Turning 33 is not exactly a milestone for most people. 18, 21, 30, 40... not 33.
For me, though, when I hit 33 five days ago, it was a depressing feeling with a sadness that's been bottled up for a while.
Watching Sicko on the couch today helped magnify that.
It was 1989 when it happened. My mother was a grand mal epileptic. She had seizures most of her life, but had been able to keep them under control for a few years. We were back on our own though for a couple of years - my mother, my sister, and me - and things were not going well.
She would try to work, lose her health insurance, cut back on pills, have a seizure, lose a job, and go back on welfare. Try to get off, try to better us, have a seizure, and start all over again.
The pill games caught up with Mom. On May 8, 1989, at around 2:00 AM, she woke up to go to the bathroom. She should have known better - whenever she woke up late like that, a seizure was coming. I always knew that. Somehow, she never did. She closed the bathroom door, sat on the toilet, and had a seizure.
My sister came to get me, and I ran to the bathroom, and the door was blocked. After a seizure, she would fall asleep, wherever she was, so we presumed that was what it was, and we went back to bed.
7:00 AM, she was still not up. The bathroom still blocked. I was 14 at the time, so breaking down the bathroom door with my scrawny frame was not the easiest, but I broke open the top of it and climbed in.
The door was blocked by Mom. Dead. Her skull fractured by hitting the metal door frame when she fell forward when she had her seizure. It was one week before her 33rd birthday.
Her seizure killed her. The state was an accessory.
Now, I'm 33, and the painful realization that I outlived my mother loomed over much of my thoughts over the past week. Watching Sicko today, which I have meant to do for a while now and just had it lying around, has tearfully reminded me of why she's dead, and why we are no better off than we were then.
When I turned 17, my doctor said that the curvature in my spike that was supposed to go away as I got older was instead getting worse, and at a dramatic rate. The orthopedic surgeon told me my options were surgery or death by 40, as my ribs were shifting to counteract the curve in my spine, and the shifting was contracting on my chest, making my lungs work harder and harder and harder. I was going to be attending school out of state that fall though, so I would need to have the surgery on winter break. When we closed in on the break, however, a scheduling issue arose, and it looked like my surgery might not be possible before my 18th birthday, and that would have had me removed from the insurance plan I was under after Mom's death that my grandmother signed us up for, and I would have been faced with not being able to have a surgery that my life depended on. Fortunately, Children's Hospital was willing to get creative with the paperwork, but we faced a situation where a matter of days was the difference on a procedure that I would need to live in a modicum of comfort or die young. All because our medical system is a joke.
We've had almost 20 years since my mother's death to fix a health system that kills. We have had a chance to save people. Too often, we have chosen to not do so. Why have I spent more Christmases without my mother than with her? Because her $100 a month or so pills would have bankrupted the state? Because greed is more important than lives?
Why is Nataline Sarkisyan dead? Why are millions of Americans in the same boat? Why do we keep settling? Why do we keep hearing lies on television about how horrible medicine is in Canada or France or Britain, and yet the surveys that show how we are near the bottom of Western states in comfort of living and life expectancy are almost never mentioned?
This Christmas, I only want one gift. I want to know that no other kid will spend more Christmases without their mother because of death by spreadsheet.
Now, I'm going to have some white chocolate. Mom got me to love the stuff. It's addicting.