Bad things

I just found out another friend of mine from school is VERY ill. Extremely ill. Should be in a hospital but was seen through the infirmary where they are barely competent ill. He is also in my lab. So that makes breast cancer, death, and acute severe illness all in one lab in about 2 1/2 months.

A few years ago when the university was considering cutting grad student health insurance, I would hear the phrase "grad students are a young and relatively healthy population" used so many times I wanted to smack someone. It was the context which made me smacky - that therefore we didn't need as "rich" a plan as the faculty or staff at the university. Let's look at my lab, which only has 6 students in it, as a small sample. Sharon put her arm through a plate glass door a few years back. Not intentionally, she tripped and fell. It resulted in a year's worth of treatment and two surgeries to reconstruct tendons which had been severed. She will have long term effects of this for the rest of her life, including neuropathy. My friend with breast cancer has been treated for thyroid disease for as long as I've known her. I had endometriosis, surgery and many treatments for it which themselves caused complications and more treatments, severe migraines, and neurolyme disease. I'm currently being watched for developing an autoimmune disease, and being treated for isolated symptoms as they come up. My friend who is very very sick right now has a congenital heart condition which increases the likelihood that he could go into v-fib and now is quite sick with something which could be contagious.

Young and relatively healthy my ass. If we were all 21, it might be a reasonable statement - but given that my lab's mean age is 28 this talk about a young and relatively healthy population is clearly nine kinds of bullshit. This is an age group where the early arrivals in terms of disease show up. Think about all the diseases which have as their onset age "child bearing years" and you've got my group. But we are also at increased risk of certain injuries and infections due to being still young enough to be more physically and sexually active than our 35+ married with children peers.

I just had to get that out of my system. Needed to rant. I feel so bad for my friend. He was so sick this week. He really should be in a hospital.