Not Dead Yet. Though Apparently Appreciably Closer This Time

Modern medicine is amazing, but it is still disconcerting to hear “what’s that?” when one medical professional discusses your condition with another. It is even more disconcerting when you have been in the hospital for a week and a tech remembers you entirely because they had never seen the syndrome you acquired in their thirty-year career.

I have acquired a syndrome that happens, apparently, one in four million times. I guess I need buy a lottery ticket.

We live in an age of medical miracles. I am going to survive this syndrome, but less than seventy years ago I almost certainly would have died. But because smart people cared enough to not want that to happen, it hasn’t, and it won’t, at least not because of what I have now. That is remarkable, a testament to our ability to improve ourselves, when we want to.

It is also a testament to how fortunate I am. I work for a company that allows me to purchase excellent health insurance. And while this will be a financial hardship, perhaps a terrible one, at no point did insurance get in the way of treatment. That is not true for many, perhaps most, Americans, and it has not always been true in my own past. I also work for a company that has given me the space to heal properly — again, something I know from personal experience is not real.

These are not great times. Fascism is resurgent, war appears endemic, climate change is wreaking havoc, our economic leaders are more interesting boiling the oceans so they never have to deal with an artist again than actual economically useful items (like medicine and climate technology), the Blackhawks are terrible. It can feel overwhelming and paralyzing.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. In a small way, my treatment and recovery are reminders that we can do better — because we have done better. We have focused on things that matter; the common good, the welfare of all, spreading the good life to as many people as we can. We have never been good at this, precisely, and often been quite bad at it. But we have been able to take some steps, halting as they may have been. The world does not have to be a terrible place. I know, because we have, in the past, collectively made it better. We can do so again.

Anyway, I am not out of the hospital yet, though hopefully that is coming in a day or two. Thank you for reading, and I hope to ramp back up to a more normal schedule as I improve.