I depart from the sort of writing I have been doing lately,
even from the style that I have adopted because I feel obliged to do so ...
whether or not the effort I am about to undertake will bear fruit. It is that I
am going to be away for a period of time that ranges somewhere between a few
weeks and a longer duration depending on several factors … but that's not the
story. The real story is that the system of universal healthcare we have here
in Canada
is one that no person on this planet should be without … and I have good
reasons for saying so.
I have always tried to avoid talking about myself or the
family, but I must say a few things now to illustrate the points I am trying to
make. There was a time when a man working alone could support a family of
seven, paying to send five children to private schools from kindergarten to
college, including private tutoring when needed, and the flying lessons for the
one that grew up and became a pilot. I must say, however, that I broke from
tradition and chose to go to public school for one year just to see what it's
like to be in a public school in Egypt.
And you know what, my friend, none of that would have
happened if one of us was stricken by a catastrophic illness. Life as we lived
it would have been different if the illness that I caught more than 65 years
ago had developed into something more serious than it turned out to be. I
caught malaria as a toddler, and the symptoms kept returning three years in a
row at Christmas time before they vanished for good. Now a septuagenarian,
something happened just before Christmas that caused me to spend the holiday in
hospital. It is the kind of catastrophic illness that would have ruined the
family had it happened long ago, had it not been in Canada where there is universal
healthcare.
I knew I had a problem a few months ago when I was running
out of energy, and was getting short of breath when making even a small
physical effort. Seeing my cardiologist once a year, I waited for the day of
the appointment to tell him of my condition. He thought that ten years after my
quadruple bypass, a blockage could have developed, and that I may need a stent.
He ordered a series of preliminary tests before going for the more definitive
angiogram.
That in itself would not have been catastrophic except for
the fact that the preliminary tests indicated the presence of pulmonary
fibrosis. I will have to undergo a biopsy on both lungs to determine exactly
what that is before a remedy can be prescribed. And then, something worse
happened just a few days later. I lost as much as half a liter of blood to the
toilet bowl. I went to the hospital where they checked the stomach and found
nothing wrong there. They checked the colon where they discovered a growth,
later confirmed to be cancer.
That's when all the other tests were put on hold till I
undergo the cancer operation which will see half of my colon taken out. A
determination will have to be made after that as to whether I should first go
for the lung biopsy or the angiogram. Treatment for either or for both will
follow, something that will require months of care at a cost that would have
broken the budget of any middle class family.
This is why it baffles me that a country like America –
having the potential for giving its people the kind of peace of mind I am
enjoying at this time as I go into this thing – and not giving it. Even as a
child, I could sense the anxiety that the adults around me felt every time my
situation worsened. Would my mother have to go to work? Would we have to go to
public schools? We had a car in the 1940s called Ballila, and then a Vauxhall
later on; we also had bicycles and scooters. Would we have to sell all these
and learn to live without them?
I can imagine the anxiety that people in America feel
every time someone in the family falls ill. And why does this happen? There is
only one explanation; it is that some people believe in the dogma which says it
is okay to make money off people in dire need of something. And there is
nothing more dire than seeing a member of the family getting worse and moving
closer to death. Universal healthcare will do away with that, replacing it with
the peace of mind that will rob the rapacious of the leverage they have to suck
the blood of the desperate before ordering the blood work that will indicate
what remedy they require.
Capitalism ceases to be capitalism when it relies on the
exploitation of those it can compel to make it rich. This is where America stands
today, and this is how it lost its capitalistic edge to newcomers who
understand capitalism as well as did the old American generations, and better
than does the new one.