Life Support

In the past week, two people I know have asked me to help them with medical costs for their children. One woman texted to ask for $14 because her four year old daughter was sick with a bad cough, and the other woman called me at 11:30 p.m. because her newborn son was in the hospital with diarrhea. She could not pay for the dextrose that was keeping him hydrated. Neither woman wanted to have to ask me; they’d rather pay their bills by themselves. However, a mother’s desperation and passion supersede what the mind wants.

The week before that I was in a government hospital with some friends of ours who live near a local landfill. A one year old girl who lives there was diagnosed with TB. Fortunately, the Philippine government provides free medicine to TB patients, but to be so young and to be inflicted with a relatively complicated disease just doesn’t seem fair. On top of that, the line to see the doctor was easily a 5 or 6 hour wait.

While medical costs in the western world do bankrupt families, those costs often reach into the thousands of dollars. And entire volumes of books are devoted to the deconstruction of healthcare costs in some of those western countries. However, the difference between life and death in the majority world may be a matter of $10 or $20. Rarely does it involve insurance companies or any paperwork beyond writing your name on an index card. I commented to Dave that it is hard for me to imagine what it would feel like to be unable to pay a medical bill that seems so small to me, especially for my child. This is not a new revelation -- I’ve experienced it over and over. Even though we live on the generosity of others, that generosity affords us the luxury of seeing a private doctor ($7-12) in the Philippines when we are sick.

So what does this mean? I guess I’m still learning that compassion is a lifestyle. Compassion has the capacity to change everything we know about ourselves -- how deeply we can love, how much we can give, how fully we can accept, how interdependent we ought to live.