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The drug potassium chloride has been on the market for decades, widely prescribed to help the nerves and muscles — including the heart — function properly in patients with low potassium. Too much of it, however, can kill you.
At high doses, it is so effective at stopping the heart that some states have used injections of it for executions.
So the danger was obvious in May, when Indian drugmaker Glenmark Pharmaceuticals recalled nearly 47 million capsules for a dire flaw: The extended-release medication wasn’t dissolving properly, a defect that could lead to a perilous spike in potassium. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration deemed it the most serious kind of recall, a defective drug that had the potential to kill people.
At the time of the recall, the FDA, which is charged with protecting Americans from unsafe drugs, was already on notice about troubles at Glenmark.
The Mumbai-based company had four recalls in the previous eight months and would have two more in following months, all for the same dangerous tendency for pills to dissolve improperly. All the faulty medications were made at the same Glenmark factory in central India, government records show.
Yet the FDA hasn’t stopped Glenmark from shipping pills from the factory to American patients. Nor did it send investigators to the Indian facility to figure out what had gone wrong. Its last inspection of the plant was more than four years ago, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“They should have been camping out there,” said Patrick Stone, a former FDA inspector who now advises pharmaceutical companies.
Glenmark’s String of RecallsIn less than 12 months, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals had seven recalls for drugs that didn’t dissolve correctly. All were made at the same factory in central India, records show.
Oct. 20, 2023: Recall of deferasirox tablets for oral suspension, which treat iron overload from blood transfusions
Oct. 23, 2023: Recall of ranolazine extended-release tablets, which treat chest pain
March 26, 2024: Recall of diltiazem hydrochloride extended-release capsules, which treat high blood pressure
April 17, 2024: Another recall of diltiazem hydrochloride extended-release capsules
May 29, 2024: Recall of potassium chloride extended-release capsules, which treat low potassium. This recall was expanded on June 24, 2024, and announced by the FDA the next day.
June 28, 2024: Recall of pravastatin sodium tablets, which treat high cholesterol
July 31, 2024: Recall of indomethacin extended-release capsules, which treat rheumatoid arthritis
Since the May recall, Glenmark told regulators it has received reports of three deaths, three hospitalizations and four other serious problems in patients who took the recalled potassium chloride capsules, FDA records show. It’s unclear if the drug was the cause.
A federal lawsuit alleges that the pills were responsible for the death of Mary Louise Cormier, a 91-year-old woman in Maine. A letter informing her of the recall arrived three weeks after she died.
The FDA’s anemic response underscores longstanding weaknesses in the way the agency oversees the safety of generic medications manufactured in foreign factories. The agency failed to act on clear patterns of trouble, was slow to warn the public about the potentially deadly pills and never mentioned that millions of them had been sold to consumers.
From the day of the first recall in October 2023 through the next 12 months, the FDA oversaw 22 recalls for drugs that didn’t dissolve correctly and could cause harm, agency data shows. That single Glenmark factory was responsible for more than 30%, a ProPublica analysis found.
“The FDA is always late to respond,” Stone said. “This should have been dealt with immediately.”
The FDA has long said it polices foreign plants by prioritizing inspections based on risk. For routine inspections, the agency uses a computer model that weighs prior recalls, the date and results of the most recent inspection, and other factors. FDA employees decide when to send investigators for more urgent visits based on signs that something is amiss. But the agency would not explain why Glenmark’s string of recalls didn’t meet that threshold.
What’s more, federal regulators were aware of significant deficiencies at three of Glenmark’s four other factories that have made drugs for the U.S. market, FDA records show. The breakdowns were so grave at one plant that the FDA barred drugs made there from entering the country.
The FDA’s failings date back decades. In her book “Bottle of Lies,” journalist Katherine Eban exposed the agency’s struggles to identify and combat corruption in the global pharmaceutical industry amid a huge demand for cheap generic drugs in the U.S. The book detailed how a whistleblower in 2005 started feeding the FDA insider details about unsafe medications at a different Indian drugmaker, but it took federal officials almost nine years to wrap up a criminal case.
The majority of the factories making drugs for U.S. patients are in other countries, many of which churn out the generics that make up more than 90% of prescriptions filled here. Yet the investigative arm of Congress has repeatedly found that the FDA has too few inspectors to adequately oversee these plants.
