Not all of us here are on vacation. It’s been a tough week. My son finally relented to seeing a doctor Monday after not feeling well for several days – while working construction in the heat and humidity. He could teach the Irish a thing or two about stubbornness. He had a very bumpy ambulance ride that day to the hospital an hour away. Spontaneous pneumothorax: aka collapsed lung. He had ignored it as long as possible – long enough to have his chest cavity fill up with air and put pressure on his heart. He almost blowed himself up.
So I left the house in a hurry and followed the ambulance in to the ER. After emergency surgery to insert a chest tube he was placed in a room on the cardio-pulmonary floor. Inside this behemoth medical complex he was placed in the room directly across the hall from where my former husband died in April, the last place I was sitting vigil. Here’s hoping this bookends the summer of that routine. What is that colloquial idiom…”when it rains it pours?”
Like his father and stepfather before him, my son does not surrender to any perceived weakness. And anything other than super-human strength is weakness. There is no grey area in their world. Pain is for sissies.
It is easy for any of us to hear the stories of our loved ones suffering and think “how did they do it?” Most of our ancestors certainly had hard lives. I don’t know a woman who doesn’t wonder how her Mother did it. Whatever the “it” was: physical pain, emotional upheaval, the relentless stress of daily existence. Endurance. We see it everywhere, even in this enlightened age. We are impressed by it in others; we are oblivious to it in ourselves.
What is wrong with us?! Who decided this was the way? Is this the best we can do for ourselves? We live in the culture of “self care”…as if we know what that means. I doth protest.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, once I knew he was out of the woods and being well cared for by the professionals – once he wasn’t panicked and had some major pain meds in him – I returned home almost 30 hours later. I walked in the house and was reminded that I’d left fish out to thaw the previous morning. Oops. As my Mother would say, “are we having fun yet?”
Look. I’m 72. And a half. “No spring chicken,” as they say. I don’t need to be convinced that life is not easy or pain free. But I vehemently aver that life does not need to be this hard.
My son has no health insurance. He can’t afford it. He will now qualify for emergency Medicaid thankfully. He qualified for it in his 20’s after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. It covered all but about twenty thousand dollars of his medical bills. He paid that off over many years. Explain to me one more time why we don’t have free health care in this supposedly affluent country. Don’t tell me the long term stress of that didn’t take a debilitating toll on my son’s physical and mental health. I’ve just observed the effects of him not wanting to incur those expenses again. He tried to work through the discomfort.
But outrageous costs aside, this crisis could likely have been prevented. It’s that phenomena where the ten thousand dollar car engine almost blows up for lack of a forty dollar oil change. We all do it in our own way, stretch our limits just a little further for a little while longer. We Americans are suffering from an existential identity crisis: a shortage of self-awareness. Self awareness sounds silly and pretentious. We are arrogantly defensive about our right to be arrogantly defensive. Is this human nature? Don’t you believe it.
How many of our ailments do you suppose are stress-related? Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying people in other countries with free health care have no stress. I’m saying they have one less stressor. It’s kinda like I’m not saying people in other countries with strict gun laws don’t have as many mass shootings. Oh. Wait…
And while I’m on my soap box (I recently told a friend my soap box covers the entire northern hemisphere) I am also saying that free higher education leads a culture to be less defensive. Maybe a little more self aware…what might that be worth?