I haven’t spent much time here on the blog this summer. Vacations, family, kids in and out, badminton tournaments, long walks, and a new baby (a beautiful black-haired girl came into our lives a week ago thanks to my son and his lovely wife)–all of these hot-weather joys have quieted my yearning for expression. Instead I’ve been basking.
I’ve even tried to eschew the news and haven’t done a bad job. But this damn healthcare business won’t stop. The people whose healthcare won’t change are determined to make the American people pay for the hollow promises they’ve spent the last seven years making. Their brazen disregard for the elderly, the sick, the unemployed is mind-boggling. In fact, it’s so mind-boggling lots of folks are immune to it.
I can’t tell you how many conversations I have had with folks about healthcare that ended with someone saying with cynical shrug of shoulders, “It won’t happen.”
I guess I’m not that cynical. I believe that they will, if they can, take healthcare coverage away from the most vulnerable among us. And we are all vulnerable. High blood pressure, heart disease, anxiety, pregnancy, diabetes, cancer–if we don’t think we have pre-existing conditions, we are sadly and dangerously mistaken.
My daughter has Type 1 Diabetes. My father has life-long heart disease. My sister has a thyroid condition. I had an eating disorder when I was a kid. It’s time we took the legislators seriously. They are out for our healthcare.
Call your senators people. Call them now. Call them repeatedly. We must keep up the pressure.
63 years ago, an 11-year old boy who loved baseball sat right next to his mother while a kindly old pediatrician explained to him–you have a hole in your heart. This meant for that young boy, no baseball, no track, no basketball.
I imagine this appointment broke that little guy’s heart, and his mother’s too. They didn’t have a lot of resources, and whatever disappointments they were handed, they took chin first. I have a picture of them in my mind, sun filtering through a high dusty window–dust motes flickering in the air. There were no tears.
Not quite 20 years later, my dad had open-heart surgery at The Cleveland Clinic to repair that hole in his heart. He had a scar that began at his belly button and traveled up almost to his collar bones. My mom remembers seeing him for the first time post-surgery, the breathing tube…
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The 49th Year 