The Final Countdown

 Today is Monday. Carolyn did not get results today and her doctor is out of office until Jan. 6. We're getting ready for a revolution, at this point.

Megan, who texted me a week ago with the ALS news, is now ghosting me. Carolyn said to give her space and time and she can have all the space and time she needs. It's just that I have limited time since I get on a plane to Japan this Friday.

I'M GOING TO JAPAN IN LESS THAN A WEEK!!

This is crazy: I'm so excited to see Mollie and finally experience her world. We have so many plans and I get to meet her friends and see her old boss (I met his partner and was smitten). We have a few special plans made and I'm just anxious to finally go.

So during the time I am gone, I'm not planning to do anything but enjoy my child and have fun. Let the world burn, I'm eating ramen. 

Holding...

 So Carolyn had her PET scan a month ago. She'd had a CT scan which showed stuff in her lungs that shouldn't be there. So a PET Scan is to determine if it's cancer.

After the scan, she waited. Someone should surely call her with results. Nobody called. Finally, (after much nagging), Carolyn called the imaging center and asked if the report was sent to her doctor. It was not. It was sent to a doctor she had seen once and had no further appointments with.

"Please send it to my doctor, the one who ordered the scan."

And the response: we'll snail mail it because I don't have your doctor's fax number. (Seriously? One phone call will take care of that.)

More nagging and Carolyn finally makes an appointment with her doctor. She tells them it's to get the PET Scan results. Finally she goes to her appointment and nobody has bothered to get the results. As Carolyn is sitting in the office, nothing happens.

This was on Friday. 11am. So the doctor tells Carolyn to go home and she will call that afternoon with the results.

No phone call.

Now it's the weekend and the week of Christmas. Carolyn doesn't know if she has lung cancer. Nobody in her doctor's office is treating this as if it matters.

Just another way that healthcare in the US fails us.

Megan

Today during therapy, while discussing the choice to withdraw from political awareness for awhile and try to concentrate on joy, I got a text message. After therapy I opened it to find the message was from Megan, a friend I had lost contact with in the last year or two telling me she's in hospice, dying from ALS. She's reaching out before she passes.

Carolyn gets the results from the PET Scan on Thursday. Hoping it isn't lung cancer.

I was holding it together. I really was. I leave for Japan at the end of next week and I just needed to make it and so of course, I got a mouth/tooth infection. Horrific post nasal drip. 

Did I mention the fire Thanksgiving night when the apartment directly below me had flames leaping from the window and I woke up to black smoke and sparks?

This is life. Life is what happens when you're making other plans. My plans were to try and stay out of survival mode and enjoy life. To do more than survive. To live in joy.

Existing is an act of rebellion. Joy is controversy. Carolyn's paintings are on the wall above the couch. Megan was with me when I found Murder. She helped me start on my healing journey.

This is disjointed and I apologize. I didn't cry. I ate an entire bag of potato chips while flipping through funny videos on You Tube. I took one of my carefully guarded narcotics because the mouth pain was unbearable (I'm on antibiotics). It was horrible.

Then I texted Mollie and I started to cry. Megan is only about 40 years old. She's neurospicy, carries a lot of childhood trauma. She had muscle pain. Our conversations were free flowing, lots of "me too!" moments. She's artistic and smart. She's too fucking young to die. 

I don't know how to do this. How do you say goodbye to someone who shouldn't be dying? How do you forgive yourself for not cherishing someone who deserved to be cherished?

How do we find joy in life when life keeps tearing at our souls? I really don't know how to do this. Survival isn't just rebellion. Sometimes it's a gift we did nothing to deserve.

A Shooter, A Dilemma, What is Morality?

 The death penalty should be abolished. Murder is a sin. Health insurance for profit should be abolished. Health insurance for profit is a sin.

So the CEO of United Healthcare was murdered as he was walking into a meeting where he was going to brag about the billions of dollars in profit that was made by denying people life saving care. Murder is a sin. The shooter committed a sin. The CEO and their board/shareholders committed a sin.

Blue Cross decided to limit the amount of anesthesia available to patients having surgery so they wouldn't have to cover the costs of life saving care. A Shooter killed the CEO of UHC. The BC CEO said "hey, we were just kidding. Have all the anesthesia you need."

Deny. Defend. Depose.

Online the conversation around the assassination is a general lauding of the shooter as a modern day Robin Hood. He's Batman with a gun. Except that the 8am meeting the CEO was going to still took place at 8am. His job was posted the very next day. People who deny life saving drugs aren't really going to give a shit over a man bleeding out in the streets. The internet is giddy but nothing has changed.

United Healthcare will not be changing its practices. Blue Cross will provide your surgical anesthesia but no doubt will raise the cost of cancer drugs and deny MRIs. The new Trump administration will find a way to gut Medicare and roll back the $35 insulin to the astronomical previous prices.

What did he accomplish? There were a few more Eat the Rich memes. People celebrated a bad man having a bad end. But all that really happened is that as a society we sink a little further down into the murkiness of the least common denominator. We become a little more unfeeling, a little less empathetic. The divide between us grows stronger.

Billionaires are societal scourges. They're in it for the money. Some give back but the Musks and Zuckerberg s and CEOs of billion dollar profit organizations; they are in it for themselves. But does that mean we should shoot them as a protest?

What did this accomplish? Because I enjoy the memes but I also worry that I don't give a shit that a bad man was killed in a bad way. I worry that as politeness becomes a thing of the past, as aggression and anger become louder and more actionable that we won't see a new French Revolution but rather the end of our society and the beginning of our end.