I've had something happen this week that once again underscored for me the importance of making sure that everyone has access to medical care. This past Monday around noon I came down with a case of the sniffles. It didn't seem too serious at first, but over the course of the afternoon the runny nose got worse.
I have had allergies before, though not for some years, and this seemed like such an episode. It is late spring/early summer and I'd just been noticing some new flowers, particularly the verbenas, in bloom around the house. The drip from the nose was very thin and watery and became constant, except when being interrupted by sneezing. Then my left eyelid got swollen and puffy and began to water incessantly too. I finally took some antihistamine and went to bed.
I suffered all day Tuesday, using one tissue after another all day. I kept taking antihistamines but my condition persisted. It seemed peculiar that only the left nostril and eye were affected. The right side side, to my relief, was still clear so I could breathe out of one side of my nose and see out of at least one eye.
The body's mechanisms and defenses are remarkable. Like Tuesday morning, when I woke up Wednesday at first the symptoms were much improved. Before long, though, they were back at full strength. It's as though the body makes a maximum effort to keep the air passages open so it can try to renew itself in sleep, and then, exhausted, is once again overwhelmed. By mid morning I was miserable. I resolved to go to the doctor, hoping for perhaps a stronger, prescription antihistamine that could overcome my body's allergic reaction to whatever pollens were bedeviling it.
Instead, I was surprised when he looked into my left ear and exclaimed, "My gosh, it's sure red in there!" The same was true when he peered up my left nostril. It seemed I didn't have just an allergy going on. A full-blown infection of the ear, nose and sinus was underway. He prescribed a five-day antibiotic treatment of Azithromycin (often called the Z-pack) and a nasal spray to dry things up. With these in hand, I was already considerably better by bedtime Wednesday and felt definitely on the mend by Thursday. Ah, the wonders of modern medicine!
Fortunately, I'm someone with good employer-provided medical coverage. It doesn't cost me much to see the doctor or get prescriptions. Yet I still waited two days, both because I incorrectly self-diagnosed what was wrong and because I therefore didn't want to waste even an insurance company's money on something that probably couldn't be remedied except by time.
What would I have done if I'd had no insurance at all? Well, I can afford to pay, so I might have waited another day trying to save the $90 doctor visit and $150 prescription cost. What if I were really hurting for money, like most of the community college students I teach? Well then, I can imagine waiting a long time, hoping it would go away of its own accord. $240 is a couple of weeks pay for some of them, or their share of a month's rent. They would just suffer and get worse for another several days or a week. Maybe an infection like mine left untreated for 10 days could cost someone an eye. And if it were something more dangerous, they might well wait until it was too late and even die. It happens. That's why Harvard Medical School estimated 45,000 Americans die every year because they have no health insurance.
That's also why it's such a moral imperative to make sure everyone does have some form of coverage. It needs to be treated as a human right. As Garrison Keillor has written, "if lower taxes are your priority over human life, then we know what sort of person you are. The response to a cry for help says a lot about us as human beings."
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