I Think I'm Going to Live

This past weekend my friend living in New York City notified me that he wound up in an ambulance after falling off of his bicycle [details withheld to protect the guilty].

As I have said previously, the largest lurking danger that could immediately destroy my goal of spending less than $12,000 over the course of the year would be needing medical attention of any kind—especially emergency—for I, like my NYC friend and 45 million other Americans I believe, am without health insurance.

This is rarely a concern for me and never would be except that I am also a bit of an occasional closet hypochondriac. In the past I’ve survived a fractured sternum; lupus; skin, lung and liver cancers; and even a small bout with Lou Gerhig’s Disease. And I always seem to have a medical condition just strong enough to keep me worried. After the ingrown toe nails (read: Turf Toe), there were my wisdom teeth and then my sore shoulder that I was convinced needed arthroscopic surgery. Now I am even nursing a sore hand whose self-diagnoses have ranged from nothing at all, a slight sprain, a sever sprain to (now, possibly) a small fracture.

So naturally after hearing my friend’s story I was bound to come up with something new. And today I got stung by a bee. So even though I knew I wasn’t allergic to them, there was a good thirty minutes that I figured it was a severe enough sting to travel straight up my spine and into my brain to eventually kill me.

But I toughed it out (read: called mom to ask her how to make it better) and the pain eventually went away.

After contemplating how sad it is that even after seventeen years of schooling I haven’t been equipped with even enough basic medical knowledge to know a home remedy for an as common occurrence as a bee sting—and I doubt I’m the only one—I eventually, as I always do, came to my senses and realized that I was going to live.

But I also realized that, in consciously deciding to live in a way where I don’t have health insurance I am only able to do so thanks to my general clean bill of inherited health. Thank Life I am not allergic to bee stings or peanuts, or gluten products or any other allergies that could randomly be triggered and require immediate attention, or that I do not even have seasonal allergies that require medicine. If it wasn’t for these things perhaps I would constantly require the burden of health insurance.

(I am technically allergic to penicillin but thankfully I am protected from that by our caring government since it would require a prescription to get that—which come from doctors that I can’t afford just to add another layer of defense for my health.)

The human body is frail sure enough, and I can see the obvious sense of having and wanting health insurance. But, in not having it, after those initial paranoid attacks of hypochondria, ones that require only the now still free medicine of time, I do not feel the need to live in constant fear and expectation of the worst happening to me. (Though it is weird how we almost instinctively, as if we are raised to act in such a way, immediately expect the worst.) If it does, I’ll survive. I have before. But if it doesn’t—and more than likely won’t—I’m not going to miss out on everything else that I do have that is good that can so easily be overlooked and go unappreciated in a unnecessary hysteria and panic. I’d like to believe that I would rather die as the mathematical abnormality than live my entire life thinking I will be but only at the end realizing I was one of the lucky ones.