HIllbilly Heroin in the Year of Health Insurance
A Strange Story from the Far-Off Year 2000
Back in 2000, Bill Clinton was such a bad president that even I, whose highest level of education was obtaining a GED, had a great-paying dot-com job. It was a time of high wages and low rent in New York City and I was a writer for a company that owned a series of comedy websites. The job took me forty-five minutes a day to complete and, to the point of this story, gave me the best health insurance plan you’d ever heard of.
For me, health insurance acts more as a magic totem. For some reason, I have serious medical emergencies either right before or right after my period of coverage. After I was fired from this dot com job, I decided to let my insurance lapse due to the COBRA payments being almost equal to my unemployment payments. I had been let go during the summer and had decided that I wasn’t going to even look for another job for a couple of months.
The next day I shredded my hamstrings from overworking them at the gym. For a full year straight I had spent the generous lunch break I gave myself to work out for two hours every day without stretching first. It was to be another year before I could walk, or extend my legs, without pain.
This story happened the summer before. I was at a friend’s beach house in Connecticut and I noticed that my finger was swollen right under the nail to a genuinely alarming degree. By the time I was on the train home, the finger under the nail had swollen to three times its regular size. I got back into Manhattan at two in the morning and went straight to the Mt. Sinai Hospital Emergency Room.
My insurance was so good, I got to see a doctor straight away.
If you don’t live in the U.S., it might seem a bit obvious. “Of course, you went to the hospital with a medical condition, and you got to see a medical professional for medical care. What kind of third world medieval nightmare would the United States be under any other system?”
Emergency Rooms in this country act as a place for those who can’t afford or who legally can’t obtain insurance or afford to see a doctor to receive sometimes basic healthcare. And while President Obama’s Affordable Care Act alleviated the worst of it, in the late 1990s hospital emergency waiting rooms were famous for being great places to catch up on things you always meant to do – read Moby Dick cover-to-cover; knit an entire scarf; build a civilization and watch it crumble into dust three generations later.
But like I said, my insurance that year was excellent. I was called in almost immediately, and I was treated by an intern, a nice young fella who told me that the swelling wasn’t anything to worry about, it was just an infection under the nail and that he was going to prescribe antibiotics.
Then he said, “I’m also going to prescribe you a painkiller. What do you want, you want some codeine?”
And I said, “I don’t know.”
Then he winked at me, pointed, and said, “Don’t worry, we’ll get you something good.”
He then prescribed me a month’s worth of Vicodin, with two months’ refills.
This was the tail end of the 1990s, after all, and the only people who really understood the long-term harmful effects, not to mention the short-term harmful effects, of what is now affectionately called “hillbilly heroin”, were the pharmaceutical scientists, manufacturers, and reps who pushed the drugs, along with the doctors who handed them out like candy.
And indeed, Vicodin is a top-shelf painkiller. It kills pain caused by infections, caused by thinking, caused by feeling emotions. In fact, the only pain it doesn’t kill is the pain caused by not having Vicodin in your system, and within a week the window between taking the pill and feeling its effects had grown alarmingly short.
By the second week, I had to give it away to a friend who was excited to try it. The next day when I asked how he’d found it, he told me he took one pill and flushed the rest down the toilet because, and I quote, “That shit is the devil.”
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