The consequences of lax oversight were unmistakable when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2023 that four people died and others had to have their eyeballs removed after they used contaminated eyedrops made by a different Indian company. The FDA had never inspected that factory before people got sick.
Fed up with what they called “institutional weaknesses and dysfunction” in the oversight of foreign drugmakers, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce in June demanded that the head of the FDA turn over documents about inspections in India and China.
A spokesperson for the FDA declined to answer questions about the Glenmark recalls or inspection history, saying the agency could not publicly discuss potential or ongoing compliance matters. “When there are quality issues identified that could result in harm, patients should rest assured that the FDA does everything within our authority to work with firms to ensure a recall is conducted most effectively,” FDA spokesperson Amanda Hils wrote in an email. A recent reorganization, she added, “will ultimately help the agency be more efficient and cohesive in our inspection and investigation efforts.”
Officials with Glenmark also declined to answer detailed questions. In a court document, the company denied being responsible for the death of Cormier, the woman in Maine.
“Due to the ongoing litigation, we are unable to provide further information at this time but Glenmark is fully committed to maintaining the highest standards of quality and regulatory compliance in all our operations,” a Glenmark spokesperson wrote in an email. “We continue to work closely with the FDA to ensure compliance with manufacturing operations and quality systems.”
Overseas compliance with U.S. manufacturing standards is crucial in a drug market where foreign factories like the ones operated by Glenmark make a wide range of injections and pills that treat some of the most vulnerable patients in the U.S., including those with cancer, heart disease, epilepsy and kidney ailments. What happens in a factory a half a world away can have deadly consequences.
Glenmark’s major troubles with the FDA began in 2019 at a factory far from the one that made the potassium chloride.
That spring, FDA investigators went to the company’s Himachal Pradesh plant in northern India and reviewed more than 100 complaints about products made there: A steroid cream was gritty, a medication was watery, and tubes of medicines were cracked and punctured.
The inspectors found so many problems at the facility that the agency sent Glenmark what’s known as a warning letter, a disciplinary tool the FDA uses to lay out significant violations of federal requirements and demand changes. Too often, Glenmark didn’t identify the root causes of problems and failed to come up with plans to prevent the same defects in the future, the director of the FDA’s Office of Manufacturing Quality wrote to Glenmark’s chairman.
“Your quality system for investigations is inadequate and does not ensure consistent production of safe and effective products,” the FDA official wrote.
This became a recurrent theme for Glenmark in subsequent years as FDA investigators dinged one plant after another for failing to follow manufacturing processes that prevent defective drugs from winding up in American medicine cabinets.
FDA records show the problems stretched from India to the U.S., where Glenmark has a factory outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. In August 2021, Glenmark recalled every product it made at that plant. The recall notices said they failed to meet manufacturing standards.
In the spring of 2022, FDA investigators spent more than a month in that factory, documenting 17 violations that resulted in a warning letter for that plant as well.
The problems snowballed in the fall of 2022. The FDA sent Glenmark’s chairman yet another warning letter, this time about its factory in Goa, India, which the agency said failed to thoroughly investigate discrepancies among batches of drugs and lacked the procedures necessary to ensure that its products had the strength, quality and purity that Glenmark claimed. And FDA officials were so concerned after a subsequent inspection of Glenmark’s Himachal Pradesh factory that they placed it on the agency’s dreaded import alert list, which allowed federal regulators to prevent drugs made there from entering the U.S.
At that point, three of the five Glenmark factories that had made drugs for American consumers were in trouble with the FDA.
Get in TouchDo you work at the FDA? Do you have information about generic drugs that we should know? We’re particularly interested in decisions made by the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research about drug shortages, foreign or U.S. manufacturing, and regulatory actions, such as warning letters and import alerts. What aren’t officials telling Americans about their drug supply? Email Megan Rose at megan@propublica.org or Debbie Cenziper at debbie.cenziper@propublica.org. If you prefer to reach out confidentially on Signal, Megan can be contacted at 202-805-4865, Debbie can be contacted at 301-222-3133, or get in touch with both reporters at 202-886-9594.
But one plant has escaped scrutiny in the last few years: the Glenmark facility that made the recalled potassium chloride.
The factory, in Madhya Pradesh, India, previously had a mixed record with the FDA. The agency had sent inspectors every year between 2015 and 2020, finding problems in half the visits.
In 2018, the FDA asked Glenmark to voluntarily make improvements after inspectors found evidence that drafts of internal investigations were shredded in the quality department, among other deficiencies.
