Can you imagine having to storm the ER running, carrying a severely-ill child in your arms, having not a shred of health insurance, hoping against hope some doctor, any doctor will break the rules and help…
You pray, it’s a scream prayer, one only you can hear in your mind…
God please please let a doctor have mercy on us, please God let me smoke past the desk people, make us invisible, right turn, right turn, floor is slippery, can’t slow down, please please dear God, my child, my child, the gatekeepers yell stop, we cant stop, someone help us, please please God don’t let my child die, please God, don’t let my child die, left turn, left turn, floor slippery, cant slow down, security guards, please please dear God let them be family men, please God let me look worthy, let us pass, let us pass, please please someone help us, please I beg you, someone, anyone, take pity, help my child, help me, help my child…
If you’ve ever driven or rushed a child into the hospital, you know at least part of that horrible prayer by heart. But how can a parent ever get help for their ill child when they have no money to pay? I only know you do it in full-metal-jacket desperation, willing to kill if necessary in order to get the aid your child needs to live.
I’ve been there. So has my youngest daughter. That was us storming the ER. More than 35 years ago.
My little one, two years old, trouble breathing. Suddenly her little chest pumping up and down trying to suck air, her little face turning pale gray. She was fainting so sweetly without complaint, a smile on her face, tore my heart out, she was innocent, innocent of everything… and us with no health insurance, minimum wage job, $2.50 an hour before taxes, food stamps… I was wild, wild with terror
…. and I insanely had run into the street with my ill daughter in my arms, hailing a cab which careened us to the inner city ER a mile away… a drive I could not pay for.
As I ran through the hospital halls with my daughter, my mind went split-screen; fearing the police, fearing being stopped… and seeing the driver out on the tarmac with engine running, waiting to be paid… I remember the clanging thought, Which twenty strangers could I beg for money for my cabbie… and still, every mother cell in my body was crying, Please, please help my child, arrest me, kill me, but help my child.
Today, now many years later, with daughter safe and grown with husband and children of her own, I was wondering, the kind of situation we used to be in, was it this kind of parent that President Bush was wanting to target and give help to with his own version of the SCHIP program?
The parent who is young or naive, who doesn’t have education enough yet to know the systems and how they work, who hasn’t yet figured out how to get more education, pull down a better job and manage to put their children first…all at the same time?… who is without parents and grandparents as safety nets?
Is President Bush wanting to shelter the parent who has made some excellent choices thus far in life, but some badly-informed ones too, ones that have led to losing so much while trying so hard?
Is he wanting to help those who are using all their bones and every last scrap of blood to try to help themselves, pull themselves up, who did not, do not, have the luxury of deciding’ this job, not that job,’ ‘this house not that house’… but rather, ‘please, just give me any job! Any place that has a furnace that works. Water that is not rust red. A toilet that does not back up’?
Is his idea of the SCHIP program to help the children of the parent who has been ill or who has a chronic and serious disease, a family who is ‘so far down, ‘down’ looks like ‘up’ to them,’ no matter what age the parent might be?
Is the rumor of now perhaps adding an extra % of money to such a governmental program year by year, about helping the children of the ‘chin-to-knees in hard waters, but rowing with all you’ve got,’ poor of the land?
35 years ago, there was no telephone to call an ambulance. No twelve dollars a month plus taxes to pay that luxury. 35 years ago there was no neighbor in the place we lived who had a car to take us to the hospital.
35 years ago, poor people and health care available to them in the USA, was like living in the 16th century territories. You were on your own with whatever folk cures and herbs you knew to be helpful, and little else
35 years ago, I’d already moved from one southwestern city to another to find better work. I then moved from one state to a larger state hoping that would provide more work opportunities. I’m in no way complaining.
Just telling it like it was. And too often still is, for many of the poor who are like the last of the Joad family, trying to keep the family together and slugging their way cross-country, their greatest resource, often only each other, and the life force inherent.
