“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
~ Benjamin Franklin
I had a very odd dream last night about the state of health care in our country. It was a futuristic glimpse into the medical clinic where I go to see my doctor for sickness and also for wellness checkups. He helps me monitor my bl0od pressure, which thankfully is fine since I lost 60 pounds, and he helps me monitor my cholesterol, lipids, and diabetes. I’m supposed to see him every 3 months, but sometimes, I stretch the visits and go for 4 or 5 months before I see him.
In my dream, I went into the clinic, and I felt the heat and noticed the poor lighting. When I asked, the receptionist told me that the air conditioning was broken, and they couldn’t afford to get it fixed. And the lights were out in some places for the same reason: no money. There were people being turned away because they had no health insurance and could not pay for services. When I got to see my doctor, he said that we would have to decide which test I wanted to have because he was limited to only one test for each quarterly visit. So, I could choose to have my AlC checked or I could choose to have my triglycerides checked or I could choose to have my cholesterol checked. Thank goodness I didn’t suspect any kind of infection or anything like that, or I would have had to make that my choice and not the others. I asked my doctor if this was what government controlled health care had come to, and he responded, “What are you talking about? There is no government control; this is the insurance companies running things for huge profits.”
It would have made an interesting dream to relay to my congressmen and women, but instead I share it with you. I’m not trying to make a political statement one way or the other. I’m just saying that even though things are not this bad for me because I do have health insurance that does not put those kinds of limits on my medical care, at least not now, they could get bad for me, and they are already bad for a lot of folks. I do know people who are without health insurance and who face every day the choice of whether to try to get well on their own or whether they risk begging to be seen by a doctor that wants and needs to be paid.
I have a student who admitted to me that she has severe asthma, and when it gets bad, she uses her child’s medication to try to get better. She said it wasn’t good enough, but it was better than nothing, which is what she can afford. She called me this morning and told me she was very sick and wouldn’t be in school today. I could hear her wheezing as she left the message. She won’t be going to the doctor unless she ends up sick enough to go to the ER and see if she can be seen without medical insurance. It’s a sad situation that faces many people. She had insurance until her factory closed down and her job was sent away overseas. Now she does the best she can, which isn’t nearly good enough.
But back to my dream. When the doctor told me I’d have to choose just one test, I looked him square in the eye and said, “I choose to lose this excess weight, get rid of my diabetes medication and my cholesterol medication and my triglyceride medication. I won’t have to make choices then.” I seemed resolved in my dream to not have to rely on medical care when my doctor has already told me long ago that I could avoid every bit of this stuff if I would just lose weight. Somehow I haven’t been quite as resolved in my real life as I was in my dream life, though.
The health care reform issue is complicated and very controversial. The current bill before Congress gets bigger and bigger and more and more complex. I frankly don’t know if I support it or not because there is so much of it, a good portion of it, I’m sure, not even pertaining to health care reform at all. Unfortunately, that’s the way our very disturbed and disturbing Congress operates. But whether we choose to let the government run our health care system or leave it to the insurance companies, it’s for sure that we need to reform it in some way.
That reform may not be up to us, but there is something every single one of us can do to help: we can see to it that we are as healthy as we can be so that we don’t have to use the health care system anymore than we absolutely have to. We can eat better, exercise more, take preventative measures to avoid passing contagious diseases, and fortify ourselves to be at our very healthiest. What a reform that would be! My student with the asthma could quit smoking and help herself out even more than her child’s medication could!
Every thing we do affects other things in the Universe. The greed of big insurance companies may well affect the state of our health care system adversely. But our unhealthy lifestyles also add to the problem. We may not be able to do it all, but we can help reform our health care system just by vowing to get healthier. The impact of a healthier nation would be immense.
"Unhappy is the man, though he rule the world, who doesn't
consider himself supremely blessed."
