Updates from Week of June 19: Japanese Wisdom for an American Life
Last Saturday, when finally my fridge ran out of prepared meals, a sweet member of my Boo-Boo crew made an original pasta dish with the ingredients I had at home. We were enjoying his cooking when I casually glanced at my phone and saw a message that my Aunt Sheru was in the hospital with a stroke. She is the beloved aunt who came to my rescue from Toronto and cared for me in my first few days out of the hospital. Sheru Aunty is like my second mother and, hands-down, my favorite family member. Though I could sit up and slowly use a fork with my right hand, I could not help her while she was slightly incoherent at the ICU that night.
Shortly after we got the news, my mother flew to Toronto. I saw my aunt improve over our WhatsApp calls. Talking to her children, my closest cousins, was a jarring experience. I know how devastating it is to see a family member in that condition. On this date last year, I wrote about how this side of the family lost another aunt, my maternal grandmother’s oldest child, Mohabbat Ben. Over the week, my mother became the main news source for my aunt’s condition while I also followed up with Sherr and her kids over video calls. Fortunately, my aunt is improving because she received good medical care right after her husband called for an ambulance. Nonetheless, I found myself hoping for faster relief for my aunt’s body and my sibling-like cousins’ spirits.
The overall experience has me thinking about health and life and the precarious nature of our existence. It’s so easy to take our health for granted. I remember the Japanese phrase, `Pin-pin karori,` which roughly means to live long and fully, then die quickly. During the years of my ramblings around Tokyo, I could see elderly Japanese living up to this expression. Watching a white-haired senior citizen cycling to the neighborhood vegetable or seafood market was routine. The Japanese elderly would even gather in public parks in the AM to do exercises broadcasted over the radio. The world’s largest senior population suggested there were health lessons right there.
I am the only member of my immediate family who did not enter the healthcare profession. My father was a physician. My mother has run a family medicine practice in Atlanta for nearly 20 years. Her desire to work in the profession drove her back to school while she was a recent immigrant (who was raising two young kids in America). My parent’s ambition for doctors in the family found its fruition in my sister, who sought an education in the Caribbean and later went on to practice at Emory and other hospitals. My other sister Masha works in a busy pharmacy and regularly deals with pharmaceuticals, sick people, and their insurance companies. Our family meals were a great place to glean the bumps and bruises of the American healthcare system. My recent experience as a patient at Grady Hospital sheds plenty of color on the stories around the dinner table. For even deeper insight, just less than two months ago, I attended a board hearing on the finances of the Fulton-Grady health systems as a Documenter.
Thanks to the insights of my experience, I purchased health insurance before I started riding bicycles in Atlanta. The traumas after my accident were partially lighter because I had the money to get health insurance before I purchased Luna (on credit!). In retrospect, next to the purchase of my red Prius, this was the second-best idea I had since returning to America. Modern medicine has revolutionized the way we live. The fact that I was able to get an entirely dislocated foot attached and have the hope for a 100% recovery is a testament to all the advances in trauma care. At the same time, modern medicine fails us in some places and ways. My situation now is a funny reminder of how I joked in at a few nights of standup comedy and moved to Japan to get great health coverage while working as a teacher in Tokyo. Of course, there are many other ways the American healthcare system fails. It disappoints the sick and those working inside of that system.
The news is full of commentary on American health care. Nearly one out of three bankruptcies in the United States result from the medical bills incurred over an unexpected injury. Our litigious culture and the back-breaking cost of American healthcare may be why several recent healthcare providers suggested I sue the guy who lost control of his bike on May 15. In our American system, many believe he should be financially responsible for the medical costs (and even the pain or suffering) I may endure. Away from fault and shoulds, there are other ways to become whole; some countries operate on the premise of universal healthcare. The externalities of an accident are born by a stronger social safety net. The money and profit side of American healthcare may rear up to explain why many doctors are unhappy or suffering a moral crisis (as the New York Times puts it). The criticisms are not new. Though it was years ago, I remember watching the Michael Moore documentary Sicko comparing American healthcare with the economically impoverished Cuba. I wonder: is an ideal healthcare system at odds with capitalism?
In the Japanese concept Pin Pin Karori, there is a recognition that quality of health is tied to lifestyle. In some contexts, these include what are called social determinants of health. Those elements include sanitary and safe housing, strong social networks, and preventive care. In America, while we boast a big flashy GDP, we have shifted away from providing these essential public good elements. That is, where people access care, have resources to enrich life, and are economically stable. I know that education and my background gave me privilege through my trauma. As an early career, I wondered what the global dichotomies in medicine and care. Life experiences and the anecdotes of my immigrant family show me the wonders doctors can do with minimal resources. In my brief brush with global health policy, I considered private companies’ incentives to study diseases not prevalent in the rich first world. As a world traveler, I quickly noticed lifestyle-related health problems, including obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Yet, my connection and work in indigent legal defense have also shown me the American poor’s inability to access preventive health care. For example, I have heard that the American Veterans Affairs system has considered sending its patients abroad for essential, expensive operations because those same procedures were cost-prohibitive in America.
After my wrist surgery, my friends joked that I could be a cyborg Spiderwoman. Actually, Wonder Woman is my kind of hero. Seductive, voluptuous, and demanding, she throws the lasso of truth around villains and gets accountability. I would tie the lasso around the members of the Atlanta City Council who voted to fund Cop City.
I wish to ask why the Well Star hospital system was shut down in the City, but a privatized military training zone is being financed with public tax dollars. This question is particularly poignant for anyone who travels to downtown Atlanta. For the nearly three decades that my family has lived here, as you approach the City, Atlanta’s neediest people sleep in tents, strung up underneath the roaring highways overhead. The spillover effect of our broken system is evident everywhere. It is enough to make you wonder what strange America my family worked so hard to join. People experiencing poverty are routinely ignored, untreated, and criminalized. Meanwhile, those who went down to speak their minds at City Hall can spread hammocks between trees and choose to sleep under the stars with goose feather sleeping bags along a lake or in the mountains.
Thanks for your comment and for following along! As a society, we ought to ask such question. For example, we have enough food calories produced to make sure no one goes hungry. Yet, the access and distribution makes it so that people go hungry. Similarly, we have resources enough for health, housing and education.