I'm sitting in one of my favourite old haunts, Taste and See coffee shop in Macon. I can remember so clearly passing away the summer days here, writing about how much I didn't want to leave this place, sipping counter culture coffee before I ever knew what counter culture was, taking time to myself after the long days of teaching gymnastics. I close my eyes, and life passes in an instant. Here I am - school is behind me - this place is all memories and long ago times and a place to be a passerby only, never to stay. Life feels that way - it's passed in an instant. I work in a place where I encounter this a lot, and it's taught me to respect time, my 20's, all that life as a young working person has to offer. I'm tired from work - a different kind of tired. Not the kind of tired I was in school. There's a weight of responsibility on me, and growing pains as I learn full-on adulthood. It's trying to find work-life balance, not gawk at how much money goes to taxes, and weighing healthcare plans. It's making financial plans and trying to pay off student loans and leaving work at 7 or 8 o'clock sometimes. It's finding new friends as my old ones move on into their new lives. It's keeping old friendships alive. It's (still) trying to learn how to cook. It's a season of many new things - including finally having health insurance.
Everytime I go to the pharmacy now, it's hard for it to not feel like Christmas. The concept of going to a pharmacy and not having fear and the feeling of a pit of despair in my stomach is still new. I used to regard pharmacies with a mix of hate and dread - isn't that funny? But I mean it. I hated the place that was filled with a drug I couldn't dream of affording. I'd even look at nursing carts during my internship at the hospital - nurses would open drawers, and pens upon pens of Novolog would be inside of them. They'd draw some insulin from a pen and throw the rest away. That hurt. I've spent a lot of my life going without, and it sucked. It feels like a bad dream now, but it's not, and it was really just a bad learning experience about what falling through the cracks of the American healthcare system means. The reason I write on all this is because of the story that recently made headlines about the 26 year old who died because he came up $25 short for his GoFundMe for insulin. What a sick reality is that? The sad thing is, it happens every day. I rationed insulin for so long. I purposely ate lower carb things to avoid having to give so much insulin. I'd go a unit or 2 without if it meant making my insulin last longer. I'd go without Lantus for an extra 12 hours so that I could have an extra day or two worth of insulin a month. I'd pull the extra insulin out of my insulin pens with a syringe so I could have the extra 10 units. I used insulin that had been expired for 2 years. I begged people for it. You don't leave that and forget it. As long as I live, I will never forget what it was like to have something I needed to live so far out of my reach that just thinking about it made me a little teary eyed. It's part of the reason why I love where I work for so much. I work with a lot of underserved people that need help. Who need advocates - and I hope to spend my life continuously learning how to better serve these people. Because I couldn't have made it through years without health insurance and scraping by with enough insulin through the skin of my teeth, without help from a lot of kind individuals. I'll always count my blessing for that $0 or $25 copay, because I'm happy just to have an affordable copay. Healthcare is a privilege I fought for, but I don't think it should be that way. It should be within the reach of people like you and I, whether that means holding pharmaceutical companies accountable for actually making these drugs affordable, or simply recognizing that there is a big problem, and that we all have to do something to change it. Whatever the solution, it starts with awareness of the problem. This blog is just one small way of making my own voice heard.
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