I checked her throat today. I know what's coming. The fever's there. The strawberry tongue. The tonsils that look like pre-historic rocks. And this time her asthma's got a jump on her. Strep? We'll see. That's my guess. Usually doesn't start off with breathing treatments, but this round is starting that way, whatever she's got. She just finished on the nebulizer, with the puffers, nasal spray, and with a nasal swab of zicam in hopes of it just being a virus.
Well, I guess we don't say "just" a virus anymore, do we?
And the only thing rolling round my head is fury. Fury that next week I lose my health insurance benefits that I've worked my ass off for the last five years to have. It's business. It's a down economy. We've explored other options. These are facts, but they're not truths. The facts don't upset me. I don't begrudge the facts anything. I can do business with facts. No hard feelings on the facts. And I mean that.
The truth, however, is that until human beings bypass these institutions, form their own networks, with caring inherent in the links among me and you and him and her and them, we're all one sad lot. I believe the move toward caring commerce is already happening. When I'm not tired, gearing up for child sick days bound to follow the next few days, I see it all very clearly. Staking my future on it, so to speak. But more about that another time. I do have more to say. Not now.
In the mean time, when I look at that sad little face with the circles under her eyes, the mask over her mouth and nose with steam bubbling through the plastic holes, I understand what somebody once meant when he said corproations aren't human, they have no heart.