~Seneca
Do you ever sit around daydreaming about the things you wished you had? I do. All the
time. I want money to pay off all my debts. I want money to remodel my house. I want
to have some kind of simple bariatric surgery to help me get rid of all this extra weight
I have. And then I want to be able to afford plastic surgery afterward to get rid of all
the excess skin I'll have. I want time and money to travel with my husband. But do I
think I'll be any better off if I am able to get all of these things? Not really. I am
so blessed just as I am right now. I have the most wonderful husband in the world. I
have good friends and a wonderful family. I have pretty good health.I have a very
comfortable home. I have a job that I love and thrive in. I have coworkers that are
the best to work with. I have so much peace in my life. Peace and happiness and joy
is worth so much more than millions of dollars.
I teach community college students. Some of my students are unemployed after years of
having a good job. Some of my students are experiencing personal tragedies of other
sorts: the death of family members, cars breaking down and no money to get them fixed,
a lot of sickness going around, and personal family struggles. Yet they come to my
classes and are prepared for tests and essays. And if you ask them if they are blessed,
they will say with 100% assuredness, "Yes! Of course!"
My husband delivered a sermon a couple of weeks ago on the book of Job. Job was a man
who was visited with every trouble imaginable. He lost his health, his family, his
riches. He lost everything he had. Yet when asked to "curse God and die." He would
not. In the rather fairytale like ending of Job's story, all is restored to him plus
some. He is wealthier than before he lost everything. He has a new family that is
larger and more impressive than the old one that perished. He has his health restored.
By all comparisons, Job is better off at the end. I don't think the moral of his story
is that if we just hang in there and refuse to curse God and die, that we will be
richly rewarded. I think the moral of Job's story is that we are blessed no matter what
our external situation is. And we can choose to be blessed or we can curse our existence
and be miserable. It's our choice.
I had a student call me last week in tears. She had been sick with the flu a couple of
weeks before. She had a sinus infection following that. Her hours were being cut at
work, and then all of a sudden, when she wasn't quite well yet, she had been asked to
work overtime. So, of course, she was doing the best she could. She was behind on her
work for my class. She was low on funds because she had to visit the doctor a couple of
times and get medicine that she couldn't afford. She was ready to work a twelve hour
shift, glad for the extra money, when her throat closed up, and she could barely swallow
or breathe. She was forced back to the doctor's office and was told she had step throat.
Her employer would not let her work. She called me and told me all of this, and she even
launched into her past troubles of when she was a child in the foster care system, with
no parents to love her. She ended by saying that her house was messy, and she didn't
have the energy to clean it up. She said she just wished she had a mother who would tell
her that everything was going to be okay. I felt great compassion for her, but I
couldn't tell her that everything was going to be okay. I could give her a time extension
on her work for my class. But that was all I could do. I hope she feels the love of God
and the blessed state that she is in despite her tragedies.
There have been times in my life when I did not feel blessed either. I felt fairly cursed,
in fact. But I realized it was just a mental state to feel cursed. And I realized I had
the power to change my mental state. One thing that helped tremendously was to take
prayer walks. I would walk and give thanks for all the things in the world that were
right with my life. I broke it down to being thankful that my legs would take me on the
walk and for the shoes on my feet and the food in my stomach and the ability to digest
that food. I walked and walked and gave thanks, and the more thankful I was, the better
I felt. It was worth more than all the therapy in the world. It was worth far more than
if I had won the lottery and had all the money I needed to take care of material things.
I would come back home with a healed heart. I highly recommend prayer walks to anyone
feeling cursed.
I still play the lottery. My husband just bought us another 2 dollar powerball ticket
last night. We haven't won yet, but we could. It's the possibility that we might that
keeps us spending those two dollars at a time. Will I be blessed if I win the lottery?
Oh, yes! Am I blessed if I never win it? Oh, yes. Because I couldn't imagine anything
as sad as having all the money, all the prestige, all the power in the world and not
feeling blessed. As the Roman philosopher Seneca said, "Unhappy is the man who rules the
whole world if he doesn't consider himself supremely blessed." 
Rita
Deb
Catherine
