Some Thoughts on my Sister and Healthcare

Last night after dinner, I talked with my sister for the first time in a while. She is home for the week from Sacramento, where she is going to med school.

Being the future doctor in the family, she gets the honor of fielding every medical-related question or worry that comes to my mind. If my back is hurting or have had a sore throat and I'm convinced I'm dying, she gets a phone call. In a world where Covid is behind every corner, she gets a lot of calls from me. She says she doesn't mind, but I don't believe her.

Tonight though, the conversation drifted from Covid vaccines and my hurt toe to healthcare and the few problems that come with it. Most people know our American healthcare system needs some work. Every week there are headlines about the rising cost of drugs and people who can't afford surgeries or medicines that would vastly improve the quality of life. It doesn't make sense that a country as wealthy as ours can't afford basic drugs.

I wanted to get my sister's perspective on the problem. As a second-year student in med school, she no longer works on the front line, but she used to assist in clinics all across our county. A county in the Bay Area; an area that contains some of the wealthiest area codes in California and in the United States.

She told me how most health problems she saw could have easily been fixed, but so many could not afford it. They knew the procedures, the medicine, the referrals that would fix everything, but could not help them. She told me about a woman with type two diabetes who could not afford insulin. How if they suspected a patient of having cancer, they sent them to the emergency room because that the only way they know the patient will be able to afford help. She told me about how she had to memorize all the closest food banks because so many of her patients could not afford proper nutrition.

This is a half-hour away from Silicon Valley, where in the past two decades more millionaires were created than anywhere else in the world.

As I listened to her describe how much farther she and doctors had to go to treat these patients, I had to stop and appreciate my sister. She had always been a hero of mine. The work ethic she put into her sports and studies that allowed her to go to a top 20 university and become one of the best Irish Dancers in the world was always something I tried to emulate, and I know she will be a good doctor because of it.

But my sister is not going to be a good doctor; she will be a great one. Her dedication to caring propels her to memorize food bank locations so her patients can get proper nutrition. What keeps her studying for hours on end while the people she is studying to help protest health measures outside her window (she lives a block from the state capitol in Sacramento). Which allows her to patiently answer all my invalidated worries and stupid questions even though she's probably heard them a million times.

She is going to do big things. Both my sisters are. But especially now, appreciate your friends and family currently in health care. They are fighting a disease that much of the population doesn't believe in with a system that inhibits them more than helping them. Yet they still show up.