As Public Healthcare Collapses Around Us, The Fight To Access Medical Treatment Is A Personal Battle For Survival.

On the first of this month, I woke earlier than normal. I had to travel to another town to see a specialist about my lungs. A CT scan; done this past winter to detect cancer recurrence spotted fibrotic anomalies in my lungs. They have been there since at least 2020 when I was diagnosed with rectal cancer.

Unlike my bank balance, however, the scarring in my lungs has grown, which is worrisome if you want to live not only until old age but with a reasonable quality of life.

I haven't owned a car since Covid began because it needed too many repairs done to it. I was recovering from cancer treatment, and walking was good for my recovery and mental health during a time when the pandemic ensured my life was a solitary one.

I don't live in a 15-minute city, but I can find all I need within an hour and a half ramble around my town. However, to see the doctors who monitor my health requires me to utilise public transit because my city, like all cities now, has experienced a shortage of medical professionals to keep citizens in good order. Finding a healthcare provider to keep ourselves alive, thanks to neoliberalism built in bias for the rich, turned ordinary folk like me, into nomads moving from region to region to be assessed, treated and perhaps healed by a diminishing number of doctors, nurses and other medical professionals.

Sadly, public transport, like public healthcare and public education, has atrophied with the same haste as the muscles of the bedridden. How could it not? Top income earners hijacked democracy to serve their needs before all others- while regular voters aspired for their room at the top. They aren't going to get it, but like players of the national lottery, the underpaid live in deluded hope their skill set will be valued one day.

 I was fortunate an inter-city bus service exists to take me to my appointment, thanks to Canada's Federal Government's Carbon Tax collected from automobile drivers at the gas pump and then disbursed to large and small municipalities to build better public transport for their communities.

My bus driver, as well as fellow passengers, although enjoying the benefits of this carbon tax didn't acknowledge its utility to them but instead spoke about life in conservative talking points. "There are plenty of jobs, people; just don't want to work." or "His sister was extremely left-wing if you know what I mean." I thought I don't actually, but presumed he meant; she insisted on putting plastic in the recycling bin.

Under other circumstances, their political illiteracy and pandemic denialism as they were maskless would have irritated me.

Not on that day; it kept my mind from traipsing down a path of despair and worry over my looming meeting with the specialist.

I was tired of ruminating about whether the scarring in my lungs was to be a hasty killing of me like pulmonary fibrosis had done to my brother or perhaps I'd be allowed a bit more time to enjoy drawing breath.

What I do know from personal experience and observing the chronically ill or those soon to check out from the hotel of existence; is our spirits are as raw, scraped and bloody as the fingernails of a man clinging to the side of a building waiting for rescue.

I've been around people in poor health for most of my life. I was by my mother's side as a four-year-old when for months, she tended to her best friend who was dying of leukaemia during a spring when Richard Harris singing MacArthur's Park was AM Radio's number one hit. My mum's friend, a practising catholic, was so outraged by her dying, at 34, that on her deathbed; she refused the last rites- offered to her by a priest.

We all want to live as long as possible. My mum's friend did, my mother did, my brother and even my father when he approached his end at 95. But that lust for life has become more difficult for many because the infrastructure that keeps society civilised; was monetised to make more wealth for the entitled class.

To me, that was the elephant in the room when I arrived at the office of my lung specialist. He read out all the previous ailments my body had endured. I told him in Roman times, I'd have been called Co-Morbidius.

But that litany of chronic illnesses and diseases I have so far survived, coupled with no social safety net, makes it much harder to battle the issues going on, in my lungs. There just aren't the physical or financial reserves left to "once more onto the breach Dear Friends," with my gusto from before.

The Respirologist assured me I am not under any immediate threat of extinction. This is primarily because he is still uncertain about what type of interstitial lung disease I have, or whether the scarring is caused by another disease like Rheumatoid arthritis.

The last summer of my sixth decade will be one of tests, CT scans and uncertainties. Come autumn, I will have a bronchoscopy to make the final determination of what ails me.

My life will be dramatically cut short, but I've been in arrears with good luck since cancer came to court me. Yet, before me- is still a glass half-full. I should have enough time to complete the final four books and conclude what began in April 2010 when, the opening of what became The Green and Pleasant Land was written.

 I was born on February 25th, 1923. The winter of my birth was harsh. The night my mum went into labour with me, a fierce rain slashed against my parent’s rented domicile, located in a slum on the outskirts of Barnsley.

What my dad and I set out to do- all those years ago- was preserve a true working-class history and story about ordinary people who lived in extraordinary times that built the Welfare State to make democracy for all of humanity

As always, thank you for reading my sub stack posts because I really need your help this month. Your subscriptions to Harry’s Last Stand keep the legacy of Harry Leslie Smith alive and me housed. This month is proving to be real scramble to get next months together. So if you can join with a paid subscription which is just 3.50 a month or a yearly subscription or a gift subscription. I promise the content is good, relevant and thoughtful. Take Care, John