This has been a bad week and it is only Wednesday. Bill infected me with some virulent strain of creeping crud which hit with a vengeance on Sunday night. So I have spent the last couple of days using up every tissue in the house and feeling like someone ran a bull dozer over me when I wasn’t sleeping.
Bad enough, right? Earlier this morning he woke me from my vivid NyQuil dreams to tell me that a young friend of mine had a miscarriage. I mumbled something about that being too bad and went back to sleep. 15 minutes later he came in to tell me that she needed me.
“What?”
“She’s here, on the couch. She was crying so I asked her if I could get her anything. She told me she just needed you.”
So, up I get.
I go out there and it became quickly apparent that something was not right. She was making faces.
“Are you still cramping?”
“They feel like contractions.”
“When did you miscarry?”
And this is the point that I found out that she had not, in fact, gone to the hospital. But had miscarried at home. It is a boy, by the way. She was far enough along for sex differentiation to have taken place. Instead, she placed him in a shoe box and when she could walk came here.
I packed her off to the hospital. Why hadn’t she gone already? Well, she has no insurance. Why doesn’t she have insurance? Because the multi-million dollar corporation that she cleans stuff for avoids having to offer it to her by not giving her quite full time hours. She did not qualify for Medicaid. And she is proud. She doesn’t feel right about going to the hospital if she can’t pay. Which is nonsense, but she is young.
So I log online and check things and run across a post in my feed from a Conservative though not necessarily Republican friend of mine about how Pelosi is trying to force nuns to pay for college students 22 sexual encounters daily. If you click the link you will see why I felt this overwhelming urge to argue with that. Most of you probably have an idea even if you don’t click the link.
In the middle of explaining why what Pelosi wants of Georgetown is simply making them abide by the same rules as others who take state funds and are secularized and not wholly religious I find out that the young woman I packed off to the hospital had scarily low blood pressure and, oh, she is also Rh-negative. Which she didn’t know. Because she can’t afford prenatal care. Even though she got up every morning at 4:30 AM and worked as many hours as they would give her. She simply could not afford prenatal care.
And, no, she couldn’t afford female contraceptives, either. She did use condoms, but…they fail. Much more often than the pill. And her guy? He was laid off a couple of years ago so no help there.
This is a snapshot about what this controversy is all about. I want those of you in my friends list on FB and other places to think, really think about this, for at least 5 minutes.
In the richest country in the world a young woman whom I have to force to take 20 bucks from me when she needs it and who would never in a million years go on welfare is now in a hospital bed. They are worried about her blood loss and her blood pressure. She miscarried at home and then took her fetus and put him in a box.
So there she is, touch and go, mourning the loss of her pregnancy. A loss, that in all likelihood could have been prevented if she had access to prenatal care and gotten the Rhogam shot that very well may have prevented this miscarriage.
If you can’t see what is wrong with this? Then there really is no hope for you. I think most of you can, though. I don’t keep friends that are shallow and stupid. So most of you aren’t.
I’ve heard all the arguments. “I don’t want to pay for someone else’s choices!”
You know what? I do. You know why? Because if those of us that have do not take care of those of us that have not? This and worse than this is what happens. She shouldn’t have had to come to me. I’m not a medical professional. I’m just involved and she trusts my judgment. But she should have had a doctor she should call. And she didn’t. She had me.
We as a nation fail abysmally at the job of taking care of our own. This young woman and countless others like her are proof of that. I don’t care how it gets fixed. By making corporations like the one she works for not get away with working her like a dog for too little money and no benefits. By socialized medicine. By something no one has figured out yet. Whatever the cure? It needs to be implemented. Yesterday.
This kind of thing should never happen to anyone. Not this way. And certainly not to a young woman who is working class poor and doing everything in her power, including night classes, to better her life for herself and her family.
Wow, just wow….=(