Friendly neighborhood sick person weighs in on health care debate.

When I used to freak out about losing my health insurance/access to care, not being able to afford medicine, I always pictured my parents losing their house to pay my medical bills. It was the greatest loss imaginable. In the past months my catastrophizing has changed. Now, my mother won't sell her home, cash out her retirement. I fantasize about dying from lack of care. If my cancer comes back, if I can't keep my job, if I lose my insurance and I can’t afford to get treatment--I won't seek care. I'll die of my illness.If anyone every told you I'm stubborn they weren't lying. I indulge this fantasy of martyrdom to my hard-hearted country.I need to express the psychic weight that the debate over who deserves what coverage burdens me with. Watching the monetary value of my continued American existence up for debate just a few miles from where I live. I cost healthy people too much. My debility or poverty disqualifies me, abdicates rights I thought were mine... life, liberty, something else... but yea, life. Not that.In my hospital we have special education high school students working as volunteer helpers. Not everyone welcomes them. They are different people and require a slight adjustment in communication. They require accommodation.They came to the hospital to work with assistance of a career coach and the support of our unit manager. They are kind and interesting, alike to most young people. Tremendously helpful, alike to most young people. Restocking supplies, lending a hand to grab a wheelchair or a drink for a patient, going to the waiting room to track down someone's elderly family member who won't answer a cell phone. They complete tasks that keep everyone in the unit moving forward. Days that I’m swamped, they keep me afloat.The myth of the productive citizen baffles me. I've met a lot of people. Strangers coming out of anesthesia tell me dark secrets. No one conforms, not all the time. We are a big interdependent mess. To define productive and make it the measure of value is a terrible effing idea. This ideal of a completely independent working class American is at the core of the repulsive rhetoric I see daily.What we are capable of is influenced by what we are told we are capable of. The political dialogue, a demoralizing debate over who is worthy of access to care, corrodes the potential of the precise people that have renewed American greatness again and again. The striving poor, immigrant, person of color, victim of circumstance. The young. Mounting arguments to deny the very poorest, the sickest, the youngest among us the scant safety net of Medicaid and strip us of legal protection to not be discriminated against due to sex and preexisting conditions, is undeniably passing judgement on who deserves healthcare. These groups of people, my people, have no chance to acquire health insurance without the protections set in place by Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. To be without insurance is to be without access to care. The message is this: you are uncared for. To be perfectly clear, you are left for dead.The health care debate is deeply personal. The abandonment of my cause, my cause being the pursuit of a productive and healthy life, by so many of my fellow Americans. My president, my representatives.Since my diagnosis at age seventeen I kept my lupus a secret from most. A learned behavior from my father who shared the same diagnosis. He came of age in this country, a sick person in a time before the Americans with Disabilities Act. The fear of being found out, losing out on educational opportunities, jobs, insurance.I lied on my college applications. I lied on my job applications. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but there is a box to check for "I may require reasonable accommodations" i.e.--I have a disability. NOPE. Nope. Per dad's advice, cross that bridge if you come to it. You don't need accommodation. You can pass. I can pass for healthy. I've never had trouble getting a job.But I was ashamed. Sneaking around in the shadows will do that to a body. Fearful of being judged as burdensome. A waste of the world's resources.To experience the birth of the Affordable Care Act and its protections after a labor so long and fraught was elation. Immense validation. I was hearing from the highest office in the land that my worth, my potential, was not degraded by chronic illness. It's no coincidence that it was in those heady days I returned to school and became a nurse. I chose a challenging career in a field of service. I was pushed, encouraged to dedicate myself to progress personal and political. In no small part because of the leaders of my country put all the chips on the table to codify the belief that health care is a human right.Since the ACA passed, I've checked the “accommodations” box. When I go to an appointment, I don't lie. My coworkers no longer think I am hitting the dentist’s office monthly. I can pass, but I need everyone to know what a disability looks like. Which is, in my opinion, human. The messages that came from President Obama, from my representation, from advocacy groups all over the land made me feel like it was okay to exist as I am.Permission to exist is a powerful thing. It isn't hyperbole to say that the Affordable Care Act is my own civil rights legislation.It despairs me to hang on as the pendulum swings against it. But hold on, it matters. Keep saying it, no matter how ridiculous it feels to say, children and women and the sick and the elderly all deserve equal protection under the law. Our nation, and me, well... our lives depend on it.PS- Somebody make me a bumper sticker that says "KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF MY OBAMACARE"