How to Not Die in America
This is quite a piece.
“For a fairly brief but unexpected period of my life, I lost my capacity to work, to advocate for myself, to navigate life and all its frictions. For much of my illness—intubated, drugged, feverish—I simply wasn’t there. In my absence, there were more than 25 individual doctors and specialists, an army of nurses, the friends who loved me enough to take care of my affairs while I was under, some unknowable number of insurance agents sitting behind desks in another state, silently placing checkmarks next to my claims.
“I am lucky not for surviving the infection, but for being a member of a shrinking class of Americans whose lives can absorb a trauma of this magnitude, and for whom being thrown, insensible, into the system is actually a good thing. When people refer to me as a “survivor,” which they do often, they’re correct, but it’s not what they think it means: It has already been decided, especially now that it’s again fashionable to claim that healthcare is not a right, who is a designated survivor in this country. It has also been decided who is not.”
On the second Tuesday in June, I start to feel fluish. If this is 2016 and I’m still a freelance writer, I’m losing money immediately on the assignments I can’t complete because my vision is blurry and my thoughts are erratic. If this is 2013, I am soon taken off the roster at the cafe where I…
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