HW 27 - Visiting An Unwell Person

               I visited my ailing uncle in a hospital in Nyack. He was there because, several months prior, he tore a muscle in his foot while helping his father with the strenuous chores around the house.  After ignoring both injuries for a while, he finally went to the hospital and spent some weeks with a cast on his foot. Meanwhile the cut underneath the cast became severely infected. Alas, this infection led to his hospitalization, which was very expensive for him because he had never purchased health insurance. The ignorance of my uncle and his doctors led to the spread of the infection. The infection was so drastic that the doctors debated amputating my uncle’s foot. Eventually, they amputated a toe. The infection came and went over the course of those months, but it seems to be physically permanently gone. Unfortunately, it still infects his life because with a toe missing he cannot fill his former position as a cook.

                In the hospital room, my uncle reclined in a chair. A machine was connected to his foot with a tube, which was sucking infectious fluid. His foot was swollen, and parts were a blackish, dead hue. The sight caused me to fight several gagging reflexes. I told myself to concentrate on his face, the expression of which wasn’t much less dismal.  The visit was filled with awkward silences; there was little to say about his situation, other than expressions of mental and palatable boredom and physical pain.

                My uncle’s approach to sickness was fairly passive until sickness actually overtook him – he did not pursue health insurance until it was absolutely necessary.  The social conditions that contributed to this issue were probably the high cost of insurance, or a lack of exposure to the fatal results of no health insurance.  Health insurance is beyond costly if one’s employer does not assist in paying for it. The little restaurant for which my uncle worked apparently was unwilling to do so. I was at first disgusted by his assumption that insurance would never be necessary. I realized that this was snobby of me, because I might do the same thing in his situation. I cannot judge someone for forgoing health insurance when I receive it at no cost. Even so, I wondered how he could have thought that he was invincible.  I realized that such an attitude can be found in most people, whether revealed by an 11 year old boy jay walking, a high school freshman smoking cigarettes, a college student forgoing a condom, an obese middle aged woman watching television all day instead of going to the gym, or a diabetic man having a field day at Kentucky Fried Chicken. No one wants to think that they are susceptible to sickness, to mortality, to falling into a vulnerable hospitalized circumstance, to death.

                This attitude is both followed and contradicted in our guest speaker. She and Erik Wood did not buy insurance because it was expensive, and thus was forced to pretend she was invincible in a way. On the other hand, she contradicted this attitude because she had no choice but to embrace, rather than ignore death and loss. “Sicko” reminded me of my uncle, because it made many references to people who suffered from excessive medical bills, and to people who did not have insurance.  It made me realize that situations like that of my uncle are not so uncommon, and that insurance should be more readily available to US citizens. “Sicko” was very personal to me, because it evoked memories of familial conflicts and sadness that resulted from our medical system.