I have been unwell these last weeks, hence the quiet around here. I’m on the mend, it would seem: all but the coughing. I spent the third week of June trying to focus enough to get some work done, for the most part unsuccessfully. I spent the week after that catching up on work that had gone undone, with a few moments here and there tending to Annette, who caught whatever I had. I’m still behind. Some of that behind involves emails I owe some of you, and actual mail I owe some other of you. I hope to get to that within the next day or so. (The actual mail will have to wait until the fireworks are over and the postal workers return to their posts.)
I was without insurance for a while in 2009, but somehow managed not to get really sick: a bout of the flu, I think, was about it. Aside from that, the last time I was sick without recourse to an MD on call was during the Reagan administration. I’d forgotten about the cost-benefit analyses, the prognoses and budgeting that go into pay-as-you-go health care decision making. This started out as tonsilitis and then settled into my lungs: i’ve had bronchitis a couple times before, so that’s familiar territory. I’m no longer in “coughing so hard my abs spasm” mode, so I count it as recovering right on schedule. Annette, who has been a mom for 27 years, is skeptical of my ability to self-diagnose. Were it up to her I’d have shelled out for an urgent care place, on the theory that I can figure out the budgeting later when I am still alive. Had I been bitten by a rattlesnake — or worse, a feral cat or a small child — I’d have taken her advice. A broken bone? Almost certainly likewise. But tonsilitis I’ve done. If it lasts more than three or four days I start to worry. I had no fever — though it sure felt like it — so no strep. Simple viral infection, nothing an MD could do other than tell me to go home and sleep it off and gargle with salt water and eat ice cream, so that’s what I did. Likewise with the bronchitis into which the tonsilitis evolved. Been there, done that, know the drill. It’ll be gone in another couple weeks, and as long as what I cough up stays out of the “Christmassy” region of the color wheel, not to worry.
Still. There was a moment a couple weekends ago when I felt better and Annette wasn’t yet sick, and we were watching a movie at our friend Alan’s house. I won’t identify the movie for spoilers’ sake, but it was about two women, best friends and flatmates working dead-end entry level jobs in the big city, and one of them suddenly comes down with a nasty case of a tumor on her spinal cord. Aha, I think with the part of my brain that engages in not-quite-conscious thought, it’s financial stress plot point time. And yet no! Seeing as the big city in question is Sydney, Australia, the young woman goes to the hospital and has the surgery and the plot point is actually “will she get better,” not “how will she ever get better what with the crushing debt from the surgery and incidentals and all of the associated costs of recovery and rehabilitation.”
Imagine not having to worry about paying to see the doctor. Not having to worry that a serious illness will bankrupt you. It’s like science fiction or something.
Science fiction, civilization, same diff.
And I’m sorry you’ve been ill. Bronchitis is terrible.
Tell me about it.
Also, get better.
Also also, beware of the increasingly (and almost unpredictably) longer, wobblier recoveries that are a consequence of just plain getting older. Plan on doing what it used to take, but more of it.
When Don was being treated for cancer, I spent a lot of time on cancer support websites and did some volunteer work for one of them. I was always amazed at how different things are for people living in Canada vs. the U.S. Members from the U.S. often discissed cost of treatment, whether they coukd go to such-and-such clininc, etc… In Canada, you just go for treatment and never deal with the financial side of things - which is good, because te last thing a person in that situation needs is to be worrying about money.
Not to mention that whole “Ican’tworkbecauseI’msickyetthebillskeepcoming” stress. My health insurance, which is fairly barebones, but covers basic typical Western-medicine-type care, costs me $7000 a year. That’s a lot of money. And of course that’s not the only expense that ticks on like a metronome while one is lying in bed hacking their lungs out.
Reason number 674 that I love Vermont. (Hope you feel better soon!)
I was afraid you were ill when you didn’t post. So sorry to hear it. Hope you continue to mend on schedule.
This business of needing insurance to have easy access to a doctor is so barbaric! It’s one of the signs that our U.S. is truly not yet a civilized nation.
You say, “I had no fever.” I bet the thermometer you used (if you used one) to verify this was calibrated in Fahrenheit. That’s another thing you’ll find Only In America (TM)—besides a barbaric health care funding system—that’s unique among industrialized nations.
Maybe there’s a connection.
Glad to hear your on the mend. Universal healthcare, medical care for everyone would be a good start to a healthy society, don’t you think? Makes one wonder why it isn’t available, unless there are those who don’t want a healthy society. HMMMM!!!
I’ve never really had to worry about that since I’m on disability. And it wasn’t really until the economy turned that I realized how much my friends and family have to pay for their hospital care.
This may sound naive, but I just don’t get how come we can’t offer free healthcare like they do in Europe and Canada. It can’t be a money thing, because apparently, everybody likes money. Not just Americans, right?
zee - The reason that the U.S. can’t offer universal healthcare has to do with the way that the whole medical, medical insurace, and pharmaceutical industry is already entrenched as a “for profit” system. In Canada, heakth care workers are paid on a scale in line with whatever work or orocedure they are doing. Hospitals are not profit driven as their operating budget is covered by payments from the provincial governments. Pharmaceuticals covered by the healthcare system are purchased directly by the government, so they deal directly with pharmaceutical companies to get the best price possible fir karge volume purchases (chemo drugs being one example). What we din’t have in Canada is a tiered health system - poor people going to this clinic or hospital, while wealthy go elsewhere and pay for more advanced treatments. In Canada, the UK, etc…, if you get cancer, you are treated according to whatever protocol is considered the best treatment available (gold standard) as determined by oncology panels who study available drugs, etc.. So whether you are richu or poor, the treatment protocol will be the same within that province. Further, let’s say that are an Inuit Person living up in the Arctic, you would be flown down to a hospital in southern Canada, accommmodated at a special residence for Inuit people (Baffin House), have translators going with you at the treatments if required, etc… This is all part of the system of everyone having the right to access to healthcare. This system is paid for through taxes, and so our tax structure is different friom in the U.S. It is based on level if earnings. True, some people up here do grouse about high taxes - the more you make, the more you pay - but that is what keeps the system running. In survey after survey, Canadians have said that universal healthcare is imoortant and we are unwilling to give it up. There us nothing that the corporate medical and pharmaceutical industry would like more than to get a foothold here in Canada, but so far, that has only happened in a lilmited way - fortunately.
- bev -
thanks for the explanation.
Hey Chris, I’m glad you are better. I’ve lurked for some time, but today, which I spent seeing a doctor, then getting a mammogram and ultrasound (so far, news much better than expected) made me want to comment on this post. Last night, lying awake wondering if I’d see my daughter’s 8th birthday, I comforted myself that at least whatever treatment I might need would not bankrupt my family. It helped. Today, all that medical attention cost me a total of $30 which was the copay on the general practitioner. Imaging, all paid for my taxes over the last 25 years. It is civilised, and I wish you had a national health system too. Even hard things are easier when you don’t have to worry about money.
Get well soon.
Sorry to hear of the sickness and glad you are better. But I think there is a plague of summer sickness that reached me out in the MIdwest about the time you were getting better. I had a fever for a week and that and the antibiotics (cipro) made me feel like I had contracted serious Depression where life does not seem bearable. I could work for a few hours and then had to sleep for hours. It has just started to lift a bit today with the end of the 10 days of drugs. Not the best summer.