This morning I ended up waiting at the lab with an older man, both of us queued up for blood draws from the phlebotomist who’s excellent at taking only one try to get the vein. My neighbor in waiting was clearly a lab regular too and as we sat there we got to talking, as my gran would say.
He’d joined Kaiser the year I was born and it had seen his family through major surgery, a premature baby, and the sudden arrival of his own chronic illness nearly 30 years ago. Still only tentatively mobile after my descent into acute illness two years ago, I wholeheartedly agreed that without Kaiser I’d be dead too. Maybe not today, but much more seriously ill and in serious decline. My doctor was the first to really take seriously all the disparate symptoms and weirdnesses I’d been dealing with for 30 years. Without her persistence and diagnosis, I’d be struggling to get appropriate treatment for the myriad secondary troubles that my underlying condition cause.
“I just don’t know what people do without health care, it’s terrible,” he said with a deep shake of his head. “They’re always telling us this country is so great.” “It’s unconscionable,” I replied. They die, was what lay unspoken between us, both seeing too easily how we could have been on that road. Even now, with access to health care, the costs of actually using the care I need to remain functional prevent my family from participating in social life in so many other ways. We delay home repairs, to the detriment of local businesses and laborers we employ. We don’t take vacations, eat out, or go to the movies or local shows. Our lives are constrained. But every single day, as I take my pills, see my caregivers, and prepare the specialized diet I need to maintain, I am grieved by the knowledge that others with my condition don’t have even these options. While I am fortunate to have the household income to keep going, they are suffering, struggling to survive, and dying.
We moved on to trading war stories, literal stories of wars neither of us were in: my grandfather playing soccer on a stop in Kenya during World War II, his own story of avoiding Vietnam by having terrible vision. (“We are not going to give you a gun!”) The phlebotomist wondered if we had just come there to hang out, and my neighbor quipped that all we were missing were the drinks.
There are so many ways in which people are dying in this country every day. War, hunger, lack of housing, lack of medical care, police brutality, pick your poison. All of it so unnecessary.