Subsequent inspections in September 2019 and February 2020, though, went well.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the FDA put all but the most urgent inspections on hold. An Associated Press analysis this September found that about 2,000 pharmaceutical plants had not been inspected by the FDA in five years.
The FDA doesn’t have enough experienced investigators to figure out what’s wrong at factories where there are signs of trouble, said Peter Baker, a former FDA inspector who consults on pharmaceutical quality.
“It’s really difficult to be proactive when you don’t have people,” Baker said.
People familiar with FDA enforcement say inspectors are often frustrated because they have little say on which facilities they inspect. That decision is made by another arm of the agency that doesn’t have the same sort of on-the-ground view of what’s going on in factories.
Those who have the most to lose — the patients who could be endangered by defective pills — rarely, if ever, learn about the conditions inside the manufacturing plants. The FDA doesn’t make it easy for people to know where a drug is made, let alone whether it was by a factory with a concerning safety record.
To determine that the recalled Glenmark drugs were all made at the Madhya Pradesh factory, ProPublica matched drug-labeling records from the U.S. National Library of Medicine with details in two FDA databases. Because the FDA doesn’t routinely post its inspection reports online, ProPublica obtained these and other records from Redica Systems, a data analytics company that receives this information from the FDA through public-records requests.
The first in the string of recalls from the plant came in October 2023 for a drug that treats iron overload from blood transfusions. Days later, the company announced a second recall, this time for a medication for chest pain. Then came two more for capsules that treat high blood pressure. The potassium chloride recall was Glenmark’s fifth. Two more came after that, for a cholesterol-lowering drug and a rheumatoid arthritis medicine.
The only one mentioned on the FDA’s recalls website was the potassium chloride. In that case, the agency followed its practice of posting a press release from the drug company rather than writing its own alert for the public.
“Public notification is generally issued when a product poses a serious health hazard or has been widely distributed,” the FDA spokesperson wrote in an email.
Records show the agency determined that potential harm from taking the other pills Glenmark recalled was likely to be temporary or reversible. But it never told the public what that harm might be.
Mary Louise Cormier never knew her potassium chloride pills had been recalled.
On June 27, the 91-year-old was taken to the emergency room from her nursing home in Brunswick, Maine. She was lethargic and could give only soft, monosyllabic answers to questions, according to the lawsuit filed by one of her daughters.
A blood test showed that her potassium level was alarmingly high — so high that an emergency room doctor had the lab run the test a second time to make sure the result wasn’t a mistake, according to the lawsuit. A level above 6 millimoles per liter is considered a medical emergency. The tests showed Cormier’s level was 6.9, the lawsuit says.
Cormier — who had raised five children, cared for babies in the foster care system and once ran a day care out of her home — suffered cardiac arrest and died, the suit says.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Newark, New Jersey, accuses Glenmark of a “systematic disregard for drug safety” and alleges the company sold pills “more suitable for an execution” than for the vulnerable patients they were supposed to help. Cormier’s pharmacy confirmed that her pills came from recalled batches, the lawsuit says. The suit is seeking class-action status.
In a court filing, Glenmark denied the allegations. The company’s attorneys listed dozens of defenses, including that the injuries claimed were the result of preexisting or unrelated medical conditions and that the product contained an adequate warning. There can be other reasons for a spike in potassium, and ProPublica was unable to independently verify key details in the suit. Cormier’s daughter referred a reporter to her attorney, Aaron Block, who declined to release Cormier’s medical records, citing the early stage of the litigation.
It’s not clear when Cormier’s pharmacy first learned the pills could be dangerous, but news of recalls can often take time to reach pharmacists — and longer to get to patients. The suit says Cormier’s pharmacy dispensed the pills on June 25. That was the day the FDA posted the recall on its website and three days before Cormier died. Medicines in the U.S. often pass through distributors. The manufacturer is responsible for notifying its distributors, who then have to notify their customers and so on down the supply chain.
News of the recall didn’t reach Cormier’s family until three weeks after her death. As her family was preparing for her memorial, a letter arrived. Cormier’s health insurance company was writing with “important drug recall information” about her potassium chloride: “Our records show that you may have recently filled a prescription for this product.” The letter made it clear that the pills may cause high potassium levels, potentially leading to cardiac arrest and death.
Glenmark knew there was a problem with its potassium chloride at least a month before Cormier died.
