Today I'm thanking God and enjoying the cold sun.
On Wednesday, my partner was having trouble breathing. My partner is 45 years old, and after days of feeling like crap, was suddenly having trouble walking from the bed to the bathroom.
As someone who has performed surgery on himself, running to the hospital isn't second nature. But that's exactly where we went.
I live in a small rural community, equi-distance to Baltimore, Washington, and Philly. That's convenient for work, but not for things like advanced health care. I always swore that if I was half dead along the road, I would tell the hellicopter pilot to take me to Hopkins, 150 miles away as the bird flies, instead of the local podunk hospital.
I've covered way to many hearings on healthcare and cancer to trust a small hospital, not affiliated with an educational or research center.
We got to the emergency room. "It's bad, really bad" the doctor said. What's worse than a doctor saying that? Getting knifed in the stomach? No, I can tell you that's not worse. Watching the World Trade Center tumble down? Close, but on a different level. Hearing a colleague has been beheaded? Getting warmer. Looking down at the White House and realizing your camera isn't recording? A bad day, sure, but not even close. I can always work retail (and have). No, those are the most terrible words you ever hear. Those words are personal. They are the personal equivalent of national tradgedy. They suck.
Anyway, tests after test, this that die being shot into his system and then scanned, I don't know what all. A fluid on the lungs, what was the cause? His sister just died last month of cancer. Was it the big C?
The doctor, nurses, staff of Podunck Hospital couldn't have been better. Result: not the Big C, the big B: bacterial infection, picked up when we went to a third world country last month. Treatment: IV antibiotics and prayer. Things were bad, very bad. But not the big C.
Today: not so bad. He'll be home as soon as the IV's come out.
Thank God for Podunck community hospital and the pork funding that put the cancer specialists there. Thank God they are affiliated with a major hospital, who knew, that's benefited greatly by the doubling of NIH funding a few years ago. Thank God Congress doubled that funding, and Bush signed it into law. And thank God there are people in the world who are so f*****g smart that they can even understand the weird images they are looking at. Last, thank God we live now, after years and years of government funded research, that ended up saving my partner's life. Ten years ago, he'd have been dead.
And I'd be writing a very, very different entry to my blog. Or maybe not. I might just be curled in a ball crying in the corner.