Post Op (I)

Good to be back

I did intake and testing and was led to a spiffy private room with a gigantic window that gave a nice view of the surrounding foliage. I opted to keep the blinds drawn, though. At this point I was deep in my own thoughts, some of them about death — which, though in this case a long shot, is never out of the question with surgery. I desultorily looked through the little aspirational library I’d brought with me, scrolled Twitter, napped.

Birds sang outside, then stopped with the night. The floor on my unit was quiet though busy. Nurses flitted in and out, making pleasant chat, taking notes and vitals — the ramp-up to what I knew would be a long night of sleep interruptions. I got a menu for what they called room service, which was requested through a legacy phone service (Dial 3). Like everyone else I met that day, the order-takers were pleasant and respectful. Deeper in the night I put on my gown, Hibiclensed my abdomen, and got a series of visits for blood draws and pills.

Soon the unit was silent but for distant conversations or rolling carts, gummed soles on soft flooring. There was no traffic audible and only faint light from the monitors and my phone, through which I fitfully scrolled. A Gordon Lightfoot song kept running through my head: “In the early morning rain/ With a dollar in my hand…” Then the lights, the quick shot, the hairnet, the bed brakes clicking off and the weightless flight down corridors through double doors, cheerful re-explanation by attentive doctors, my wedding band greased and removed, the drip and the dark.

I made it.

Among my unopened mail from last week I found an EOB from my piece of shit Cigna high-deductible plan on a recent in-network doctor visit, explaining why my insurance would cover absolutely nothing of the cost of an obviously medically necessary doctor’s visit.

The employer through which I receive this non-support now only offers the HDHP, by the way, having dropped the so-called “Cadillac” option (i.e., covers some things) to cut costs, which makes sense because employers were hard-hit by the pandemic, whereas their drones reaped enormous cash benefits if they were clever enough to sell their free home COVID tests from a blanket on the sidewalk.

I don’t know whether it’s this tight-fistedness that has pushed so many workers into high-deductible plans that such plans now represent more than half of all employee coverage; having witnessed the escalation of capitalist depravity over the past several decades, I can make an educated guess.

That might seem an ominous opening for what subscribers have a right to expect will be a report of my recent medical adventures that obliged my absence last week. But thanks to Big Government I actually received a high level of state-of-the-art, labor-intensive, complex and coordinated care for free.

You may know I have a rare genetic condition that the National Institutes of Health studies as part of its world-class medical research. Here we should pause to consider that research on this level is as close to a selfless act as capitalism gets; senior officers in the cause may pull down big salaries, and even low-level workers can live decently on theirs, but the knowledge itself is not greedily stockpiled and segregated, as nations do with nuclear weapons, for example, or pharmaceutical companies do with patents — rather it combines with other research to improve the health and quality of life of the whole planet.

As a clinical trial participant I offer myself for internal inspection at the NIH every year or so and, if they find something that needs taking care of, they take care of it. In this case, it meant a distal pancreatectomy and splenectomy.

A tumor on your pancreas is nothing to brush off for many reasons, one of which I can’t even bring myself to name, and I’m not out of the woods yet. But let me tell you: Knowing one of the world’s great medical institutions has your back — unconditionally, with no titration of service due to cost of care, means testing, or other customary bullshit — makes an enormous difference physically and emotionally. It makes you feel like — well, like part of a functioning society. A Great Society, one might say.

I’ll have more to tell about the trip later. Meantime I see in my absence some of subjects I last treated are still live issues — the continuing Clarence Thomas revelations, for example, because I guess some people think anyone who takes money from people with business before his court and doesn’t declare it, and then gets caught doing fishy accounting — all discovered without so much as a government inquiry, mind you — should make a meaningful statement about that at the very least. But you’ll wait forever for that. Thomas has always been an asshole, as Anita Hill told us long ago and as indeed Thomas himself told his clerks: “The liberals made my life miserable for 43 years… and I'm going to make their lives miserable for 43 years.” He won’t abide by the law unless forced to, and who’s gonna? Certainly not his boss. Thomas revels in his unpunished criminality, like his kindred spirit Donald Trump. They were all and always exactly like this.

Among the newer items, I was cheered on my sickbed by the mad rage of MAGA freaks at the rapturous reception the Irish gave native son Joe Biden. How it must have burned them when he came onstage in Mayo to “Shipping Up to Boston” and thunderous cheers! Knowing how their tiny minds work, it must ruin the song for them, as they can never again associate it with the Southie toughs they imagine they’d be if they grew up there. The losers are claiming Biden brushed past Rishi Sunak to greet the Lord Lieutenant of County Antrim because he didn’t know who  Sunak was, but a more likely explanation is that he shares most Britons’ low opinion of Sunak, and was better pleased to greet a noble Irishman than a Tory wanker.

But I must save my strength. Tomorrow!