Like any good Kossack, I've been following the push for health care since I first came here in '05. I read all the health care nightmare stories, which sadly started to sound similar after a while. Someone gets sick, needs care, and can't get it for one reason or another, ensuing in a lot of hair pulling by me. Some of them move their lives forward as best they can, inspiring us with their courage and urging us to fight. Some of them don't make it.
Perhaps this is neither a story of courage nor defeat, but it's only hitting me now what good health care in this country might have done for my mother.
My mother died in 1997 at the age of 57. My family would feel ashamed if they knew what I was saying here, but she was kinda nutty. She had been divorced for several years, yet was working for her ex-husband's company. They'd had the classic alcoholic husband/co-dependent wife relationship during their 25 year marriage. He was not my father. My grandmother and her husband adopted me when I was an infant; they were my Mom and Dad.
Our relationship was at the same time intense and distant. The year she died I had only spoken to her a couple of times. I hadn't seen her since the year before. One time, a few months before she died, she said she was sick with bronchitis, and then broke down crying that she would come to see us, she promised! I attributed her hysteria to her nature, which had always been dramatic, not to her illness.
We found out a week before she died. She was in the hospital and the doctor on the phone said, "She has a tumor in her tummy," as if I were a child. We flew down to San Diego from San Francisco and found out she really had stomach cancer and she would die within a few days. I will never forget that moment. I was 34 years old and looked up at my grandmother, who was in her late 70s and realized I would be completely alone in the world very soon. We brought hospice in immediately and took her to her home where she died a few days later.
I spent 4 months after that living in her home, processing our difficult relationship but also trying to find out what the hell happened. Her ex-husband had said that she would have had insurance, but she never filled out the forms. I would have pursued that further but to what end? Knowing my mother's martyr tendencies, I thought it was plausible.
I looked through her papers and discovered that she had paid cash to see doctors and the ER a few times, and had had chest x-rays which I'm sure, given her story of "bronchitis" months earlier would have shown metastases. Why didn't she have further tests and treatment? Probably because she didn't have insurance.
Today, after reading nyceve's diary, it finally hit me. I always thought that I didn't have a health care story. My mother was not a strong advocate for herself. I cannot say 100% that my mother would have gotten treatment earlier if she'd had health insurance. Stomach cancer is hard to treat even with early detection.
But even though my mother was a bit emotionally unbalanced, what would have happened if she'd had insurance no matter what?
It's possible she wouldn't have accepted treatment anyway, but perhaps she would have felt cared for, "held" in a way that she didn't back then. Perhaps health care workers (I'm not blaming them here) would have been slightly more encouraging-- I imagine someone gently leading her by the elbow to be admitted when she was in the ER, instead of what really happened--her leaving with a prescription for an inhaler. Perhaps she would have felt comfortable telling us she was gravely ill and not worry that her treatment would bankrupt her whole family.
Perhaps, perhaps, she'd be alive today.