A few times this year, the reality of our broken health system, health disparities, and unregulated industries became a tangible reality to me. May I share?
~One of my first weeks on the job, an older gentlemen--a resident of Baldwin Hills--came to the office and asked for some information on a certain kind of cancer he heard about in a presentation that is caused by certain gasses used in oil drilling. His wife had died of that kind of cancer recently. He was so humble and genuinely seeking information about what happened to probably one of his most beloved--that visit early on in this year has stuck with me and helped me make some of those early days of phone banking.
~One day walking up the big hill from the bus stop to my office building, I met a stranger in distress. I had just passed Ihop and was waiting at a stoplight when I heard something behind me. A young man was sobbing, cell phone in hand, hands to his face, sitting on a small retaining wall. There a lot of medical buildings around and he must have just come from one of these because he described to me how he is in so much pain and no doctor can tell him what's wrong with him and his family doesn't understand his pain.
~One particular bus ride downtown, I was either especially surrounded by the sick and lame or they especially stuck out to me. A man got on the bus with a huge tumor on his neck; he had a cup of change, although he asked no one on the bus for change but greeted all with "Happy New Year." Another man walked across Broadway with the hugest limp I've ever seen. A woman on the bus held a baby with a phlegmy cough. A man asked me for change at Pershing square, his arm bending at some unnatural angle as if he had a muscle-contraction disease I had just learned about on the TV show House.
~You know when you ask how someone is doing as a way of saying hello? You know, like, "How u doin?" Well I ask this a lot and I really do care how the person is doing, but usually people don't tell you. However, with this one particularly active resident with whom I interact quite a bit, in this whole past year, of maybe the 20 times I've had a chance to ask how this person was doing, never once have they given the traditional "good." The health conditions they are battling and the stress they have over the oil fields keeps them from, even in polite, usually mindless conversation, from answering any other way then being completely honest about the health battles they are facing and how it really effects them all the time...
Does anyone else have experiences like these....
My review of Fredrik Backman's novel, My Friends
4 months ago