35 years ago, if you were poor, you had to both work your rear off at everything available to you, and to beg. Literally beg. To someone. For something. For grace. For time. For other elemental things. If there were government programs to help, they were not advertised to those most in need. No newspaper, no television, no women’s or family magazine wrote about resources that might be eked-out for or by the poor.
Meanwhile, 35 years ago, though working at every job they could land, the poor often fell behind at the bone level; on rent, food, heat, light, bus. Honestly? Back then, I could write our budget on a postage stamp. There were no line item funds possible for luxuries: doctors, dentist, prescription medicines.
Is it this group, this presently huge group of the poor in the USA, that President Bush was holding out to help? The ones who aren’t living a few miles inland from the edge with resources albeit worried about the future, but who live right on the edge with no resources, or else over the edge already.
35 years ago, time went on, and within several years of taking every kind of work I could get with a high school education and a small child, I was in proud possession of a broken down Pinto with its back window that kept falling out despite the artful duct tape goo-ing it together; I had three minimum wage jobs instead of just one, jobs I could take my child with me on… delivering Multilist books, baking at a bakery in the middle of the night, washing other people’s clothes.
I don’t want to compare our circumstances to anyone else’s circumstances here in 2007. And in no way am I making a plaint about our times long ago. We did what we had to do. And plenty of people who were flat broke and out on the salt flats alone did exactly the same. Legions of us. And I am not saying, ‘Going without was good enough for us, so it should be good enough for you.’ I wouldn’t wish those desperate times on anyone.
And, I absolutely don’t want to be an arbiter of what child ought or ought not receive medical aid, for in a right world, they all ought… by hook or by crook, by pre-planning, by selling your last widget to buy bread, by aid governmental and church-based, extended family, neighbors… however it is that by bundling all resources, children can be helped… that’d be a perfect day in the neighborhood.
And for certain no child, such as the Frost child, or any other, ought be dragged through the mud for saying their piece. The issues are for the adults to solve.
I just would like to ask the question again… was the intent of a veto of SCHIP in order to hold out for giving health care to those who have the least resources, that is, for the truly poor?
CODA
35 years ago. My child was having an asthma attack. She’d never had one before. And she never had another. It may have been brought on by a dilapidated place we lived in at the time. At the ER, once past the screeching gatekeepers who did call security… ironically the security guards ran beside me like wing-men helping to bring my child to the inner wards…
my daughter was treated immediately by a man doctor and a woman doctor. Once my little one was breathing easy again, the male doctor handed me papers to fill out to pay at the front desk. This sent lightning bolts of fear though my arms and legs…
It’s one of those most awful times when you are bellowing silently inside your head, ‘don’t cry, don’t cry, I really mean it, don’t cry, don’t,’ but I swear the body can leak all by itself no matter what muscles you pull inward as hard as you can. After I’d filled the papers out best I could, the man doctor suddenly threw the papers into the ‘sharps’ disposal, and said ‘Bill paid. A mother’s tears are money today.’
Who are you dear doctor from long ago? I do not know. There’d been no introductions. Since that time I have only ever thought of those two souls as ‘blessed man doctor and blessed woman doctor’ who saved my child. One of the medicines they’d brought to us surely was their mercy.
And the cab driver waiting outside the ER to be paid? That’s a longer story for another time. A sad, funny, horrible story with a good outcome.
Even so, that day, the outcome for a crazed mother and an alarmingly ill child, was a good one. There were other days, weeks, months, years though, with other challenges, some of them also health issues.. the outcomes of those were poor and sometimes disastrous, for no help and no angels were near at hand.
But, that was true for all of us who lived down at that level while trying to raise ourselves up. We learned, even the merciful goodness set into each person at birth, was not always reliable.
Yet for many of us, we just kept going. Like some say, and I like the saying a lot, ‘Too stupid to stop.’ An angelic blessing of its very own kind.