Peter is a close friend and a neighbor. He had worked around the globe as an engineer and was looking for work in my metro area. It was our usual habit to eat breakfast together on Sunday mornings. I had just handed him a cup of coffee and was headed back to the kitchen when my son yelled, "Mom! Peter is acting like Frankenstein!"
I turned to see Peter in the throes of a full-on grand mal seizure, lying on the sofa. His arms and legs locked poker-straight, his jaw rigid, and his eyes bulging wide open. He had frothy, blood-stained saliva coming out of his mouth as he struggled to breathe. After about two minutes of that, his body relaxed and went into what I could only describe as a death rattle.
Peter’s parents survived the war. His mother was from Hamburg Germany, living there as the Weimar hyperinflation made eating almost impossible, as the Nazis rose to power, and then fleeing after the firestorm. She told me flatly that the only thing left of their apartment block after the firestorm were the drain pipes sticking out of the ground. She was a smart cookie, with high hopes of immigrating to the United States. But she ended up in the UK as a nurse in the newly formed National Health Service.
Peter’s father was an unnaturally smart little boy, the son of a banker, living in Glasgow Scotland. Of course, he was the smartest kid on his block so he went to medical school. After a few tours of duty as a military doctor on the Continent during reconstruction, he got a job in the newly formed National Health Service.
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I knew that it was a seizure and that Peter could die on the sofa. After a moment of hesitation, I called 911. My hesitation was that Peter didn’t have a job, didn’t have any insurance, and didn’t have any assets to speak of. A trip to the hospital could push his already precarious situation into homelessness. Did I want to be responsible for initiating that? But death is always worse than homelessness, so I made the call.
Once in the hospital, his seizure cycles weren’t abating on their own, so they put him into a medically induced coma and wheeled him into the Intensive Care Unit. I visited every day and he was beginning to stabilize. They discovered that he had a small brain tumor in the frontal lobe, which accounted for the seizures.
On the third day, he called me to tell me to come and get him. Using slow slurred speech, he explained that they told him that he had to leave the ICU and the hospital now that the seizures had stopped. I raced to picked him up.
The man getting into my car was not a man who should have been checking out of the hospital. He had slurred speech, he was extremely sore and limping, and he had a very hard time following conversation. But he was stabilized, which I understood to mean not actively dying, so I drove him to my house and set him up in the guest room. He was in no condition to be alone.
I searched my friends and family (many of whom are medical professionals) for options here in the US. The short answer was that there were none.
With no other options, I called his parents in the UK. It was a difficult conversation. I explained that he had a quite treatable brain tumor, but with no insurance or assets, he could not be treated in the United States. They were confused and upset by this: Peter was an immigrant in good standing, a green card visa holder, and as a well-paid engineer he had contributed to the US system for more than 20 years. Surely there must be some mistake; I should check again.
I slowly explained our baroque system to them: our health insurance is all private, usually paid for by employers, and without it you are denied treatment. I explained that we couldn’t buy insurance at that point because the tumor is now a pre-existing condition, and even after successful treatment, he still wouldn’t be able to buy insurance. I explained the insurance companies’ profit motive and I explained the cost of medical care even with insurance to cover it.
Peter’s parents are kind, generous people. They have the warm patience of people who have survived hell on earth. They are founding members of the UK’s National Health Service, so they thought they knew how medicine in first world nations works. And they were not aware that the US system is so different. In a word, they were speechless.
So we arranged for flights back to the UK. In the time since, he has been successfully treated with surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, and the most recent scans turn up clean. He is a fully-functioning member of society again.
Now, when I hear my own father (!) parrot the talking points of the evils of NHS and "socialized medicine" I remind him of Peter. They were buddies, and Dad was able to see first-hand what happened. He was there the day that I drove Peter from the ICU to my guest bedroom. I don’t have to remind Dad that without NHS, Peter would have died here in the United States. He wants so badly to believe what he’s been told is evil, but he has seen it first-hand that our own system is severely lacking in fundamental ways.