I would light a cigar to celebrate the passage of health care reform. Except I have seen the last of cigars, probably. A cigar might kill me. That is something (my non-cigar-loving friends are fond of reminding me) you could probably have said all along. Now, however, it would be much quicker.
See, Monday before last, walking Buster the dog, I had a heart attack. It had been coming on, I can now see, for some weeks previous, though I had dismissed it as goodness knows what. I even bought some antacids, guessing (hoping, really) the pain I had in my chest and elbows and back under a load going uphill was the result of something I ate.
So, much as my heart (literally) might be in marking the occasion, there aren’t many practical ways left to do it. Too many things are suddenly off the table, things about which I might, even recently, have claimed were the kinds of things that a person shouldn’t give up in order to live longer because they were the kind of things that would make you want to live longer.
I still feel that way, in an abstract sense. Rather, in an abstract tense—the future perfect: I will have been glad anyway to have had that Macanudo out on the course, even if it were to have knocked the two years off my life that would have allowed me to reach 104.
But not even 60? That changes a whole dynamic. It is a crash course in pot odds and expected value. So even while I do not regret one extra drink or puff I might ever have taken, I am now wholly given over to careful behavior.
Good behavior will do me no good, however. And would have done me none. I have no risk factors to speak of. I exercise often (during the stress test the morning after, my doctor called out to the EKG readout, "Will you show me something? You’re in such good shape I can’t tell what’s wrong!"); don’t smoke (two cigars a year hardly counts), no family history, and the Dub household diet is Mediterranean to the point it needs no post–Event altering.
Even so, the arteries supplying my heart were between 70% and 95% clogged. ("More blocked than the Seahawks pass rush," said a smart-aleck nurse.)
I just got dealt a bad genetic hand. My body manufactures (in three shifts, with weekend overtime, apparently) lots of small LDL particles. This allows the wickedly efficient transport of high concentrations of cholesterol to my arteries. Nothing besides the three drug-eluting stents they put in me and the handful of daily pills I now take can do anything about that. And maybe pomegranate juice.
The trip to the emergency room, the stay there overnight, the subsequent monitoring and tests, the transfer to the cardiac ward and the angioplasty and implant of the stents all ran about $120,000 (the cardiologist’s estimate; the bills aren’t all in).
That’s just for the left side of my heart. We get to do it all again in three weeks for the right side.
I have insurance, through my wife’s employment, and it took care of these particular bills, thankfully. But I do not have a job. And at my age and in this economy am I unlikely to get one. The future did not look good as late as last week. If my wife were to lose her job, or retire, even, we would lose our coverage as members of a group and have to go on the individual market for health insurance.
What do you guess the odds would be before this week that anyone would touch me with a very long pole? Especially when good behavior has less to do with how I’m doing than good luck?
At some point, I would likely face the choice: Bankruptcy or care. Oh, sure, with luck, maybe not for a long time. But sooner or later, something would sneak up on me, heart related or not, and because I now am the proud owner of the Grandaddy of all Pre-existing Conditions, I would be up the creek. With no paddle. In a wire canoe.
So hurray! Thank you, Mr. President, you Senators, and Congresspersons. Thank you even more, you who fanned the sparks of this long smoldering ember of this humane idea until it could flame out once more.
You have allowed what years remain to me to be free of a horrible awareness that my life would eventually and inevitably impoverish the lives of those I love.