tired"You look tired."
"You should take some time, you know. Some time to rest."
"You should sleep more."
"You have to take care of yourself."
At the end of the day, I do look tired. Why shouldn't I look tired? I am, after all, working two essentially full-time jobs: I get up at 5am every day to travel from my suburban home into San Francisco, where I put in an eight-hour day before repeating the commute in reverse, and spending the evening writing, editing, and trying to stay on top of my frankly horrifying inbox. When all my must-do items are checked off the list, I collapse on the couch with my cats, and watch mindless television to power down my brain. And then the next day, I do it all over again. On the weekends, I either write like my shoes are on fire, or go to conventions, where I have a lovely time, as long as I don't think too hard about how much catching up I'm going to have to do later.
Why do I do this? Why am I working two jobs, with a massive commute in the middle? It's not because I particularly need the money. I know how to make a pound of hamburger last for a week; it's not pretty, but I can do it. I may like to buy books and toys when the cash is coming in, but I do pretty well with amusing myself on what I have then the cash isn't there. So what's the big deal here?
The big deal is medical insurance. The big deal is what can happen to you when you don't have it. The big deal is that not everyone has friends who can put together an anthology of massively awesome authors to save them from bankruptcy* when they get sick, as people have a natural tendency to do.
Melissa Mia Hall didn't have the same option. She died last week of a treatable medical condition, because she couldn't afford to go to the doctor. She died alone in the night, of something modern medical technology could easily have fixed. And yes, they would have treated her if she'd gone to the emergency room, but she didn't go, because she knew—as the uninsured always learn, as I learned, when I didn't have insurance—that it would be expensive, and she couldn't afford to risk losing everything.
My mother doesn't have medical insurance. Neither does my youngest sister. I work two jobs because I need to have medical insurance, and because I live in honest fear of the day Rachel calls to tell me that Mom was having pain and didn't say anything, because she knew it would be expensive. And if that sounds overly dramatic, well. Take a look at either of the examples listed above. One woman who sought medical care and would have lost everything without her friends stepping in; one woman who chose to die rather than gamble with the loss of everything she'd worked for.
And that's why I look tired, and why I wish people would stop telling me how tired I look. I know how tired I look. I just don't see where I have any other choice.
(*If you missed this: Ravens in the Library was an anthology project organized to pay the medical bills of SJ "Sooj" Tucker when she got hit out of the blue by an illness that required serious hospital care. You can see my original post on the matter here. Without that book, Sooj would have been in a lot of financial trouble. I think that book saved her life as lived, even as the hospital saved her life as living.)
February 1 2011, 16:34:02 UTC 6 years ago
I am much better now, and thankfully although thanks to my husband's current job I now have excellent medical insurance (which is no small part of the reason he's working this job rather than freelancing as a copy and television writer--something he could do successfully if he devoted himself full time to it; my husband is good and experienced in that field and if you watch a Viacom network, you've probably seen something he worked on in some part) that covers both the medication that keeps me alive and my doctor's visits, I didn't have health insurance for nearly six years through no fault of my own. I was doing EVERYTHING they said you were supposed to do: I was working nearly full time, I was putting myself through college because my parents couldn't afford to send me (or to insure me) but neither my job nor my undergraduate school offered health insurance. My undergrad school offered it ONLY to foriegn students. I was literawlly at one point on my hands and knees begging the president of the college to let us domestic students buy in.
He brushed me off. "Nobody will want to do it." he said. "And I can't make an exception just for you. Go the the ER if you get sick."
(he occasionally wonders why I won't participate in any of their fund-raising or promotional materials; he's dense, I guess)
I don't think I'd have had to get as sick as I did if they had, and I lived in fear that I would get something serious, like bronchitis, or that my appendix would go, and that would be all she wrote: I'd either be dead or buried up to my eyeballs in medical debt, and there would go college, only I'd already be up to my neck in college debt and I wouldn't even have a degree to show for it.
That this didn't happen to me was, quite honestly, pure dumb luck. I know other people it happened to.
You know what's sad? It's such a treatable condition and synthroid is cheap, cheap, cheap, but without insurance I was so afraid to go the doctor (or the ER), I would never have gotten it checked until I was extremely ill.
And even when I had health insurance I STILL got dropped (retroactively, even, making the thyroid problem that had NEVER had a coverage gap a "pre-existing condition" and impossible to ensure until my husband took a job with a health plan!) by one insurer last year because I had an echo-cardiogram to confirm that a heart murmur I'd developed was innocent (it was, they still dropped me, and my attempts to fight the dropping proved futile: the state kept telling me that the health insurance company assured them my coverage loss was "within internal policy" because the company told them it was. God I wish I was making that up, but I'm not: they accepted that it wasn't pretextual, even though I had access to information suggesting it was, because the company told them it wasn't.)
I hate our health insurance industry. I hate, hate, hate, hate them, and I don't say that lightly, and it makes me furious that I have relatively little choice but to buy into their system.
And it makes me more angry the only first world country that's so eager to let the poor die, and I have a WHOLE other rant on that, but I'll save it. I've talked long enough.
February 4 2011, 19:40:14 UTC 6 years ago