Okay, what I’m about to relate is only one of the reasons why electing Democrats matters. Women’s reproductive rights, labor law, a Supreme Court that isn’t full of phony “originalists” who reverse engineer their decisions to please their corporate masters (jiggery pokery anybody?) are some of the other reasons.
I went ten years without health insurance. When I quit my full time job to become my mother’s live in caregiver the last years of her life the nice insurance plan went with it. For awhile her health allowed me to work two or three hours mid-day, but in the restaurant industry, so a few bucks came in but no health insurance of course.
And for all those years I dodged a bullet. Was never in an accident. Was never seriously ill. I saw my doctor twice a year, paying out of pocket (and eternal damnation to the woman who took to dunning me for money the moment I walked in the door. You’ll get your $170. You always have.)
Then, thanks to Barack Obama, Democrats in Congress, and a Democratic state legislature with a Democratic Governor who took the Medicaid expansion, I obtained insurance. Is the ACA perfect? Not by a long shot. But here’s what it has meant to me:
A couple Saturdays ago I worked a very busy day in 88 degree heat. About mid-way through my day I began to experience discomfort in my chest. The pain did not radiate anywhere, there was no nausea, and exertion didn’t make the pain worse. When I got home I laid down and although it took a couple of hours I eventually felt fine. I got up, enjoyed the rest of my night, and went to bed.
The next morning I felt ghastly. Ghastly enough to think “I wonder if I did actually have a heart attack yesterday.” I drove to the ER. That’s right, I drove. If I’d called my town’s paramedics they’d have taken me to a tiny little hospital that doesn’t even do heart procedures.
At the ER they immediately did an EKG which was completely normal. But there was an elevation of an enzyme indicating some sort of stress on the heart. Two hours later that enzyme’s level had neither gone up nor down. After a chest X-Ray I was told I had pneumonia. I was admitted and hooked up to an antibiotic IV. The third blood draw showed the enzyme level had gone down, although it was still elevated above normal.
Monday I had some tests. I did a treadmill stress test and although I was barely able to complete it with my breathing capacity so diminished I did pass. My EKG was fine.
Now I should mention at this point that every time somebody had listened to my heart during all of this they said the same thing “Boy, you’ve got a big murmur.” I’d had a very tiny heart murmur due to extremely minimal mitral valve prolapse since I was in my mid-twenties. It was so faint that often doctors couldn’t hear it at all. I’d had an Echo-Cardiogram no more than eighteen months ago that showed that things hadn’t changed.
But now everybody was commenting on my “Big Murmur.” I decided to name my Murmur “Ethel.” If you’re old enough you’ll figure that joke out.
My final test of the day was an Echo-Cardiogram. I’d never had one take this long. The technician kept going back to the same place over and over. Occasionally I’d glance over at the monitor and although I am purely a layman it seemed that what I was seeing wasn’t right.
Not long after being wheeled back to my room a cardiologist showed up. “Your heart is failing,” he said. “The mitral valve isn’t coming anywhere near to closing and blood is gushing everywhere.” Yeah, he actually said that. What was actually happening is called “Regurgitation,” and it means that blood that is supposed to be moved from one chamber to the next is back-flowing into the first chamber.
In an irony of ironies, my nephew who lives in Atlanta and is only five years younger than me had his mitral valve repaired just a few months ago. In his case the problem was a congenital problem that he shared with his father and one of his father’s brothers. He’d had the vale repaired arthroscopically. Literally five tiny holes and three days later he was home. That was exactly what I hoped to do and a quick check with my phone showed that procedure to be available in the area.
The cardiologist said that they would be performing an angiogram the following day but “If we find any blockage we’re not going to put in a stent or anything.” I asked him why, once bothering to do an angiogram they wouldn’t leave behind a stent if necessary. “Because we’re going to be cutting you open at some point to fix that valve, and we’ll do bypasses at that time if need be.” I decided to leave the argument for the following day.
That evening I summoned the nurse to say that I was having difficulty breathing. My oxygen cedula was replaced by a BiPAP machine….the “fighter pilot” mask. That would be the last thing I remembered for four days.
Apparently around 2 am an alarm sounded indicating my blood pressure had dropped perilously low. How low? The systolic was in the 20s. The posterior leaf of my mitral valve had completely failed and was hanging on by a thread.
I was rushed to the ER, sedated, intubated, and a “balloon pump” was inserted via my groin to my heart to provide it with the assistance it needed to keep me alive. It wasn’t going to be able to do it on its own. A ventilator did my breathing for me.
My poor sister got the sort of 3am phone call that nobody wants to get. “Your brother is in intensive care, he needs surgery, do you consent for him to have it?” She said yes, of course (we have healthcare POA for each other.)
My sister called her son, my nephew, and within a matter of hours he was outside the cath lab talking to the same cardiologist I’ve already written about, plus a surgeon whose specialty is mitral valve repair and replacement. Remarkably, the angiogram showed that my arteries were as clean as a whistle. Astounding, but I’ll take it.
Over the next 24 hours I was stabilized and early Wednesday morning I was wheeled into surgery. Around 12:30 pm the surgeon came out to say that everything had gone great and he had in fact been able to repair the valve. Three out of four times when the patient is in a crisis stage an artificial valve has to be used. But the doc said my leaflets were “like butter,” with no calcification, and that he was able to resection them, suture them in place, and anchor them with a non-ferrous metal ring. I won’t even have to take blood thinners.
After a couple hours in the ICU I was moved to a room. Every time they tried to remove the ventilator my breathing rate and my BP shot up, but eventually on Friday afternoon, almost 48 hours after the surgery, they were able to remove the balloon pump and the ventilator and I was extubated.
From that point on my recovery has been astonishingly swift. I was discharged to a rehab center only three afternoons after waking up, and came home from the rehab center today.
And again I say, THIS is why it matters. Because when we elect Democrats to office people are able to get life-saving surgery. Yeah, they probably would have wheeled me into the OR in any case, but perhaps they would have asked for a guarantee of responsibility from my sister. At the very least I would have come out of the OR with not only a tube down my throat but a $200,000 bill in my pocket.
What happens when we elect Republicans to office? Well Trump is typically secretive with specifics, but his replacement for “Obamacare” is going to be “Great, just great.” I think that means the usual old Republican song and dance about selling insurance across state lines (also known as the Race To The Bottom plan) Healthcare Savings accounts, a rescinding of the individual and employer mandate, putting the ACA into a death spiral.. And people dying because of it.
But let me tell you, when it’s your sternum they’re cutting in half, and your body they’re hooking up to a heart/lung machine and your heart they’re stopping so they can do some miraculous cut and stitch, you can’t help but remember what Joe Biden said when President Obama signed the ACA into effect. ”This is a big fucking deal.”
It certainly is Joe, it certainly is. And THAT is just one reason why it matters to elect Democrats to office.