But in Canada, they have waiting lists

A week from Monday, if all goes according to plan, my wife will be having the surgery that will restore her to full health and mobility and put an end to the the daily pain she’s been living with for nearly four years. Please, Lord, let this finally for once go according to plan.

This is the sixth time this surgery has been scheduled for my wife.

The first was more than three years ago. She got bumped that day because her surgery is considered “elective” and her doctors were called elsewhere to address a life-threatening condition. We respected that, and accepted it, even if the word “elective” seems wildly inaccurate and cruelly inappropriate as a word for fixing that which is painfully, life-alteringly broken.

“Elective” makes it sound voluntary and optional. But what she needs is a lot more like re-setting a compound fracture — a not-optional procedure to put your insides back inside and to keep them there in one piece so they function properly and don’t cause pain.

So, anyway, that first date for the procedure got rescheduled for January 2023. That schedule was re-written because her non-life-threatening condition almost killed her. While it’s technically true that her problem is not directly life-threatening, it does make her vulnerable to infections. A double-whammy of infections two years ago this month put her in the ICU in a medically induced coma for three weeks. The recovery from all of that pushed back her surgery until the fall of 2023.

That surgery date got cancelled because what with the coma and all, she exceeded the number of sick days her company allowed. So they fired her and she lost her health insurance. Surgery cancelled.

We added her to my health plan — something my employer discourages, by charging twice as much for spousal coverage — and then had to establish three months of this as “continuous coverage” before being allowed to reschedule the surgery.

This whole time, again, my wife is dealing — every day — with a condition that’s painful and inconvenient and disabling and that risks her long-term health. The pain affects her ability to eat and the condition affects her ability to digest what she eats, and that can cause her electrolytes to crash. This was what nixed the other scheduled dates for her surgery. She failed the blood test and, instead of getting fixed, just spent a day hooked up to a menorah of IV bags with half of the periodic table of the elements.

Her “blood work” this time looks good. Her magnesium was a little low, so they topped that off, but otherwise she’s approved to go on January 20.

Yes, I know. It is strange to be counting down to that date with eager anticipation, but we are. Eager anticipation mixed with the hard-earned dread of a family that has had this hope dangled before us many times before, only to have it yanked away each time.

We can’t afford for that to happen again. We had a solid plan to get us through that first scheduled surgery and her recovery period afterward. We were going to “dip into our savings” a little bit, but we wouldn’t have to borrow money from friends and relatives, and since she’d soon be back on her feet, back to 100%, it would be just a brief financial hiccough.

Three years later, after losing her job, and a big chunk of my paycheck, we again have a plan to get us through the surgery date. It involves putting off paying back those friends and relatives, and using up the last of what once was our savings. But if the surgery actually happens this time, and she gets back on her feet, we may be able to start paying those people back and rebuilding those savings before too long. If the surgery actually happens this time, we’re gonna be OK.

But the finances are secondary. If this surgery somehow gets put off again for months or years more, I’m not sure my wife could survive it — either emotionally or literally and physically. It hurts. And she is tired of it hurting.

Nearly four years of delay has meant four years of pain. Four years of disability. Four years of reckless risk to my wife’s long-term health. And four years of financial hardship for our family.

Four years.

This is why it kills me whenever some dim reactionary American defends our money-burning, lethally callous private, for-profit health care system by saying, “Yeah, but in Canada they have waiting lists.”

America has waiting lists. Intolerably long, inhumanly apathetic waiting lists. My wife fears she is going to die on the Great American Waiting List. That waiting list threatens to take our house.

Whenever I hear these resentful idiots babbling about “Canadian waiting lists” I want to scream in rage and frustration. If we were Canadian, my wife would be better by now. If we were Canadian, she would not be in pain.

I desperately needed to do a fundraising post. I apparently also desperately needed to vent a bit of the dread and anxiety and sore-abused hope that my family is experiencing these next few weeks and appear to have done that here rather than write the actual, desperately needed fundraising post.

So I’ll have to return to that over the coming days.

Here is a link to my PayPal account.

I am also on Venmo as @George-Clark-61.

Thank you for your support and for your thoughts and prayers for my wife over the coming weeks.