On May 29, a Glenmark executive wrote a letter to distributors saying a batch of potassium chloride had failed to dissolve correctly in a test, so the company was issuing a recall. The executive told the distributors that the recall was “being made with the knowledge of the Food and Drug Administration” and used red capital letters to mark the notice “URGENT.” The letter was sent via FedEx overnight. But the company and the FDA didn’t tell the public at the time.
In late June, Glenmark recalled dozens more batches, including the pills that the lawsuit says Cormier took.
On June 25, about four weeks after the Glenmark executive had written to distributors, the FDA finally alerted the public.
Glenmark and the FDA declined to say why the initial recall in May didn’t include all of the faulty pills or why they didn’t tell the public sooner. Speaking generally, Hils, the FDA spokesperson, said that the agency does not have the authority to mandate recalls of most drugs, with a limited exception for controlled substances. The agency’s role, she said, is “to oversee a company’s recall strategy, assess the adequacy of the company’s action, and classify the recall.”
Since then, Glenmark has told the FDA about reports it received of the deaths, hospitalizations and other serious health problems in patients who took the recalled potassium chloride. Companies are required to file reports to the FDA’s Adverse Event Reporting System so the agency can monitor the safety of drugs. The FDA’s online database includes only bare-bones details, so ProPublica was unable to independently verify what happened in each case. While the FDA would not comment on these complaints, the agency generally warns, “For any given report, there is no certainty that a suspected drug caused the reaction.”
A majority of the reports said the patients suffered from abnormal heart rhythms, while the second-most-common complaint was of muscle problems. Glenmark’s public alert said that the recalled pills could cause irregular heartbeats and severe muscle weakness.
Glenmark’s top executives have told financial analysts on earnings calls that the company has invested in improvements to its factories.
The company’s troubles with U.S. regulators are so well known to investors that its compliance officer notified the National Stock Exchange of India in September that FDA inspectors had found no problems at one of its other factories in India. As the news spread, Glenmark’s stock jumped 9%.
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This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Bangor Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
Public housing helped bring an end to Linda Gallagher-Garcia’s three years of intermittent homelessness in her hometown of Presque Isle, Maine, in 2020. With $200 in secondhand furniture, she made the apartment feel like home for her and her dog, Tex.
But when she fell behind on her rent and was evicted two years later, the fact that she was in public housing made her future more dire: Maine public housing authorities’ rules bar evicted tenants from returning to government-subsidized units and from receiving other benefits that could help them relocate.
Gallagher-Garcia had moved back to her hometown in northern Maine in 2017 after her husband died. She was working as a home health aide and struggled to earn enough to afford a place to live; then, when she got COVID-19 and had to take time off from her job, she fell behind on her rent. The Presque Isle Housing Authority evicted her in 2022. “I was sick,” she said. “It didn’t matter to them.” Citing confidentiality rules, the housing authority said it could not comment on her case.
Last spring, Maine lawmakers had a chance to help public housing tenants at risk of losing their homes when they created a fund to prevent evictions. But instead of doing what nearby Massachusetts and Connecticut did, and making public housing tenants eligible for the program, Maine did the opposite and specifically excluded them. That left public housing residents — who are more likely than others to become homeless after eviction — ineligible for the aid.
Those who crafted the law said they didn’t realize people in public housing might need such help. Gallagher-Garcia’s story shows why they do.
She owed just $955 in back rent and utilities when she got her eviction notice — an amount the new eviction prevention program could have covered if it had been in place and if she had been living in a privately owned apartment. Instead, at age 59, Gallagher-Garcia checked into the local emergency shelter where she stayed for two years. In total, state and federal dollars paid about $55,000 for her to stay there.
Gallagher-Garcia outside her old apartment at the Presque Isle Housing Authority’s elderly and disabled section. She lived there for two years before being evicted in 2022. (Linda Coan O’Kresik/Bangor Daily News)Maine’s pilot eviction prevention program, called the Stable Home Fund, opened to applications in October. It provides eligible households with up to $800 a month for up to one year, with additional funds available to cover back rent.
The creators of the Stable Home Fund thought that public housing tenants already had enough aid. Public housing, which is funded with federal dollars, is supposed to be affordable for low-income families, the elderly and people with disabilities, with rent typically capped at 30% of household income. Public housing tenants, however, can still struggle to afford rent and be evicted just like tenants in private apartments.
