I am a 34-year-old mother of one. I am in good health, and I go to the doctor if something is wrong. I don't pay a co-pay to see the doctor, and I pay $5 for any prescription that I need.
My husband is a pediatrician, and we have the best health-care plan offered by his employer, Kaiser Permanente. My parents were public-school teachers in New Mexico, so I had excellent health care growing up. I have had short periods without health coverage (between jobs, for instance), but have been fortunate never to have a major illness or injury during one of those times.
My health-care story isn't about something terrible that happened to me, and it's not even about what happens when you go without coverage. My story is about what it can look like to be on the receiving end of good health care.
My mom had breast cancer that recurred four times over the course of eleven years, and she finally lost that battle about six years ago. She and my father were covered by insurance through the California State University system, where my dad is a professor.
Through those eleven years, my mother went through countless, expensive chemotherapy treatments, radiation treatments, and everything experimental that my dad could find. She had some of the best oncologists in the world, and some of the most dedicated and compassionate nurses I've ever met. We were fortunate, because it is without any doubt that she would have lived only a fraction of those eleven years without the aggressive, innovative treatments that she received.
The years my mom lived with cancer were all about milestones.
She wanted to see me graduate from college, and she did. Then, she hoped to see my younger brother graduate from college, and she did. (And we nearly lost my brother while he was a college athlete, when he was involved in a freak accident where he was hit in the back of the head with a discus. Without emergency care, and many days in the ICU, he would have died. My family was able to spend those frightening days caring for him and not worrying about a medical bill that would have wiped us out without insurance.)
When my brother graduated from college, my mom cried. She was a tough lady who didn't cry often, and she wasn't particularly sentimental. But that day was a day that she didn't think she'd see.
My mom was there when I had the ultrasound for my daughter, who is five now. She went downhill quickly in the last few months, and she didn't live to see my daughter born.
When I think of the gift we got from modern medicine, I know that it's a combination of luck and privilege that allowed me that time with my mom--years that she wouldn't have had without it. Because of the insurance my dad had, he didn't have to mortgage his home to pay to keep my mother's treatments going.
How can we not, as human beings, ensure that every wife, mother, daughter with cancer gets treatment? How can we say that we believe in the right to free, public education but not access to health care? Who are we if we don't believe in the basic right to see a doctor when you're sick? Did my mother deserve those eleven years more than any other mother does, and if so, why?
When I hear the stories about homes and life savings lost, about care shirked at hospitals and treatments denied, I can't say that I know what that feels like. But it makes me feel sick and sad to imagine people going through illness or injury and then being hit by the Mack truck of insults on top of it, in the form of insurmountable bills or letters informing them that no, they won't be able to get the medicine or surgery they need.
I believe we have got to make our way toward single-payer, universal health care. Right now, I will be happy with a good public option in place, so that we can start to fix the gaping hole through which so many people--human beings!--fall every day. I want us to be courageous for people like my mom. Her own grace and courage deserve nothing less than boldness from us.
And a word about Death Panels, if I may. My experience of watching someone live with a terminal disease was that you spend a lot of time imagining horrific scenarios of suffering. I felt as though we were tied to the front of a freight train and there was nothing we could do to stop it. At a certain point, we knew the cancer wasn't beatable. The last week of my mother's life she eroded quickly. At the end, we had to make the decisions for her about whether we would fight the pneumonia and the infection in her brain.
We knew my mother's wishes, and we knew that she didn't want to live in a hospital, attached to machines. We made the very private decision to make her comfortable and wait with her.
So when I hear conservatives try to scare people about Living Wills and end-of-life decision making, I feel very personally insulted. Families wade through those waters daily, and without fanfare. They don't have to answer to strangers, like Michael Schiavo did. I think the notion of dignity and choice at the end of life is something that speaks to our basic humanity.
Yesterday, I drove to Senator Dianne Feinstein's local office with a letter about health care, and a picture from my daughter of a nurse with her patients. Earlier in the week, I went to Congressman Darrell Issa's office with a letter. (I know, it's practically futile, but I do it anyhow. I'm his constituent and dammit if I'll just let him off the hook.) I'll co-host a meeting this week to help others write letters to the editor and letters to Congress about health care reform.
I won't be doing this because of what I have lost to our broken health care system--I am one of the lucky few. I'll do because it is humanity at its most basic, and we should all stand up for that.
I'll do it because I wish to honor my mother, and every mother who looks ahead to hoped-for milestones and dreams of what may be.