Diary of a Low Budget Superhero

This video that I posted earlier tonight on Facebook is worth reposting here, even though at this point I don't think anyone reads Low Budget Superhero who isn't also a Facebook friend. Unless I've blocked you and you don't yet realize it, which probably means you suck, so go away.

Follow up:

I get such a feeling of helpless despair watching these televised town hall meetings about health care reform, where people just keep yelling over each other and no one's listening, the whole mess just an ever louder spew of vitriol. The Nazi photo of Obama? Terrible. And like Jon Stewart pointed out, about that woman taunting Barney Frank about "how could you support this Nazi plan." He said "A mixed race President and a gay Jew Congressman..." Right, we're living a total Nazi dream right now. Jesus.

People. Please. Just listen. Many thousands of people are dying every year because they literally cannot afford the high price of medical care. Life-saving medical care, prescription medications, surgical procedures that are necessary for pain relief, for quality of life. It is just so expensive to even go and visit a doctor anymore. Childbirth has even become like a baby mill, the doctors too often using drugs and C-section to get the baby out and clear the bed for the next patient. Somebody said something poignant about today's health care, loosely recalled as boiling down the entire process to "You get cancer and everybody lines up to make a profit."

The worst part of our broken health insurance system, in my opinion, is that office workers are sitting in corporate headquarters, deciding whether or not you can get treatment. That's the worst part! If the public option does come to pass, I would hope and pray that it's an insurance for the people, not a dictated decision tree for care selection, which is what the current brand name "insurance" companies do, to shocking effect.

Friends, remember when I had diverticulitis...correction...a sudden and near fatal bout of perforating diverticulitis. Merely saying "diverticulitis" doesn't capture the whole thing, how I didn't know I had the somewhat common stomach condition until it was too late. Diverticula...soft spot on the intestine. Perforating...soft spot rots through and becomes gaping hole.

Well, that three months of 2003 after the Swiss doc removed the bad part of my lower intestine, I got back to the states and spent the summer wearing a colostomy bag? When I went to schedule the colostomy reversal, also known as "get this bag off me, sew up the hole in my side, and put my poop chute back where it was," guess what they said. The insurance people. They said that the surgery was elective.

As though I was asking for a boob job.

Let's back up. The surgery that you need for a perforated intestine is a bowel resection. An emergency procedure. When your intestine ruptures you don't have a choice. Well you do, I guess. You can either have the surgery, or your family can pick out your coffin, your choice. It's your intestines. You know, the 20 foot tube coiled inside your abdomen that connects your stomach to your rectum? The first operation, in my case removing the damaged sigmoid colon, results in an artificial outlet for your waste. Put simply, you shit out a hole in your side called a stoma.

Artificial outlet, everyone. God didn't make us with our large intestine connected to a plastic pouch.

You have to wait out the three months for the inflammation to go down, and then you have a second surgery to reverse the colostomy and close up the stoma. My emergency bowel resection in Switzerland was in April, so my reversal would be in July. I researched gastro surgeons in Massachusetts, picked one I liked on paper, and made an appointment to see how he was in person. Our consultation began when I walked into his Mass General office and said "SO, are you the fella who's gonna reestablish my intestinal integrity?" He laughed at that. He was even interested in local music, having gotten my story of being on a European tour with a rock band at the time my intestine ruptured.

I believe it was that surgeon who finally pushed it through, slicing with some magical swipe of his brilliant scalpel at the reams of red tape I'd encountered. Elective surgery. Seriously? I don't know what he did, but I not only got my reversal surgery, I woke up in a REALLY nice room. For what my financial situation was at the time, I should have been stuck in a broom closet in the basement. But this room was all dark wood, a chair rail, deep maroon wallpaper, tasteful details such as art on the walls and a cloth curtain, not just blinds, and a nice settee where Hub was sitting when I woke up. When the surgeon came to see me after the surgery I said "How come I'm in HERE?" He patted my shoulder and said "I have some pull here." I still don't know why I got such good treatment. Maybe he just liked me, I don't know.

I just don't know. And I don't know what I'd have done if the procedure was simply refused. Still have the stoma, I guess?

But would the public option call that an elective too? I don't know that. I don't know the answer, I just know that we need to keep the information coming and get everyone understanding the proposed plan, point by point. I wish the media would help with this instead of gleefully hunting up the nuttiest, most outrageous town hall screechers and giving them all the air time.

That's all I got.