In fact, in 2023, Maine’s public housing authorities filed a disproportionately high share of eviction cases, according to an analysis of court data obtained by the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica. The eviction filing rate for public housing authorities was more than twice as high as the rate for all rental housing: 10 eviction filings per 100 units for public housing compared with four filings per 100 units for all rental housing.
The cause of most public housing eviction filings in Maine was nonpayment of rent, based on a separate review of court data collected by Pine Tree Legal Assistance, Maine’s largest legal aid group.
Because of public housing rules forbidding tenants from returning after an eviction, and because public housing tenants are generally poorer than other renters, both publicly and privately owned properties become out of reach. (By contrast, people who have been evicted from privately owned housing are still eligible to live in public housing.)
As a result, the consequence of being evicted from public housing “is almost certainly homelessness and extreme housing instability for already vulnerable families,” said Marie Claire Tran-Leung, director of the National Housing Law Project’s evictions initiative.
That homelessness comes with a financial cost to state and local governments. A 2009 Maine study found that governments spent about one-and-a-half times more in services for a homeless person in the six months before they were placed in subsidized housing and given supportive services than in the six months after.
Aroostook County in Maine. Three-quarters of the state’s 2023 low-income eviction cases were in its rural 2nd Congressional District, which includes Presque Isle. (Linda Coan O’Kresik/Bangor Daily News) Public Housing Gets ExcludedLittle is known about evictions in Maine, in part because the state’s paper-based court system makes it hard to obtain data. In 2023, Pine Tree Legal, a nonprofit that provides civil legal services to people with low incomes, spent a year traveling around the state to review eviction filings to understand why landlords try to remove tenants, how often renters don’t show up in court and how frequently they have representation. The Bangor Daily News and ProPublica analyzed the data, which covered about 40% of cases filed between 2019 and 2022. The newsrooms also obtained further data from the state court system on every eviction case filed by a public housing authority from January 2019 through August 2024.
Taken together, the data provides a window into a little-noticed aspect of Maine’s housing crisis. Since 2019, public housing authorities, which had a combined total of 3,299 units last year, went to court to evict low-income tenants about 1,300 times.
In 2023, their cases made up 5% of all eviction filings, despite the authorities having just 2% of the state’s rental units. Of the public housing cases, three-quarters were in the rural 2nd Congressional District, which covers most of the state outside the populous southern coastal region and includes Gallagher-Garcia’s hometown of Presque Isle.
The Presque Isle Housing Authority, where she lived, is in the geographically largest county east of the Mississippi River and has a population of just 67,000 residents. The housing authority filed nearly one eviction suit for every five of its public housing units in 2023, the highest rate of any housing authority in Maine, the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica found. The vast majority of cases in Presque Isle were for nonpayment of rent.
The housing authority said that a small minority of its cases resulted in actual eviction orders. (The state of Maine, however, does not track the number of people who leave after being threatened with eviction but before their cases are completed.)
The housing authority’s executive director, Jennifer Sweetser, explained that evictions are necessary because the agency’s budget relies on consistent rental payments. She also said that the housing authority doesn’t grant individual exceptions to eviction, which could be unfair or discriminatory. Instead, she said, the eviction process gives tenants a “neutral” way to resolve issues.
Farther south in the 2nd Congressional District, the Bangor housing authority filed more than twice as many eviction cases as the housing authority in Maine’s biggest city, Portland, located in the state’s other congressional district, even though Portland has many more public housing units.
This issue isn’t unique to Maine. Eviction Lab, a research organization based at Princeton University, has found that some public housing authorities around the country use evictions as a rent collection tactic, sometimes at higher rates than private landlords.
Victoria Morales runs the Quality Housing Coalition, based in Portland, and was the architect of the eviction prevention program that launched this year. She said she didn’t know how often Maine public housing tenants faced eviction until the Bangor Daily News and ProPublica shared their findings, as her organization doesn’t usually work with people in public housing. “I think it is hard to see that this exists if you’re not in it,” Morales said.
Morales excluded tenants in public housing from the fund because she said their rent is already supposed to be affordable. The goal was to help people facing eviction who were not already receiving some type of aid, she said. (In the end, however, the program allowed renters to apply who were receiving other types of housing assistance — just not those living in public housing or who had a federal Section 8 voucher.)
