It may be as early as the middle of next week that S. is finally discharged from the hospital and able to come home. It’s been a long and hard road since our operation on 22 December last year and she has stayed in the hospital for the better part of two months… I can’t deny it’s been hard and tiring for the both of us, for me to see her so ill and weak, for her to be the that week, to actually wake up after the first crisis had finally passed and realise that she couldn’t remember anything that had happened since the day before the operation. Worse, like DC Comics in the past few years, she couldn’t stick to one crisis and actually had to go back to the hospital after she was discharged too soon. What she at first thought was some stomach or bowel problems got worse and worse, we went to the emergency department of the hospital, she was taken in again and the next day they had to do an emergency operation, re-opening the wound to drain more than a litre of infected fluid from around the kidney. It was this that had caused the stomach upsets, literally compressing her guts. Awful, awful, stress filled days and sleepless nights, but there was one worry we never had.
Whether we could afford to pay for all this. We will never get the bill for this, never will have to worry whether this emergency operation or the cost of S.’s lifelong immunosuppressant drugs treatment would bankrupt us, never even will have to worry whether it will put our insurance costs up or whether the costs of the transplant will be balanced out by the savings in not having to have dialysis anymore (In case you’re wondering, the NHS thinks the cost of a transplant is only slightly more than half the cost of a year’s worth of dialysis). Never an issue, never even something that entered my head to worry about, though S., who has spent a couple of years in the US, did every now and again. Even associated costs, like the transport to and from the hospital for the trice-weekly dialysis sessions, were never something we had to pay.
Which is an experience that people in most of the richer countries in the world will recognise, and something most citizens and governments in less rich countries want to emulate. Everywhere in the world it is taken for granted that free or cheap healthcare is a Good Thing — except it seems in the US. What everywhere else is seen as a liberation, is sold in the US as slavery, with the very real possibility of either being bankrupted by medical costs or dying because you can’t afford treatment presented as freedom of choice! You have people like Matt Welch opposing public healthcare while knowing it’s superior to the American “health care” system simply because it would put their taxes up sand they’re rich enough to buy what they need and screw everybody else. How shit hasn’t been burned down yet I’ll never know…