I’m 76 and drive for Uber after losing my savings to my wife’s cancer bills. I’m not sure how long I can keep driving.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jeff Mason, 76, who drives for Uber in New Jersey for extra income. Mason and his wife liquidated their savings after his wife’s cancer treatment, which she underwent before the Affordable Care Act‘s restrictions on insurance companies denying coverage to patients with pre-existing conditions. Over the last two decades, the couple has tried to financially recover. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

At age 10 in 1960, I started shoveling sidewalks and mowing lawns. I used to cut a lawn for 25 cents. I worked at a produce market, washed dishes, and worked in retail while growing up. My mother was sick for a few years and died when I was a senior in high school. I went to prep school for a year and then college for a year, but I quit to become a caregiver to my younger siblings. I chauffeured my brothers and sisters around for a few years before going back to college.

My father owned a construction company, and I worked summers for him. I moved from being a laborer to working with an engineering crew. I learned how to operate heavy equipment and large trucks, building bridges and highways. I also worked on wastewater treatment facilities and then moved into management. I did estimating and project management for a specialty construction company that worked on warehouses and loading docks.

My wife was a stay-at-home mom, but when our youngest daughter moved out, she decided she needed to do something more. She got a job for an environmental testing company.

Within a year, she started to have abdominal pains and went to the doctor a few times.

She went to the family doctor, who determined she had the classic symptoms of a bad gallbladder. She had her first surgery and had to stay in the hospital for a few days. It wasn’t until a few months later that the bills started coming in.

Our son was getting married, and my wife’s work was by choice instead of necessity. She voluntarily took a leave of absence and started to collect unemployment. We started to pay COBRA a little over $100 monthly to maintain her health insurance.

A few months after that, she found a lump in her chest. We started to get bills from the doctors and the hospital. They told us we didn’t have insurance. I said that we did. We were paying for COBRA, and I had all my canceled checks. She had surgery on her breast, but the hospital flat out told us that we don’t have insurance. She was sent home a day after because we couldn’t afford it.

The easiest way to understand what happened is that hypothetically, there were 300 employees at the company. We were paying 1/300 of a monthly premium. They weren’t paying the other 299 parts of it. So even though the insurance company was taking our money, we weren’t covered. They wanted me to go from me paying for my insurance and her paying for her insurance to essentially paying for four policies on one income. I had made too much to qualify for government assistance.

We went to a few lawyers, and each of them said we had no case because there was no intent on anybody’s part to defraud us.

As her cancer progressed, we couldn’t get insurance for continued coverage.

I talked to one of the insurance companies that denied us, and they said we need to secure insurance for any other things that might happen, but she won’t be covered for cancer treatments, as cancer is a pre-existing condition. Meanwhile, we didn’t have any income coming in. The company said the only way she could get covered is if I divorced her, and she could collect welfare and get coverage.

We decided we were going to liquidate. We cashed in our IRA, sold our car, remortgaged our house, and emptied our savings. After a year, I started making monthly payments to everybody. We eventually ran out of money. It took me 13 years to pay off the second mortgage.

I remembered getting a bill in the neighborhood of $246,000 from the hospital that covered the surgery and her recovery in the hospital. We still had a whole road ahead of us for aftercare. By the end of it, the bills totaled about $300,000. This all happened before the Affordable Care Act.

The rebuilding process was slow. Our IRA was non-existent. I remember one day I came home and found my wife on the front porch crying because bill collectors were asking for more money. She never cried once through the treatments and the recoveries.

The aftermath rolled into the 2000s.

Our credit was bad at that point. It took us a while to get a credit card. Our car broke down, and I was trying to work and had no way to get back and forth. I bought an inexpensive motorcycle, which I used to go back and forth on a construction site. Little by little, we built our credit back up.

I worked 12-hour days during the week, a long half day on Saturdays, and pretty much every Sunday night. I also held side jobs. We started to put $10 away out of every paycheck. We lived very sparsely. We didn’t spend any money. My wife didn’t go to a hairstylist or buy makeup. We bought a home that was less expensive. I was also lucky to never have been laid off.

We’ve lived in the same three-bedroom house in New Jersey since 1988. From time to time, family members need a place to stay because of their situation. We’ve probably had 10 to 15 people live with us for months. This included my father, who spent his last five years here. Our house is known as the sanctuary. People come here to heal, whether mentally or physically.

My wife got involved in elder care after she went through that cancer situation, transporting people to and from the hospital. She made connections with people who had older parents or family members, and she started to take care of them on a part-time basis.

I really didn’t want to retire in my 60s, but we were getting older, and my wife wanted me to be spending more time at home. When I retired, I had some equity in my home and around $300,000 in my IRA. I also started to fund an IRA for my wife, which I built to mid-five figures. This allowed us to travel extensively within the US for the first few years. But a part of me felt like we probably weren’t going to live that long anyway because everybody around us was dying.

I was diagnosed with prostate cancer and have had several heart surgeries. I decided to loosen the purse strings and not worry so much about savings. In those years, we probably spent more than we should have.

During the pandemic, I noticed that I needed to go back to work.

We live on a 20-acre piece of land and are surrounded by nothing but woods. We live an isolated life and don’t have many friends.

I started driving for Uber to continue the lifestyle that we had while I was last working. I first aimed to make $100 a day. Some weeks now, I can make well above $600. I’ve had a few weeks over $1,000. I typically work nights and weekends. I haven’t had to withdraw any money from an IRA since I started driving for Uber. The money anxiety started to go away.

Even with my prostate cancer, pacemaker, and half a lung removed, my physical strength and stamina are remarkably good. As a mental challenge, I try to push myself in every situation I’m in. I find driving at night calming, and I like the aloneness of it. Driving bolsters the self-sufficiency aspect of my life, and I get to meet the denizens of the dark, who are often more interesting.

We both would like to leave something for our children, even though they are pretty well off. We don’t know what their lives are going to be in 10 years.

I think about how long I’ll be able to drive. I know that if I retire today, we’ll be able to make it work and could possibly remortgage our house. But everything is getting more expensive. Our children check up on us and want us to move closer, and we know they’ll have our back when we get older. But I’m not too worried about our future.