it the insurance. Then the house. Then came decisions no one wants to make: pay for medical treatment or pay other bills.
Fortunately, Matthew had great support.
Foremost, there was Becky. For months she cared for Matthew through his treatment, while also doing all the parenting tasks he couldn’t help with.
“I always felt bad because my wife was having to take care of me plus the kids at the same time. There was a lot of stuff I couldn’t do, you know, simple little things like the baby is crying on the floor and she’s trying to help one of the other ones. Just getting up to help change a diaper, I couldn’t move to do because of my back or my treatments.
“But once I finally got better and got cleared and all my medical stuff kind of came to an end, then I was going to go try to go back to work,” he says. “But she said, ‘You know, why don’t you stay home with the kids for a while and I’ll go back to work.’ I was like, ‘Sold, I’m good.’”
Finding a home after they’d lost theirs could have been a special challenge. One of their children has an allergy so severe they can’t live in a home where peanuts have been consumed.
“Peanut proteins can live in carpet,” Matthew says. “That’s why there are hardwood floors in this house. My mom took her inheritance and built this house for us to live in.”
And then there was health insurance. A lifetime of monitoring and possible treatments lies ahead for Matthew. His child’s peanut allergy requires epi-pens that must be replaced regularly in multiple locations—home, school and grandparents’ house—at $300 per pen.
When the Affordable Care Act allowed Oregon to expand Medicaid, Becky heard about it. And she got all her family signed up with CareOregon and the Oregon Health Plan.
“From that point on…I didn’t have to worry about making my health secondary to my bills,” Matthew says. “I could actually go and see my cancer doctor, go have my CAT scans, go do all this stuff and not be worried about how I can’t pay the water bill this month because I have to pay this doctor. It was heaven-sent for us.”
These days, Becky still works while Matthew stays home. They care for Matthew’s grandmother, who lives with them, He picks the kids up at school because they can’t ride the bus (other kids may have had peanuts) and he fixes dinner.
“I’m a crock potter,” Matthew says. “I love crock pots. When I’m at softball games, the other coaches will be like, so, what do you got in the crock pot tonight?”
The other family obsession is softball. Matthew was an athlete in school until an injury moved him to coaching, umpiring and now watching as a proud dad while daughter Hope blooms as a pitcher.
“My daughter Hope, for being 12 years old, when she gets all warmed up and she’s throwing hard, she’s throwing close to 55 miles an hour. The collegiate figure is 68,” Matthew says proudly.
Maybe she’ll get some of her grandmother’s six feet, five inch height, and really grow into a great prospect for college ball.
So Matthew is a lucky guy after all. He thinks others should be as lucky.
“I don’t think any family should ever have to worry about putting their health secondary to their water bill” he says. “I mean, if I didn’t have health insurance I wouldn’t be here with my kids.
“No family should have to go through what I did. I couldn’t imagine looking at my kids and saying. ‘Sorry. We can’t afford to keep Dad alive.’
