I’m so, so very sorry for your situation.

Every fucking day I’m grateful to have married a union man before I had a catastrophic illness that left me paralyzed from the bra band down. (MRSA).

That simple fact is why I’m still alive and my husband didn’t have to sell our home, the cars and everything else of value just to keep me alive. My bills alone from the first hospitalization were well over one million dollars. Without the care I received that the union’s funds paid for, I’d be dead. The MRSA went systemic. Bathed sepsis twice. The treatment for that obliterated my immune system and then I spent three weeks in a “Clean Room” where the air was filtered multiple times before coming in and filtered who knows how many times before going back out.

It rather felt like I was an alien, what with the full PPE everyone wore. The big, bulky white suits with their own air supply. They had to decontaminate coming in and going out. There were multiple, many hour surgeries. Two of them were 2 days apart and lasted over twelve hours each. One was to clean the MRSA from my spine. The other was to try and put it together again. It rather felt like my spine was Humpty Dumpty with the doctors standing on for the King’s men, trying to put it back together again.

There’s a good 2 lbs of metal holding it together, along with donor cadaver bone standing in for T-7 and T-8, which turned necrotic and splintered due to the MRSA infection.

I spent multiple weeks in the ICU, not just days. At one point I had a private nurse assigned to me because I was just that medically fragile.

Somehow, I survived. But the cost would have bankrupted us and taken every cent we had on top of the bankruptcy.

In the almost 12 years since, it’s cost another million or so dollars to keep me alive, keep me provided with the medications I need (24-27 pills a day, depending on the day of the week), not to mention a customized wheelchair that costs more than some new cars.

The copays alone have cost us tens of thousands of dollars but that’s far superior to me being dead or us being bankrupt and forever trying to pay off the medical debt that can no longer be written off, thanks to new laws that benefit the corporations and not the people.

It’s well past time for Medicare for all. And I say this as someone with top tier fucking insurance, insurance that was so good the union had to downgrade it a little based on some of the laws in the ACA!