When Falling Apart is a Luxury

You don’t learn how deeply broken our health care system is until you really need to use it. It is one of the places that points a glaring finger at income disparity in this country. I should know because I can’t afford my own healthcare. The cost of insurance alone that comes out of my husband’s paycheck severely limits our budget. And I get that it covers a lot. It’s better than not having it. But not really when we still can’t afford to live regardless of how much we “save” by having it.

I realized sometime over the winter that we were in an untenable spot because I’m trapped by my health and trapped by my income. My job certainly has a high earning potential. But I’m not in any condition to build my business beyond what it is though I was trying to do just that so that I could compensate for the medical expenses that kept piling up. But that meant having scheduling flexibility of someone who couldn’t afford to lose any business within a given month. But the results are that I’m not able to focus energy on my family the way I’d like to. And I’m not in a position for allowing the proper self-care I need to maintain my quality of life. So, when I had no choice but to ease up a little bit without warning, there were some frightening financial ramifications.

BAM! MS is real. And I can’t work 40 hours per week. I have no choice but to heed my body’s warnings. Because if something were to happen to me and I had to stop working for any period, we have no way of financially weathering it. Being Gen-X I’ve worked since I was 15, as much as I could and have never, ever considered slowing down or stopping for any reason up to this point. I’ve spent the past couple of months feeling like a complete failure. But I couldn’t NOT recognize that we needed help. And since I’ve done my damnedest to cover up the fact that I needed help, I melted down on my bestie over a barrage of texts last week that might very well have seemed like it had come out of left field. “I don’t have the luxury of falling apart.”

She “listened,” like good friends do, to me go on about how people raise money for sick people and their medical bills all the time. But since no one really knew I needed the help at all because I refused to admit that I did, the thought of starting one of those crowd-funding things for myself seemed pretty damn tacky. She offered to do it for me because she knows how stubborn I am. And in the end, I realized that this would be a good lesson learned about being humble. Because I desperately needed to buy myself and my family some time to regain our footing.

I typed up my story, and sat with my finger on the button of the GoFundMe page to make it go live, I hesitated. When I realized that this affected more than just me and that my husband and children were going through this crisis with me, I sucked it up and put it out there, asking for only what I absolutely felt we needed. And when within the first 48 hours we’d hit nearly 30% of our goal, I was overcome with gratitude for those who not only donated so generously but those who supported me with kind words and prayers as well as those who boosted the signal for me by sharing. I wanted to thank all of you for giving me the luxury of falling apart, just for a little while because you were there to catch me.