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“I went to mount adult to see if my crony had arrived, and couldn’t get up,” Ms. Kirk, 60, recalled. “I looked down during my foot. It wasn’t spiteful or anything.” The subsequent thing she knew, she was waking adult in Cabrini Medical Center, recuperating from mind surgery, and several days had passed.

In a restaurant, Ms. Kirk, afterwards a amicable services executive during a nonprofit group, had upheld out after carrying a near-fatal stroke. The operation saved her life. That cadence was a initial of 3 — she had another in 2006 and one in Sep 2011 — that would incapacitate her, hypnotize a right side of her physique and put her in a wheelchair.

Ms. Kirk told her story recently during her Harlem home, that is like a well-organized vaunt — flashy with hand-colored photographs of low-pitched greats like Miles Davis, Count Basie and Duke Ellington, along with tiny wooden sculptures from Ghana.

“I only got them during auctions,” she said. “I like to approximate myself with them. This is only who we am.”

Ms. Kirk grew adult in St. Louis and graduated from a University of Missouri during Columbia with a bachelor’s grade in amicable work. She trafficked opposite a United States for about a year after graduating, afterwards returned to St. Louis to teach.

Long drawn to a gait of New York City, a accumulation of a people and a fad of Broadway, she changed to a Upper West Side in 1974. She warranted a second bachelor’s grade in tellurian services in 1980 from a Audrey Cohen College, afterwards perceived a master’s in amicable work in 1982 from Columbia, she said.

“I always enjoyed assembly people, and reaching out to people,” Ms. Kirk said. “I favourite assisting people pierce their life to a subsequent step — possibly it was a new job, housing, a relationship.”

When she had her initial stroke, Ms. Kirk was operative during Abyssinian Development Corporation, a nonprofit classification dependent with Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where she had been a member given she arrived in New York. After a stroke, she was incompetent to lapse to work.

Ms. Kirk pronounced she did not consider many about a consequences of her condition during her reconstruction over several months.

“It wasn’t so many how’s my life going to change,” she said. “It was all flattering many tied into right now. And that’s not opposite than how we live now. we consider about a future, though my concentration is on today.”

Most days, Ms. Kirk rises early, and an assistance arrives shortly after to assistance with breakfast. After that assistance leaves, another one arrives during noon, and she and Ms. Kirk run errands — to understanding with Social Security issues, to revisit a bank, to go shopping. That is also when Ms. Kirk does a lot of her socializing. “I see so many people when I’m out,” she said.

The aides are a salvation for Ms. Kirk, and she pronounced she would advantage from carrying some-more care. But with her monthly income of about $2,000 in incapacity benefits, she could not means it. Nearly half of her income goes to her nursing care, and many of a rest to utilities, food and rent, she said.

By month’s end, she said, she is “down to roughly nothing,” that leaves diverse medical bills possibly “unpaid or not paid as often” as she would like.

To find out about her eligibility for Medicaid, Ms. Kirk called a assistance line of Community Health Advocates, a state-designated health word consumer assistance program. She schooled that her income was too high for her to qualify, by some-more than $1,000 a month. But substantiating a pooled trust, she found out, would give her a place to put income above a volume Medicaid allows her to keep, and use it for simple monthly bills. Medicaid would afterwards cover her additional home health assistance costs. But such trusts have fees and a compulsory smallest balance.

An disciple from a assistance line suggested she hit a Community Service Society of New York, Community Health Advocates’ primogenitor classification and one of a agencies upheld by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. In October, a multitude drew $1,454 from a account to cover Ms. Kirk’s smallest change and fees for a pooled trust.

“I was vehement when a income came through,” she said. “It was a certain pierce toward being authorised for removing some-more health assist services.”

With all of her challenges, Ms. Kirk finds that focusing on a benefaction is best. “I don’t like not being means to get out of this chair right now,” she said. “I’m not happy about it. But we wouldn’t contend I’m sad, either. we would contend that that’s what life is right now. So we understanding with it.”

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