Auntie Bek went to the hospital some time early this morning. Abdominal pangs that felt like stabbing sensations. By late morning she was in an ambulance being transferred downtown so that she could be in surgery at 11:00. She emerged, shortly thereafter, groggy and missing an appendix. C'est la vie.
This got me thinking as I was driving to Costco with Little P...it was almost time for Auntie Bek (my sister Rebekah, for those of you just tuning in) to endure her first incision...and I was thinking, Thank God it's a routine surgery. I mean, these days getting your appendix removed is like a teeth cleaning (with a one-week recovery time). But there was a time it was not. And had we lived some years ago (100 perhaps? 80?), I would be down one sister in a few days, either because her appendix would rupture and they would never have known how to avoid it, or because the surgery would have been likely to give her a lethal infection.
This was something for me to ponder because I'm kind of a survival of the fittest girl. It's not that I don't have compassion (I've been called a bleeding heart on a fair number of occasions, and many a conservative friend thinks I'm nuts), it's just that I don't think we as humans deserve much. I think, and I'm working this out in my head still, but I think we really only deserve not to be harassed/tortured/abused/murdered/raped/beaten by other people. Beyond that, I don't know that we "deserve" anything. Even advanced medical procedures simply because they exist.
We have this idea, in our society, that if a thing exists, we have a right to it. If it makes our life more convenient or comfortable, well, doesn't that fall under our Constitutional right to pursue happiness? This entitlement really skews our approach to the real things of life. Base level...whether you are God-revering, God-fearing, or God-smearing, we live and we die. We are mammals. We are subject to the same physical laws as the rest of the world. We are mortal and there's nothing we can do about it.
Last week I read
this article in the New York Times about illegal immigrants who had benefitted from a clinic that was able to treat their kidney problems with dialysis due to taxpayer monies and additional funding raised from philanthropists. It was a wonderful blessing to these families who were not paying a penny. The clinic absorbed multi-million dollar losses and finally had to close down. In the closing, however, they still somehow managed to pay for several months of treatments at other facilities for their former clients.
Now some of these people have used up their treatments and not found another form of care, some have gone back to Mexico or wherever and are paying out of their savings accounts, and all are being represented by some lawyers who have tried to sue this clinic for closing down. ?!!
While I am terribly confused how someone in a country illegally has the "right" to free healthcare enough to sue a
broke hospital when it can no longer provide said free healthcare, that is not the point. I was startled when one of the people interviewed griped about having to dip into her savings account to pay for treatments in Mexico. I am amazed at this perspective because I have known families who have had to fundraise in order to pay for their child's leukemia treatments, for their kid's long-term hospital visit. My friend's mother was denied insurance based on her previous condition - breast cancer. I know people who have started their own HSAs (Health Savings Accounts) to cover routine medical expenses. I have lived in Africa in regions where the nearest clinic (a non-air-conditioned, concrete block building with six multi-bed rooms that provided iodine as one of the best things they'd got) is eight miles away and folks can only access it by foot or by the occasional bus, or perhaps they could borrow a neighbor's donkey cart or something.
While in Zimbabwe, I opened the door of my hut to one of my students whose thumb was swollen to the size of her hand from a deep, inflamed, pus-filled wound incurred by an accident with a plough some days hence. I was giving her $25 so that she could go to the clinic and finally get it fixed before gangrene set in and took her arm or her life. That $25? That was Zim currency. About $3 in U.S. terms.
Now tell me, really? We all "deserve" everything we want (medically or otherwise) just because we live in America?
It is tragic, to be sure, that a 14-year-old girl who is part of her family's livelihood could lose an arm or life over something like 40 stitches and a dose of iodine. Terribly tragic. And for a moment in time I thought that if I had only gone to Zimbabwe for three years in order to save Mildred's life with $3, well, that was precious to me.
But we are animals. Animals with a soul, as I believe. But just animals if you're not the God-type. Our lives have beauty, dignity, worth, meaning and purpose imbued by God, but without Him, we're living, breathing dirt. And to dust we shall return. No one can deny that.
So our obsession with living life as the most comfortable, beautiful, whole, intelligent, happy, wealthy people? Really, really ironic.
I am not trying to make sense, so please, no one attack me here. I am not building a case or an argument or anything. Just sharing the stuff I started pondering as a result of my sister's minor surgery.
So back to A.B. I thought, in awe, of what our family would look like if it were a hundred years ago. We would probably be minus my sister by the end of the week, so there would be two sisters and one brother. And this sister, me, couldn't have kids (at least, as it so appears thus far in my life). I don't even know what adoption looked like back then - probably we would have taken in some orphans or something. The P-Pod, circa 1903. Weird, huh.
I am so grateful for modern science and the fact that an appendectomy is now a safe, out-patient surgery. A.B. was home in bed by the end of the day, and she'll be absent from work for the following week. We will be keeping her husband fed in the mean time, and Little P will no doubt be visiting her tomorrow.
