Sick of America

Sonya Huber

Sonya Huber‘s books include the anthology, Nothing Compares To You: What Sinead Means to Us, co-edited with Martha Bayne; the essay collection, Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook, finalist for the 2024 PEN/Diamondstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay; and the writing guide, Voice First: A Writer’s Manifesto. She is also the author of the award-winning essay collection on chronic pain, Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System. She teaches at Fairfield University and in the Fairfield low-residency MFA program.

Sick of America

Every time I open a bottle of pills to refill my pill container, I have a shiver of a thought given courtesy of the United States: what if I lose access to this particular pill? I have health insurance, but that status is never guaranteed.

Long ago, I stood at a pharmacy counter under fluorescent lights on a late night, crying at the counter with no money and an exorbitant tab, asking if I could buy one pill. Pharmacists are heroes who know all the tricks, and they see our lives and our pain. The pharmacist, of course, knew how to dispense and charge for one pill, and I’m sure they went home as shaken as I was.

I have done what we have to do: having providers fax approvals and requests to the corporations who make the pills for their charity care donations of medications. I have had generous providers raid their samples cabinet and come back with handfuls of branded boxes.

I am so tired of being ill, but I am more tired of the disability that is lack of air from being strangled by a net of red tape and dollar bills, this illusion of healthcare that is really about profit and punishment, the two things that the United States does best of all.

I think of my alternative self, who shimmers in another country with universal healthcare, who has never known that terrible pill-cap feeling of “what would my symptoms and life be like if this were cut off?” I want that shiver to go away, and I can’t measure how much that shiver contributes, in a never-ending cycle, to stress and chronic illness itself. This country is a pre-existing condition.

Here, we must say “thank you” and “what a privilege” when we have health insurance. We must dip our heads and know that what jeopardizes our employment might risk our very lives. The Republicans in particular love that fear, want to grow it until everyone cowers in fear for their lives, as it has been here since before the country was founded on the backs of enslaved people who feared for their lives, who died in pain.

And the only argument that the Republicans can come up with is that the wait times to see a provider in Canada are too long, when everyone knows they’re worse here. We’ve been waiting for care for centuries. We build circles of community care, crip compassion, because there is nothing else.

I do not resent people getting care elsewhere, without the shiver of blame and shame. I am comforted knowing that only six countries on the globe do not provide healthcare for their citizens, because I think of rest, the people who can go to clinics and get something, and I know this is our collective destiny: to care for each other.