On January 4 of this year, I found myself in the ICU of Mary Lanning Hospital. I took test after test, was asked thousands of questions because they didn't know why my heart rate was going 180 and more importantly why they couldn't get it to stop. Except I didn't know it was going fast, in fact I felt fine. The only reason I had gone to the doctor in the first place was because I had a terrible cough. I found out I had a heart condition called Supervantricular Tachycardia (SVT), which was basically just a fancy way to say my heart beats fast. After three days I was prescribed two medications to keep my heart rate a regular level.
I found out the SVT was caused by an extra electrical pathway in my heart, only 10 percent of people who have heart rhythm problems have this special type of Tachycardia. That doesn't mean it couldn't be fixed. Usually the condition is regulated with medication, but because I was so young and it happened so often I found out that the medication would be detrimental to my health in long run. Plus it wasn't really solving the problem.
I was refereed to a specialist who told me that it was an easy solve with a surgery called an ablation. But easy didn't mean cheap. In fact if you thought anything up to this point was cheap, you are sadly mistaken. The American Health Care System isn't here to benefit the majority of people.
I'm one of the the lucky ones. My parents have great insurance and because of the Affordable HealthCare Act, I was able to stay on their insurance and not end up in thousands of dollars worth of debt.
But this isn't the case for so many Americans, especially people my age who are thrown off of Medicare because it was one of the reforms that had to be made to actually get the Affordable HealthCare Act to pass. For those who don't have insurance, the surgery I got would be basically impossible. However, the likelihood that a person without insurance would have found out that they even had this condition is low because they never would have gone to the doctor for the cough in the first place.
If you think healthcare is a privilege and not a right then let me ask you this -- is life not a right? My heart condition wasn't a life or death situation, but so many people are put in the position where they can't afford life-giving medication and care. When did we stop caring about people's lives or their quality of living?
I never knew before my surgery that I was so exhausted, since my heart rate went 180 several times a day without any physical activity, I was so tired. After I had my ablation I realized that I could accomplish so much more when I didn't have to take four naps a day.
Not life or death, but quality of life. No one deserves to have to go without cancer treatment to keep their family out of debt. No one deserves to have to feel pain everyday because they can't afford their medications. No one deserves to suffer.
