I live in Oregon.
I have been on Medicaid since before the Affordable Care Act, back when the Oregon health Plan first started.
And in the past I seldom felt angry at my doctors or at the healthcare system.
I figured I should be glad to have healthcare I could afford on next to nothing.
But since unmasking my ADHD, since lining up all the medical stuff I have personally experienced since 2020, and dealing with the changes in my doctor's office over this time, well, I have begun to feel angry.
Some of this is simply the bad luck of my last four years; a foiled album release followed by Covid lockdown, getting Covid and then Long Covid, followed by relatively little meaningful Long Covid coordination due to massive understaffing; ; and now living with the results of all of that foced inactivity and watching my body age and slow down so badly; and finally the ADHD diagnosis and all of that. The last four years have checked off a host of boxes for me with increasingly negative results all around.
I know I need to walk in gratitude, and I make a heroic effort at that every day for so many reasons. But I find that with every medical disappointment or setback, I am now feeling angry, too.
Angry, older and forgotten -- by my government, by healthcare agencies who tell me to stay where I am because it wont be better at any other practice taking Medicaid patients (and it may well be worse), by all the people and organizations that have the power to do better, and which haven't been.
So tonight I am not feeling especially grateful for the dregs which have constituted a great deal of my healthcare since 1985.
(Note: I have to say that the only doctor who has been there for me consistently this whole time has been my gastrointerologist, who has fought for me to get the meds and procedures I need because he knows how challenging a life with Crohn's can be.
He's a freaking rockstar and I am truly grateful for him.)
But what do I do with my anger when I am too exhausted to take to the streets, and when I feel pretty certain that my efforts to reach out to my elected officials will be meaningless because the world is too big and the means to make it better are too small?
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