Passover

I had a different Blip planned for today, another funny one, the text written and ready to go when I got a phone call from a neighbor. This will be a rant against the way medical care is provided in the USA. Feel free to go on to a prettier blip and spare yourself if you've heard enough of that already.

I'm one of the few people in my building who has a car, and given the labyrinthine and utterly senseless structure of the American capitalist medical system, it's sometimes necessary for me to serve as an emergency vehicle. We have ambulances, but the ambulance-drivers are only allowed to take people to the nearest hospital. If your insurance does not cover the nearest hospital, they will take you in, but they can't do much for you.

He was taken by ambulance to our nearest hospital on Saturday but discharged at 3 a.m. with enough medicine for the weekend. He was told to see his doctor today. He called his doctor about fifteen times today and got a machine, and then a nurse, but his doctor couldn't see him anytime soon, and he is now out of pain meds. Tonight he was in so much pain he couldn't stand it.

The nearest hospital refused to do anything for him because they have already treated him, and he doesn't have the right medical insurance for them. The second hospital was closed; their urgent care center doesn't operate after hours. The third hospital was more than twenty miles away, a half-hour via the expressway, but it is the hospital he has insurance for, so we passed two more hospitals on the way to get him there. It will not surprise me if I get at call at 3 a.m. asking me to drive out and get him because they're sending him home, and of course he has no way to get home. On the way to the third hospital, he started having chest pains.

Gripping his chest, gasping in pain, he told me he feels he has been under a curse since he was born. He was born of Jewish Russian parents in London in 1942, having been conceived during the Blitz. Tonight is Passover. Chag Sameach to those who celebrate it, and here are the first two stanzas of a poem which I wasn't going to post, but which now seems the only right thing.

The Terrible Blessing of the Journey
By Lynn Ungar

Then you shall take some of the blood, and put it on the door posts and the lintels of the houses . . . and when I see the blood, I shall pass over you, and no plague shall fall upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt.
-Exodus 12: 7, 13

They thought they were safe
that spring night when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?
Forty years in the desert
without a home, without a bed,
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.

The full poem is here.