I've been posting things about my knee problems here because, well, when you commit to blog almost every day, you wind up writing about most things in your life, especially when you think you have some interesting or funny things to say about them. It also saves time. Friends of mine read about it here and then I don't have to tell them or have them later say to me, "Why didn't you let me know about this?" I am absolutely not asking for sympathy or pretending it's important that I can't climb stairs without wincing a bit.
Something I've learned about injury and illness is that it's important to keep these things in perspective. When you're sick, you can make your problems worse — even make yourself actually sicker — by living in an overdramatized mindset. Recovery can have a lot to do with not thinking like a sick person…but at the same time, you have to be realistic and not set yourself up for constant disappointments by expecting that broken leg to be fully-healed by Thursday. A friend once said to me of another friend, "He's making his condition worse because he doesn't know how to be sick."
Every indicator suggests my knee will be fine in a month or two. I have to accept the pain and inconvenience that I will experience in that time and decide that I'm not going to let it encroach on my life and work any more than it has to. If I resent it…or if I see it as a bigger problem than it is, it can become a bigger problem than it is.
I've been thinking a lot about this kind of thing lately because I have so many friends who are not well. I have a lot of that in my life and it's not just because I'm 61. As you get older, you expect more and more of the people around you to have medical problems and even die. What I'm observing goes beyond that and I think it has something to do with the economy…and with the cost of health care. My torn meniscus will end up costing me around $8000 even with pretty decent health care. I asked a lady at the surgical center what something like this could wind up costing someone with no insurance. She said that in her experience it was roughly a factor of ten — $80,000 — and could go even higher. Needless to say, there are folks out there who simply don't have the eight grand, let alone the eighty.
That's bad but like I said, my problem should be over in a month or two. The real tragedy is with people whose conditions are open-ended and which could persist for a long, indeterminate period.
Each morning, I awake to e-mails and calls from sick friends telling me the latest. I log into various forums and read updates…like I just read the latest from Stan Sakai about his wonderful wife Sharon. I've known the two of them since before Stan began lettering Groo the Wanderer, which was before he created his own, highly popular comic book character, Usagi Yojimbo. They are great people and it breaks everyone's heart that Sharon is suffering with a benign but inoperable brain tumor. "Benign" is better than "Malignant" but it has still caused her just about every conceivable health problem one can have: facial paralysis, anemia, rapid heart rate, double-vision, difficulty in breathing, difficulty in swallowing, difficulty in speaking, massive weight loss, etc.
I read all that and I have two kinds of reactions, one of them a bit selfish. The selfish one is that I think, "Jeez…and here I am thinking it's a tragedy that my right knee is going to be hurting for a few more weeks." The non-selfish one is to feel for Sharon…and for Stan and what he must be going through. They're smart, strong people and they have insurance — but smart and strong people have their limits and so do insurance policies.
I am one of those people who doesn't like "Obamacare" because it is not Single-Payer. It's better than what we had before and infinitely better than the Republicans' "repeal and replace" goal which seems to largely sidestep the "replace" part. When I hear John McCain acting like he's offended there's a war we could be in and aren't, and you think what those wars cost us just in terms of dollars, it's a real head-shaker. The most conservative estimates suggest Afghanistan and Iraq will wind up costing U.S. taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion and we'll spend the rest of our lives trying to explain what we got for our money. Some estimates say that single-payer would more than pay for itself and lower the over-all costs of health care in this country. Even if it didn't, ten years of it couldn't cost more than we spent to rid the world of those Weapons of Mass Destruction that Saddam Hussein didn't have.
Will this happen? Someday. 'Til then, we put up with it and people will continue to suffer and die because they can't afford to get things fixed. I have at least two friends who I believe died unnecessarily because they couldn't afford good insurance. In the meantime, I'm glad for mine…and glad that my problems are so minor compared to some. I hope I don't give the impression that I think this knee thing is anything more than a minor annoyance.