The program’s cost to the state was also a factor in limiting who was eligible, said state Rep. Rebecca Millett, D-Cape Elizabeth, who sponsored the legislation that spurred the fund. “We had to get it through the appropriation process when we were competing with all the other really important needs that our state is facing,” Millett said. Although Millett’s 2023 bill didn’t pass, a year later lawmakers decided to create and fund the rent relief program with $18 million through the supplemental budget process.
MaineHousing, a quasi-state agency that awarded a contract to Morales’ organization to run the program, estimated that 1,000 households could benefit over two years. In the first month, the program received 1,400 applications and had to start putting people on a waiting list.
Even with the high demand, two national housing experts said the Stable Home Fund could help more people if tenants of public housing could participate. That’s because monthly rent in public housing is much lower than on the private market.
Those experts said they don’t know of another eviction prevention program that excludes people in public housing. Kevin Connor, a spokesperson for the agency that runs Massachusetts’ program, said it is open to any household because the state wants to prevent homelessness, “whether they are in a house they own, an apartment they rent or a subsidized unit.”
Morales did not say whether she planned to advocate for public housing tenants to be included in the program in the future, but she said she would support the change if the state decided it was a priority.
Millett said she’d like to see the program expanded to help every Mainer who needs assistance, including people in public housing. But she will not be around when lawmakers convene in January; after 12 years in the Legislature, she didn’t run for reelection. Without Millett, and with no guarantee of future funding, the program’s longevity remains an open question.
After her eviction, Gallagher-Garcia was forced to move back into a shelter. (Linda Coan O’Kresik/Bangor Daily News) Evicted From Public HousingPublic housing delivered Gallagher-Garcia from homelessness. But being evicted from public housing pitched her right back into it.
One cool day in April 2022, her nieces and nephews helped her empty out her apartment, throwing her furniture into a dumpster. “Basically, I didn’t have anything,” she said, in the same matter-of-fact way that she described many of the other challenges she’s faced, including battling cancer. When she checked into the shelter, it ended her longest period of housing stability since 2017.
She couldn’t move in with her sister, Nancy Gallagher, who also lives in the housing authority, because the authority bars people who have been evicted from staying with other residents. She had to stay near Presque Isle because that’s where her job was. So Gallagher-Garcia went to the shelter. “I just didn’t have time to find anywhere else to go,” she said.
Gallagher-Garcia spends an afternoon at the apartment of her sister, Nancy Gallagher, in the Presque Isle Housing Authority. (Linda Coan O’Kresik/Bangor Daily News)Her dog, Tex, went to the kennel in Caribou, the next town up the road. Under the shelter’s rules, Gallagher-Garcia had to leave her metal crochet needles behind at her sister’s apartment because they could be used as weapons. She also was required to leave the shelter every morning; when she didn’t have to go to work or see a doctor, she spent the day in her sister’s living room calling around for apartments.
In her second year at the shelter, in 2023, her health started to decline — first a hernia, then ovarian cancer. With that diagnosis came more tests, surgeries and chemotherapy. “January, February, March, three months behind each other, not even giving my body time to heal or anything, one surgery after another,” she said. She made frequent trips to see specialists as far away as Portland, four and a half hours away.
Living in a room at the shelter with three to four women, she had little privacy when nurses came to check on her surgical wounds. When other residents started asking what was going on, she decided to tell them. “I didn’t sugarcoat it,” she said about her discussion with a boy in the shelter. “I said, you know, I could go to sleep and not wake up.”
In July 2023, she returned to work part time despite continued chemotherapy treatments, so she could save up enough to leave the shelter. She didn’t like sitting around, she said: “I wanted to go back to work and have something to do for myself.”
Finally, in June, after two years in the shelter, she moved into a motel. She was glad to have a quiet place to stay, and she got her dog back after paying a fee. But it cost $1,000 a month, twice as much as her apartment at the public housing complex. After about nine months, she fell behind on her rent, and the motel kicked her out, too, she said.
As of early December, Gallagher-Garcia was still at the local homeless shelter, looking for a place of her own. Every week, she said, she called landlords, looking for someone to accept her despite her financial struggles and prior evictions.
Then, she found something: a hotel room for $1,200 a month. That’s more than the last place, which she couldn’t afford. But she just turned 62, and now she can draw Social Security. Between that and her job, she hopes she can make it work.
This story was supported in part by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Bangor Daily News reporter Sawyer Loftus may be reached at sloftus@bangordailynews.com.
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