Shirley Schillinger has been confined to a lumpy, cockroach-infested bed since June.

But this week, the gregarious 69-year-old pensioner, who is in chronic pain from multiple neck and back surgeries, is resting a little easier.

Thanks to Toronto’s Hardship Fund, Schillinger received a hospital bed with a special air mattress that prevents bedsores. It also has an electric lift that allows her to raise and lower her head and feet with the flick of a switch.

It means she can now sit up to watch TV and snack on bread and cheese from her bedside table during the long days she spends alone between morning and evening visits from a home-care nurse.

More crucially, the $3,500 bed allows Schillinger to remain in her downtown Toronto apartment with her beloved cat, Benson. And it will reduce the risk that she will end up in hospital at $1,000 a day or be forced to move into a $150-a-day nursing home.

Schillinger is one of about 1,300 low-income Toronto seniors and disabled people with serious medical needs who benefit from the $900,000 city fund every year. But city council voted 23-22 last month to consider axing the fund as part of its efforts to shave $360 million from next year’s budget.

More than a dozen community social service agencies are hoping city manager Joe Pennachetti spares the fund when he tables his proposed 2012 budget later this month.

“Eliminating the fund will endanger the health and wellbeing of more than a thousand Toronto residents who struggle daily with the basics,” says John Campey of Social Planning Toronto, which is leading a campaign to save the fund.

For the average property taxpayer, the fund amounts to about 60 cents a year, he noted.

“In a decent, human and caring city, most people would think something like this should be available for those who need it,” he added.

On a pension of about $1,200 a month, there was no way Schillinger could afford the hospital bed or a $1,800 lift to help visiting nurses get her in and out of bed that she also received this week.

“I sure am grateful for the fund,” she says as delivery men set up her new bed in the subsidized apartment she has called home for the past 38 years.

“This feels really good,” she smiles as she settles in. “The other bed felt like you were lying on wads of bumps.”

Healther MacVicar, general manager of the city’s employment and social services division, says the fund is one of city’s last remaining social benefits not mandated by the province. It survived the deep cuts of the early 1990s recession and the Mike Harris Conservative government welfare reforms.

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“I don’t think many people know about it,” MacVicar says. “But there certainly is a need. There is a huge hidden population like (Schillinger) growing in Toronto.”

For more information on Social Planning Toronto’s campaign to save the Hardship Fund see socialplanningtoronto.org.