A quick snippet from my new pastime/hobby/full-time job navigating the USA's totally fucked-up excuse for healthcare:
It is midnight, and I am perusing eBay for used medical equipment. The problem isn't that I am poor and injured, nor is it that anyone is without insurance.
It's simply the reality that the bureaucratic hoops one must jump through to obtain certain things are convoluted and drawn-out, so even if you have a whip-smart detail-oriented impresario such as myself onside, it remains a tedious circus to just get what is needed when needs are complex.
So, here I am. Playing social worker, attempting to stitch together a patchwork of care that can leave the door open for increased mobility and decreased mortality.
Ask me if I am a doctor, and I affirm that I am not. I am an amateur nurse, an ad hoc advocate, a coordinator of care whose own physical needs fall to the wayside. I am not a professional.
I am thankful for all of the help I get, and yet I spend each day enraged that the entire system (if it can even be called that) remains dependent on the uncompensated labor of women such as myself, overstretched and under-resourced. It is a slow slog to pull together support in the best of times, and I don't dare anyone to withstand COVID in addition.
I need to go to sleep. I am tired, and tomorrow is another day of slowly mucking through, trying to push the picture on to a better scene.
We all deserve better than this. Needs go unmet, muddling through, and so much is lost trying to string together the basics in this hellscape of partial knowledge, burnout and disregard.
America, it doesn't have to be this way.
Dreaming of that mantra: May all beings be happy and free. Trying to contribute, and trying to keep my head up along the path, fumbling forward as I try to hold it all together.
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