Living with Cancer, Dying with Insurance

A very long month ago, I woke up in my sunny Brooklyn apartment with this thought:  I am going to die.

The next thought was no less comforting:  I am dying.

I am turning thirty in a few days, but I have had cancer for ten years.  I went for my regular test at Sloan-Kettering a month ago, and I thought to myself over and over before submitting to the general anesthesia, "All I want for my thirtieth birthday is a clean scan.  Good news, good news, good new--" and that's where I stop remembering. When I came to, four hours later, some part of my brain was still repeating "Good news good news good news."  But I was wrong.

I found out that I have to start chemotherapy again.  I remember 2001, having a biopsy of a large tumor in my hip joint on my birthday.  I remember singing a dirge-like "Happy Birthday" under my breath to myself, alone with the doctors, shaking uncontrollably from the medication coursing through my veins in that freezing cold operating room.

But it was not having cancer for a decade, not finding out I had more cancer after already dealing with cancer every day, that made me think I was dying.

It was wondering how to pay Oxford.

A month ago, I did not know what would happen if I lost my medical insurance.  Maintaining it seemed so necessary, it had such a stranglehold on my life, that it was and is all that I think about.  My coverage was running out fast.  Without it, and with my bank account already drained from a year and a half of COBRA payments, I thought the only possible resolution to my situation was that I would slip through the cracks, and I would die.  Now, I was looking at an individual insurance policy on the open market and finding it would cost $2600.00 a month.  Now, I was talking to a social worker who told me I would have to move into a shelter to qualify for Medicaid.

And now, I was talking to a woman in Arkansas on the phone, whom I called as part of a phone bank to urge her to call her senator, Blanche Lincoln, and ask her to support a public option.  Now I listened as she told me that she "did not believe in anything Obama stood for" and that the answer to my predicament was not the government insuring its citizens, treating health care as a UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHT, but instead that God would help me.

I don't exactly know why I can live and thrive with cancer, but am reduced to such unadulterated fear when it comes to maintaining my insurance coverage.  Having cancer?  I've been brave and strong and fierce.  Losing the only way to maintain my fleeting health?  I can't face it.  I'm reading this blog, reading about people who have died because they do not have insurance, who have died trying.  Will I be one of them?

(Photo credit:  Paulo Romalho on Flickr.)