Running on Empty in America

Welcome to this week's section of American Nomad, journal of a traveler.

I ate my last meal on Sunday afternoon, a basket of crispy chicken wings swimming in a puddle of transparent barbecue sauce at the tavern in Imnaha, Oregon, a remote town more or less unchanged since its inception in the early 1900’s.

Now it is Thursday afternoon. Not surprisingly, I have begun to think more about food than other questionable exigencies of living, such as sex and the unique, if banal, complications that being an underemployed writer presents. Droughts of intimacy can be survived, but things get gnarly in the absence of currency.

Since I am now back in Bend, Oregon, where the autumn air is redolent of prosperity and there are at least twenty-five shiny Mercedes Sprinter vans worth a quarter million bucks to every battered Honda Civic, I could take my chances on the purchase of a didgeridoo and get to busking downtown among the affluent shoppers who love a good act. Riches are in the niches, goes the cliché. Unfortunately, while I am passionate about music I’m afraid I have no talent for creating it. Staying in my lane of aspiring paid writer will have to suffice.

The wings were surprisingly good despite the transparent sauce and the radical geographical distance of Imnaha from the nearest bougie eatery aspiring to elevate this staple of proletarian cuisine to fine dining. I couldn’t resist. I ate every one them, slapping away the grimy hands of my deer hunting buddies who, unlike me, had not skipped breakfast or midday beverages. Robust men such as they are, they could endure privation alongside my lip-smacking delight or order up their own sustenance. This is frontier country, I thought to myself privately, and like good frontier American males it is each man for himself! Why break with the presiding philosophy of the mythical uber-individual here and now? If there was a shootout on the dusty main street of Imnaha, I didn’t want to get laid horizontal on a partially filled stomach. Eat or die, as a mentor of mine once said.

But trouble was brewing. I’d been experiencing gastrointestinal upset, a euphemism for you can imagine what, since I’d finished a course of thumb-sized amoxicillin pills a month previously to treat a recurring ear infection. That infection went away, only to be supplanted by a much worse and potentially dangerous one in my solar plexus, which happens to be the seat of my soul because it’s adjacent to the belly, and my soul absolutely loves all things good food. Yet even the soul has no choice but to accommodate biology. Since I’ve been in Oregon, I have personally taxed more than one gray water system. Much as it sucks, my current fast is necessary. Obviously, as a country we excel at overeating, and given that a sense of purpose increases personal longevity, I’m doing my level best to address this national problem.

When the cramps registered at a plus eight out of ten on the discomfort scale and I almost puked bile from the terrible pain, I decided it was time for a trip to the emergency room. This was no laughing matter. I had tried to tough it out, stupidly, like an uber-man of yore, a pattern of avoidance of reality that I’m working on dismantling. The thing is, as a cancer patient, I absolutely dread more tests, more invasions of my body by cold metals, needles especially, and questions from nurses and unfamiliar doctors, because I can’t ever fully shake the scary possibility that any loss of homeostasis is a barometer of my disease. In short, I’m scared to suffer and to die, so I procrastinated seeking medical assistance in the hopes that my body would heal itself.

It didn’t. The intense disturbing industrial busyness of the emergency room became unavoidable; the needles jabbed in my damn arms unavoidable; the goddamned terror of uncertainty unavoidable; the exposure to radiation from another whirring CT scan and the hot sticky feeling from the contrast ooze they put in your IV unavoidable; the need for more treatment and more medicine unavoidable; the humiliating navigation of the American health care system unavoidable; the acceptance that I cannot work all week when I need to work unavoidable; the frustrating lack of energy illness curses the sick with unavoidable; the increasing sense of being a person marginalized by disease and the cost of care unavoidable.

The doctor was kind, if inscrutable, as highly intelligent reserved people are often. He sent me home with a fecal exam kit, which I did proud. Then I waited for the lab results to come in, crossing my fingers that my symptoms were due to a bacterial culprit rather than something more ominous like an autoimmune disorder. My good uncle reminded me, astutely on his part, that I had better get better because a lot of people who love me were counting on it, a sentiment which went a good way toward eliminating the above mentioned sense of marginalization. The risk of being sick in a nation that has conflated productivity with value is that the need for help can feel like a moral shortcoming, a badge of shame, a sickness unto itself.

The results came in the following day: bacterial. At the pharmacy, I forked over a sizable, for me, hunk of cash since my Federally-issued insurance wasn’t good enough, a conundrum of economics that could and does prevent others of less fortunate situations from getting the medicines they need to just fucking survive here in the richest nation in the history of nations.

The pharmacist, a Black woman, asked me hesitatingly if I was informed how much the prescription cost. Doing her level best to meet me eye to eye, I noticed the hand she held the bag of pills with begin to shake. I replied no, that I was not informed, that I had insurance (useless), that I had no choice but to pay out of pocket since as a blood cancer patient a bacterial infection is deadly serious. I was very gentle and patient, but even still, I could sense her growing anxiety. Another pharmacist stepped into her cubicle space, explained what the medicine does, I paid, and off I went, popping a pill as I exited the hospital.

What was that all about, I wondered? My guess is that the system, wherein you either have the means or the insurance or both, had one too many times presented this woman and who knows how many people in need with a problem of our own blessing and manufacture: that being merely human in America doesn’t entitle you to help. How many sick people had she been forced to deny access to their prescriptions because of policy? How many scared, desperate people had let loose their anger at her? As soon as I noticed her hand begin to shake, I wanted to reach across the counter and hold her brown fingers and say, “Thank you, and fuck those pricks who insist that this is the only way.”

Other than coffee and water and an occasional bowl of bone broth with a tablespoon of funky miso rolled into it, I’m running on empty. Evidence is mounting that fasting allows the body to repair damaged cells; the ones it can’t heal, it destroys. And I need to heal. I’ve got people who love me, who would gladly pay for my medicine if I couldn’t. As pissed as I am at the greed bags who lobby in government halls all over this amazing nation for maximum profits, as much as I’d leap at a chance for some warrior justice with them, I’m grateful that I have a good chance of fully recovering because there is a first line of defense available to me.

And it’s available to me because I have been lucky. Too sick, yes, but still lucky. Like I said, there are people who love me. A few days ago when it felt like a dog was chewing on my guts, I was aware of this supreme privilege. Maybe some day our healthcare policies will match the earnestness of our hearts, and this country will find itself the paragon of human rights it claims to be constitutionally.

It’s an idea worth fighting for.