Sound and Fury

Bucky died about 8 ½ years ago. He was my best friend and, in many ways, a soul mate. Like any two people who share an apartment that’s decidedly too small, we had our moments. The appropriation of scarce resources—including living space—inevitably leads to conflict.

Like two strong-willed and opinionated brothers, we fought and made up more times than I can remember.

I miss him very deeply and have been thinking about him more often than usual since the issues of health care and lack of access to it appear more and more frequently in the media. Had he received care earlier, there’s a good chance he’d be here today.

Bucky was like me in that he didn’t have health insurance for a number of years. I had worked as an independent contractor for a number of years, and he had worked for small companies that didn’t offer it as well as had been unemployed or working for temp agencies for several years.

Several months before he died, be began complaining of sores in his throat. Nothing serious at first, but then it started to affect his voice. Still, he was actively pursuing a new job, one that would be stable and not on a temp basis.

He got his break and was hired to do something he did very well—schmoozing with people on the telephone and convincing them to buy the services he was selling. He would be dealing with business executives and selling them corporate services. And the job came with full benefits, including fully paid-for health insurance with coverage that began on his hire date.

He started training really jazzed. But after about a week, his throat was hurting much more and he was barely able to talk, so he went to the doctor for the first time in many years. He finally had the coverage he needed.

The preliminary diagnosis was not good: cancer of the throat.

The GP ordered an MRI and X-rays, and when they came back, the picture got grimmer: it was indeed cancer, and it was wrapping up and over his brain.

The doctor immediately started trying to get him into MD Anderson in Houston. The insurance company balked, and it took several weeks of hearings and appeals to get the admission authorized. His doctor convincingly argued that, given the advanced and sever nature of the cancer, MD Anderson was his only hope.

The day he left for there was the last day I saw him. Bucky was the singularly vainest person I have ever known in my life and didn’t want people see him in his rapidly declining state. Besides, at the time, I didn’t have the resources to go to Houston to see him.

So I waited for the inevitable, always holding to what tiny shred of hope I could, trying to believe that he would come back home when I knew that the odds were pretty long on that one.

When he was moved to hospice care, I knew the time was near.

Before he left, we traded notes back and forth. He was usually in bed by the time I got home from work, and I left before he got up, so we left notes for each other. I still have one of them, the one where he says “I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid of the pain.”

That simple statement always begs the question that, to my knowledge, he never raised: “If I had been able to get care earlier, would things have turned out differently?”

He didn’t question people playing politics with health care, batting it around like a cat toy, but doing no more. Refusing to act on the knowledge that access to health care is a luxury and no longer a given. Ignoring the millions of Americans who desperately need access to it and who will die if they don’t get it.

At its heart, the health care crisis in America is not a political issue so much as a human issue . It is a matter of life and death, and it deserves more than sound bites and talking points, empty rhetoric that signifies nothing.

Sound and fury would not save Bucky any more today than it would have almost a decade ago.

It’s time for less sound and more fury.