Being poor and sick in America

I will never forget the first time I heard her voice in the university hallways. “Are you from Cape Town?,” she asked. I stopped momentarily, because that familiar-sounding accent brought back a flood of memories about South Africa. When I turned around, I saw a tall, middle-aged lady with a smile, reminiscent of the African sunshine in my former homeland, beaming at me. This was the beginning of a decade-long friendship between two lost souls in the heart of Manhattan. I quickly learned that Lady M., as I will call her, had been through a lot of ups and downs in her life. She had been diagnosed with an insidious oral cancer that eventually required surgical removal of part of her tongue, rendering her sounding like a female version of Scrooge McDuck. Lady M. did not let her condition get the better of her. She became a mother figure, who dispensed advice along with recipes for how to make tarts and stews based on the produce on offer at Jack’s World and other cheap emporiums in Manhattan. Visits at Lady M’s place were filled with laughter, stories and trips to the local bodegas to search for the Hispanic equivalent of South African staples such as Marie biscuits (a cookie with a hint of vanilla, best consumed with tea) and Milo (a Nestlé chocolate and malt powder product that we liked). She showed me tokens of her youth as a South African lass born to Scottish parents. I learned about the influence of friends on her formative years and about how she had cared for her aging parents before emigrating here. 

While her cancer was in remission, we could both ignore the elephant in the room. In many respects, Lady M’s story was similar to those of others in households all over New York; however, she faced the added burden of being poor and without health insurance in a country that regards this item as a benefit and not a necessity. The first sign that her cancer had returned was marked by slurred speech and pain in her jaw. After finally securing insurance and consolidating her medical records from various institutions, experts confirmed her worst fears. The cancer had spread and this time it would be fatal. It was ironic that she was the one that ended up comforting the few people that knew her. Lady M quietly started preparing for her own death. She withdrew from the few friends that still kept in contact with her. Gradually her speech became incomprehensible. People would automatically assume that she had a mental disability when she spoke to them. So she learned to get by with a pen and paper.  

And then she died, not registering a blip on the radar of thousands of passers-by in the busy city. In reality, dying of cancer is not as sanguine as euphemistically portrayed on television. People are not always fortunate to be surrounded by loving families or live in fancy houses. Sometimes people fight, because they want to live or they have someone waiting for them. Sometimes people are poor, they have no one and in the end the fight against bureaucracy and to improve the quality of their lives prove be overwhelming. I salute those people. May their struggles remind us of the human component of the financial equation in the search for effective, affordable healthcare for all citizens.