To download a PDF format of this article, please click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By ARIAN CAMPO-FLORES and ASHBY JONES Oct. 30, 2015 1:18 p.m. ET One day in March 2012, 71-year-old Linda McDowell received a knock at the door of her small Vancouver, Wash., home. Ms. McDowell needed court-appointed help, the visitor told her. It turned out that Ms. McDowell\u2019s former housemate and companion had pushed for a court petition claiming Ms. McDowell was unable to take care of herself. The petition said Ms. McDowell had recently made an unsafe driving maneuver, had been disruptive in a doctor\u2019s office and, in a recent phone call, had seemed confused over the whereabouts of some personal papers. Based on the motion, a judge ordered an attorney to act as a temporary guardian with control over Ms. McDowell\u2019s money and medical care. Ms. McDowell was also to pay for these services. \u201cI was shocked,\u201d says Ms. McDowell, who once worked as a conference manager for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration before a second career in real-estate investing. \u201cI had never met this person, and here she was telling me I basically belonged to her.\u201d The visit marked the start of a 30-month stretch in Washington\u2019s guardianship system that upended her life and drained much of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1148,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[166,57,51,164,59,73,119,426],"tags":[598,587,588,591,601,608,592,600,599,604,68,304,590,37,606,595,602,594,603,597,605,593,589,501,596,607,317,586],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaapg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1146"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaapg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaapg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaapg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaapg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1146"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/aaapg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1688,"href":"https:\/\/aaapg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1146\/revisions\/1688"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaapg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aaapg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaapg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aaapg.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}