Cancer.
No matter how many success stories like Lance Armstrong's that we hear, the word just terrifies most people. They'd rather turn away if it hasn't yet touched them directly.
This is not to say that they don't care or that they don't help out the local cancer society or Relay for Life when it comes around locally. They do care, but many of them don't understand that it's not CANCER every time any more. Sometimes it's just Cancer. Sometimes it's just cancer.
No one in my family -- that I know of -- has ever had cancer. I was just the "lucky" one. Actually, my family is probably lucky that I'm the one who got it because while I tend to get really ODD things (Hodgkin's is pretty rare -- only about 7500 new cases a year in the U.S.), I also tend to stubborn them out.
I was the kid in third grade who would get an asthma attack running the mile we were supposed to run in P.E. every week. I'd have to stop, take my inhaler (which were NASTY things back in the day) and then walk for a while. Then, being stubborn, I'd start running again, trying to catch back up. Repeat until the mile was run. And I never gave up on trying to do every physical activity, asthma attack or not. Went on to be a decent athlete in junior high and high school before my mom had finally had enough of "humouring" me and forced me to quit athletics.
You know how other people get a heat rash? Not me, so much. Instead, I get a cold rash. I am, according to my allergist, allergic to the cold. But cold is relative. It can be 65 degrees in the house and I'll start getting the rash on my fingers.
I get weird stuff. But I'm also stubborn enough and determined enough to say, yeah, whatever. So I got dealt some crappy cards ... you know what, I'm gonna bluff this hand and see what happens.
And I'm lucky enough and determined enough that so far, every bluff I've tried has worked.
What I don't get ... and what pisses me off to this day is this: I got the first chemo treatment I needed because my friends told me not to worry about the money. If it had been up to me, I would have tried to completely bluff the Hodgkin's (not knowing then that's what it was).
I was working full-time (even though the job was technically not classified as full-time -- this is a problem at a LOT of universities). I was working at the University of Notre Dame, a school that talks long and often about what a great family they are, how they take care of everyone in the family. But I had no health insurance.
I have seen them raise money for students in need. I witnessed them raise money for a staff member with throat cancer.
A few beloved professors of mine donated some money to me to try to help defray expenses -- and I want to make it clear just how incredibly grateful I am to Valerie (who organized it), Sonia, Seamus and those other folks who pitched in to help out.
The university did nothing.
Meanwhile, the local state school had an adjunct who fell ill. Yep, got one of the Cancers. The whole school ran fundraisers to try to help this guy out.
The hypocrisy of Notre Dame obviously still bothers me.
But it goes deeper than that. I was working full-time. I never stopped working through chemo. When I did land a full-time job the next year and then needed a bone marrow transplant, I only took one semester off teaching. I still went to work every day. I did all sorts of things for the department -- I worked my ass off for them.
But I didn't qualify for any aid programs, federal or local private. The Medicaid office told me if I would just quit working, they'd take care of all my treatments and I wouldn't have run up over $60,000 in medical bills.
Meanwhile, the doctor who I'd been going to with symptoms for two whole years? Still has a thriving practice in town. I got lucky that I went to Med Point. If I'd continued going to him, I'd have been dead in another month or two. If that long.
This is a doctor who is not allowed to practice in ANY of the local hospitals. This is a doctor who, when I tell his name to the local pharmacies, they all give me THAT look. "Him? Oh he's awful!"
So the local health practitioners know he sucks. But he's still practicing medicine?
Why didn't I sue him for malpractice and make him pay for my chemo bills?
Look, I'm not really the suing type. But, I don't have a medical degree. I don't know what was wrong with me, just that something wasn't right. I told him all the symptoms -- and they were classic cancer symptoms. He should have caught the problem. He failed to do so for two full years. He really ought to be liable.
I tried to open a malpractice suit.
No doctor in the area would agree to go on record about this man's medical practices.
They sent my files to Indianapolis.
Here's the catch in malpractice suits in Indiana. The malpractice has to affect your overall outcome. In other words, if his missing the Hodgkin's had affected my prognosis, I could sue. This guy missed it and let the disease progress to stage 4 (of 4 stages). It was bad enough that while the initial chemo helped, I relapsed within a year and needed a bone marrow transplant.
But, I lived. And Hodgkin's can be stopped even from stage four.
So, the doctors in Indianapolis agreed that this doctor was negligent in the extreme. But, because my overall prognosis was probably good, no lawsuit.
Never mind the fact that if he'd caught it earlier, we might have been able to get away with some radiation and a little chemo and been done with it. I probably wouldn't have been hospitalized and I probably wouldn't have had a bone marrow transplant.
Negligent, but not malpractice.
I hear all the time about these "frivolous" lawsuits against doctors and how we need to protect the doctors from the frivolous malpractice suits ... and I agree, in theory.
But I also think that patients need some protection from negligent doctors.
And I think that's it's criminal that so many people are forced to choose between their health and making a living. It's criminal how much some of these treatments are ... treatments that people need to have in order to just live.
But ... I don't know what the answer to the problem is. I'm not gonna pretend that I do. I don't think a completely capitalist health system leads to better health care for all. I know how U.S. doctors feel about socialized medicine. I'm not sure that's a great answer either. I know I like the concept better than what we have now ... that doesn't mean that in practice it will actually be a better deal.
I suppose the question that we have to come to grips with is this: do we have a right to quality health care? And when I ask this, I mean everyone. I don't mean just those people who can afford to go to the Mayo Clinic.
If I hadn't had health insurance when I needed the bone marrow transplant, I wouldn't be here today. The hospital flat out told me that if I couldn't prove I could pay for it, they would NOT do the transplant. I'd be dead.
I think I contribute well to society. I taught freshman writing at Notre Dame for nine years. For most of those years I got between $12,000 and $18,000 a year, with no health benefits. When I was hired full time, I started at $25,000. The last year of the four years I taught full time, I made a touch over $30,000. (The base pay was normalized my second-to-last year at $30,000.) For a college instructor. I was never making great money. Not bad money there at the end, I'm not really complaining.
But think about it for a minute. If I had a professional job and was making $12,000 to $18,000 a year with no benefits ... how many other people are in that boat? How many of them are not getting good health care because they can't afford it?
Why is it fair that an executive VP of a hardware company can make $100,000 a year and get great health insurance and great health care -- but a teacher gets, at best, okay health coverage and maybe $30,000 a year?
Again, I don't claim to know the answers. I'm just saying that I'm dissatisfied with the ones we have right now. We're not doing enough to fix this. And I think we need to.
I was lucky. Damn lucky. I tried to bluff on the fifth street and my friends called the game off and made me go to the doctor before I lost all my chips.
Who do we know who's trying to make the same bluff because there doesn't seem to be any way to call off the game?
How many of us out there have already lost all their chips because of this bluff?
How do we define fair when talking about a person's "right" to live? Is it a right? Should it be?
I don't know.
Think about it.
Posted by Red Monkey at November 5, 2005 8:05 AM |
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