Sen. Baucus, have you lost your mind? Do you seriously think I'm going to pass along your brand of so-called "health-care reform" (aka The High Co$t of Staying Alive) to my granddaughter Leyla? No. Hell, no. Fecketing fecking feck, no.
A couple weeks ago, I caught six-year-old Leyla in a spiffy bit of deception. She's not a fan of milk, so I immediately became suspicious toward the end of a chaotic family dinner when I noticed that her milk glass was gone but her dinner plate was still on the table. "Leyla, you didn't drink your milk," I said. She gave me that deer-in-the-headlights look and asked how I knew. I tapped my forefinger repeatedly against my forehead and said, "A little birdie told me."
She scrunched up her brows and cocked her head. "You know, Nana," she said tenderly, her hand solicitously resting on my arm, "if you take some pills, you won't hear those voices in your head anymore."
Last month after NN09, I traveled to the Midwest to visit Leyla and take her on a weeklong, 1600-mile whirlwind Family Visit Tour of Illinois, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Iowa. It may be the last time I see that much of my family. After a long struggle with some serious health issues, I've been diagnosed with a brain tumor that's sending out signals for the development of other tumors. I'm exhausted, I'm sick, and I'm not sure how much more of this I can do.
You may know much of my story, or the ways my story is so very similar to those of so many others in the United States. I'm this plump, middle-aged Nana who's raised Leyla because her mom and dad were both deployed in the wars. Leyla's father was deployed to Afghanistan for the first time before Leyla was born, and he was deployed four subsequent times.
Leyla's mother (my elder daughter) got her deployment orders five weeks after giving birth. My daughter was injured about four years ago, sustaining (among other things) a traumatic brain injury. She has received so far exactly $180 in veterans' benefits. After nine suicide attempts in the past couple of years, my daughter has disappeared. I don't know where she is. I don't know how she is. I haven't seen her or talked with her in more than two months. She doesn't want to be found anymore.
To keep things going, I've been working two full-time jobs. My first job offers health benefits, but because the economy has been so rickety the past few years, the benefits have dwindled and dwindled. So I work a second job in order to pay for the medical care not covered by the insurance from my first job. I work seven days a week and have been doing this for four years now.
As of this summer, Leyla now lives in Illinois with her father, who's finally home after more than 10 years in the U.S. military -- a military he wanted to be his career, except for the fact that they kept shipping him into battle zones every few months. "Ms. MsSpentyouth," he told me from Iraq last year, "every time I survive another tour, I'm just that much more qualified to go back out on another one. Leyla needs a dad. I can't do this anymore."
Of course, I miss Leyla at levels that are heartbreaking and unbearable and sometimes just tear the breath right out of my body, like someone's socked me right in the soul and ripped it out of me. I miss her so much. But she does need to be with her father, and he does need to be with her, and the two of them need a solid future that is not going to steal more from them than has already been taken.
Senator Baucus, you must be think that brain tumor has seriously impaired every last reasoning skill in my skull if you think I'm going to ask that brainy six-year-old girl -- a girl who has lost her mother to your votes and has lost five years of time with her father because of your votes and is losing her Nana because of your votes -- to face the prospect of ending up in the same situation I am.
You must be suffering the craziest-ass schizopsychotic disorder in the known and unknown universes if you think I'm going to share your slavish, brain-lite devotion to the voices in your head that have cooked up this scheme wherein I tell Leyla what you want me to tell her. She has given up enough for her country. Our whole family has done enough. We've done enough.
Take those pills, Sen. Baucus, and you will stop hearing those voices in your head. And then take back your bill and bring me a better one to hand to my granddaughter.