Once Upon a Time in the East Village, When I Didn’t Have Health Insurance
Because nothing says “quality care” like a nurse telling you it’s “probably not AIDS.”
I found a journal entry from August 2005 that reminded me of a fantastic time in my life when I didn’t have health insurance, and I was dependent for my health care on a sliding scale clinic in the East Village.
This was, of course, back before the East Village became a fun place to transform the money your grandfather made building a hardware store empire into cocaine snowballs and $5k/month apartments.
I’m just saying, I don’t love my HMO right now. But I’m also grateful that my health care routine doesn’t involve waiting until payday, walking into a supermarket with a hundred-dollar bill next door to my doctor’s because the clinic wouldn’t make change, so I’d have to drop the bill into a bucket on a rope. And then the supermarket manager would haul it up to his loft office and then lower my change back down in the same bucket. Because the last guy who had his job had been shot.
Here’s what I wrote twenty years and one month ago:
I went to the clinic yesterday to get my strep throat checked out, and the first thing the nurse told me was this: "You probably don't have AIDS."
Which is interesting, because when I walked in I wasn't thinking "AIDS." You don't usually walk into a doctor's office like, "Hmm, my throat's a little scratchy. Feels like a touch of the AIDS. Or maybe the flu! Better get that checked out."
How do these medical professionals deliver actual bad news? “The good news is, you probably won’t need to live in an iron lung due to having polio. The bad news is it’s diabetes.”
I walked in thinking it was clearly strep throat. And now I have to think that my scratchy painful throat, swollen glands, and difficulty swallowing might be an indicator that there’s a slight, but serious, chance that I could have AIDS.
Or even scarier, that maybe i’m not getting the quality of medical care that you’d expect from a clinic that charges me $15 a visit. Even I, armed only with access to WebMD, a website that keeps trying to convince me I have cancer, know it isn’t as serious as AIDS. Probably.
I compiled a list of other things the nurse could have said that would have made me feel better about the quality of care I was getting than “probably not AIDS”:
* "Wait a second, I thought YOU were the doctor!"
* "Nurse, get in here. You gotta see this!"
* "Okay, so now get dressed and then you do me."
* "Sounds like a case of the Mondays! Or tuberculosis! Take two Cathy comic strips and call me in the morning! LOL! But seriously, it's probably tuberculosis."
* "Looks like this brave little soldier's an angel-in-training!"
* "Okay, so the good news is that your teeth aren't going to be hurting you much longer..."
When I first got sick, a lesbian friend offered to marry me so I could be on her health plan. At the time I thought it was a funny joke, but now I'm wondering; how do you propose to a lesbian?
"Hey, haven't you ever wanted a lifetime of sexless joylessness? Or how about joyless sexlessness? Why should we deprive our kids of the years and years and years of therapy WE enjoyed? It’ll still be better than 75% of most American marriages."
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That East Village seems like some weird good/bad memory now.
I heard "Wait a second, I thought YOU were the doctor!" in Groucho Marx voice. Ha!
I don't know if it was better, but it was simpler.