I'm sick, sick with maybe something that is not supposed to be, but its growing in my midsection, and the nearest medical care for me is across two hundred fifty miles of Iowa roads. The nearest interstate ramp on this trip is eighty miles away, the one on the shortest path is over a hundred, and part of the state had winter storm conditions yesterday.
Whatever this is, it affects my judgment, steals away my ability to speak, and as I type this my hands are shaking a little bit, like those of a man twice my age. I think I'm OK to drive, but that is mostly academic, as I don't have any other care choices that wouldn't immediately bankrupt me.
There are many, many more just like me who have no access to care at all, and we need to do something about this.
The symptoms came together for me two weeks ago and I was in the local emergency room half an hour later, my head stuck into a CT scan machine, and pretty much unable to speak. My insurance ran out at the end of December and that little adventure cost me $1,500. Things began to be more clear after this - the nagging pain in my back that had been slowing me down since last June was more than just a troublesome disk, and the mental fog I've been under was more than just depression due to the pain and the loss of my engineering consulting business.
I knew who nyceve was because I've been on DailyKos for a couple of years under another ID. You might have even read a diary of mine - I've been rescued four times in the last eight weeks. I created this account specifically for a proper GBCW after she did a diary that mentioned my situation. I wasn't going to say anything beyond the words I'd left with a friend along with instructions to post them here in the event of my passing, but this is proving to be a good distraction while I'm waiting for a call back from the University Hospital system.
We're very lucky here in Iowa. If you're a resident and you've exhausted all other avenues of care you can show up at a DHS office with your social security card, a birth certificate, and they'll issue you an Iowa Care ID number within two days. This only works at the University of Iowa Hospital in the southeast corner of the state, which is a bit of a trial for me as I'm in the opposite corner, but I'm glad its available. Nyceve tells me that other states are not nearly so caring of their citizens.
I did have insurance up to the end of December, but it was definitely "junk insurance", which I carried in the event of a car crash or other acute problems. I'm in my early forties and I've accumulated the typical collection of health care issues for a man my age, which I've found easier to deal with through my own discipline than trying to coax any work out of our broken health care system. My finances were such that I just paid cash when I needed expert opinions, but this avenue is not available to most people in this country.
If you're reading this you might be moved to try to help me in some way, but that isn't why I'm posting, at least not in an individual sense. I want you to take this story and go use it in the efforts to change the whole thing so nobody here in the richest country in the world has to put up with a Kafkaesque health care system where you have to be beyond the point of saving before the safety net is brought out.
(UPDATE: A winter storm in the southeast has pretty much socked in that part of the state. I leave tomorrow morning for a 1:45 appointment and things have been getting a bit worse through the day, even with the application of the blood thinner they gave me. I am not liking this, not one little bit.)