Well what do you know? I’m really feeling better today. The mild fever is gone, the headache is gone, and I have been blowing crud out of my nose and hacking up nasty stuff all morning. It was definitely a sinus infection. I felt it coming on, and I knew it was going to happen. Gosh golly gee whiz, if I had access to affordable health care, I could have gone to a doctor last week when I knew what was up, gotten some antibiotics, and head it off at the pass. But no affordable health care for me, so I had to spend almost two weeks feeling like crap, a few days feeling like I was dying, and now I’ll be another week feeling weak and crappy as my body heals itself completely. And hopefully I won’t catch anything in the meantime or have any other problems, because my immune system is trashed.

That’s health care in America for the working class. We aren’t terribly poor. We have a house, utilities, cable TV, internet, food. We usually don’t want for the money to pay for these things, but money is always tight. Sure, I could have spent a hundred bucks or more to go to a doctor, but we didn’t have a hundred bucks to spend to get a $15 prescription for generic antibiotics, and if I spent that money on that, well some other bill wouldn’t get paid … and that leads to a cascade effect of things not getting paid. We go through that from time to time, and it is really hell (and stressful).

As I read discussions about the health care system and reform at places like Metafilter and such, I am continually amazed at how many seemingly reasonable people can’t see beyond their “the system works for me” attitude. Sure, it works for you when you are 25 and in prime health. My system of not being able to afford health insurance or doctor’s visits worked perfectly well for me at 25 years old too. At 44? Not so much.

I often feel ill. I’m in the throws of the change of life, and I write most of my complaints off as being a side-effect of my hormonal system being out of whack right now. But how would I know? I haven’t seen an actual doctor in at least 15 years. I haven’t had an actual thorough checkup since I went away to college in 1983. I can count the number of times I have been to a doctor for any reason on my fingers. I don’t even have to use any of my toes. Most of those times were in college when I had access to the university clinic where it was cheap and readily available^†.

There could be something killing me right now, and I wouldn’t have a clue … and I’d just be writing it off as being a middle-aged woman and something that will pass in time. For that matter, it would be nice to get some medical help dealing with the side-effects of my body going through changes so I could tell if something else is wrong, but I can’t afford that either. All my older female relatives went through menopause without any medical help. They just got up each morning and pushed through the day, no matter how awful they felt, and did the best they could. So that’s what I do too.

But many of these women had other things going on they didn’t know about, things they wrote off as being the side-effects of a woman growing older … things that eventually killed them and were found far too late. I try not to think about that too much, but it does cross my mind from time to time, mostly when I am lying in bed too sick to even make myself a sandwich for lunch. I just get up in the morning and get through the day the best I can and hope I am luckier than my ancestors were. Maybe I am. Maybe not. Only time will tell.

So I am happy for the people who are young and/or healthy and think the system and their insurance works fine for them. I’m happy for the people who can break bones in their toes and go see a doctor to get x-rays and painkillers. I’m happy for the people who don’t have to lie in bed feeling like they are dying rather than go get a prescription for antibiotics. Good for them! But I am not even a worse case scenario. We aren’t terribly poor. If something came along and bit me in the ass and it seemed really serious, we’d work out some way to pay for what I needed, and so long as it wasn’t really huge (like cancer or diabetes or something like that), it would just mean eating Hamburger Helper and rice and beans instead of healthier foods and having to juggle bills to make sure the utilities didn’t get disconnected. We’d struggle through somehow.

What about the vast numbers of people below me on the economic scale? The class Lin has managed to pull us slightly up out of? They have even less of a chance than I do, and they completely have to count on luck to stay healthy. For them, it isn’t “we’ll have to juggle some bills, eat less healthy foods, and it will be tight if I go to the doctor.” For them, it’s “if I go to the doctor, the electricity will get shut off, and I won’t have any food.” I know how bad the situation is for myself, and I know how awful it is for them, because that’s where I came from. It makes me sad that anyone should ever have to not see a doctor when they need to, and I wish more people would open their eyes, look around, and see that the health care system isn’t really working so great for them either … before they get sick and find out just how screwed even they are.

But yeah, I’m feeling better today. It’s a good thing, because had I felt as badly again today as I did yesterday, I would have had to start considering going to see a doctor, and we just don’t have the cash for that at the moment.

1. † And I’ve been to an emergency room once, where I was seriously misdiagnosed. My friends carried me in (against my will, because OMG the bill) after a week of me lying in bed unable to breath without extreme pain. Bless them, they ignored me insisting I could get over whatever it was myself. After looking me over and poking at me for a few minutes and checking my urine, the precious doctor announced I had gastritis and sent me home with suppositories and some antibiotics. I took the antibiotics and didn’t bother with the suppositories. Even I knew it wasn’t my gut causing the problem. Two days later I felt a bit better and went to the university clinic where the doctor freaked out after checking everything. Had it not been for the antibiotics doing some good, I could have laid in that bed stuffing drugs up my ass and died from pneumonia and pleurisy. This incident is, in fact, the point where I started learning as much as I could about health and how the body works and stopped trusting doctors to know much of anything. [↩]