Laugh, Clown, Laugh

(To save your having to look the reference up, Laugh, Clown, Laugh is a 1928 American silent drama film starring Lon Chaney and Loretta Young – her film debut. It doesn’t have too much to do with this post – I just like the title – but I recommend the movie.)

Well, the effects of the accident have added ten years to my life.  I feel like I am 86, not 76. 

Reading the above line makes me smile, and I’ve been looking at it for a couple of hours now. My buddy from Texas wrote it in response to my checking into his (lack of) progress in beating the medical and insurance establishments into line. And I appreciate his still having a sense of humor in the face of what I consider to be total bullshit.

IMHO he’s not asking for much. He’s simply trying to get the spinal operations he needs after having been run over on his road bike. But in spite of his ability to laugh about it all, it’s starting to sound like the effort he’s putting into this is as painful for him as the accident was. He’s been given bad diagnosis one after another, denied coverage several times, sent from one specialist to another for no reason, and only recently sleuthed through a mountain of evidence himself to find that the insurance company actually believes he can heal without having the operation – not that they’d just come out and tell him that, of course. He’s gonna heal by himself? At 76? Complete assholes.

Can you tell this pisses me off? Bet you can. And you’re right. Aging is difficult enough. And trying to live an active life when old, a goal both admirable and proper, is (practically speaking) impossible without getting patched up now and then. Which in turn is not what the man wants. He wants his pound of my friend’s flesh, most probably through his eventual atrophy. And soon thereafter he’ll try to get me off the pickleball courts for exactly the same horribly poor reasons.

So what do we do about this brand of stupid, immoral, inappropriateness? What answer do you want to hear? You can rage against the dying of the light, to quote Dylan Thomas, you can try to work the system until you run out of energy, you can pay cash (and I’m told this happens more than I would have believed), or you can simply give up, sit on the porch and hope for a blanket if it gets chilly. Fuck! We’re the richest country in the world. Appropriate health care for all of us is a worthy and attainable goal. Instead, we get morons and near-constant run-around. Might as well be working with politicians. Oh – wait – we ARE working with politicians here, aren’t we? Our Republican friends in the House aren’t gonna support even basic Obamacare much less any improvements in it that might get my friend well sometime soon.

Now, my friend is a social and political activist, among his other excellent traits. And his voice is out there, every day, trying to make a small change in problems that are so awful and seemingly insurmountable that they make this whole discussion of inadequate insurance coverages and lack of medical professionalism seem small. But, still, without the ability to get back on the seat of the bike again, he knows he will, in fact, be 86 instead of 76, and his voice – his necessary voice – will fade accordingly.

I don’t want that. Do you? Could we get together and change something?