Despite two insurance plans, Odette Oliensis and her husband Gabe, a former aerospace engineer, have eaten up much of their life savings on rising premiums and co-payments.
Both plans refuse to pay for medications. After the chemo, my prescriptions cost me $18,00 in 1991. I take Interferon, a mild from of chemo three times a week. Gabe has to give me my injections. One doctor I went to, he charged me $210 a shot. If Gabe gives it to me, it costs us $24.
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So Un-American, Or Is It
Odette Oliensis, worked as a nurse in doctors' offices for twenty years.
Two years ago, she discovered she had multiple myeloma.
Her husband, Gabe, has written hundreds of letters to legislators
across the country, asking for help: a cap on rising premiums, on
drug costs, intervention with social security disability. Every letter
I write, he says, I hope will be the Open Sesame. I don't know if it's
going to work or not, but I'm going to go down fighting.
I. No accident they met at the Empress
Theater, at the movies, surely this life
had been run before, how else the ease,
Bonsoir, good evening, she'd said, and
her eyes, lit from behind, like mirrored fires, and
that feeling never left us, he said years later, gone on
forty years, too long to be married to the same girl,
and Beethoven's Pathetique rolling his fingers
on the piano
it was a good life, this life we built together, years
I worked as a nurse, building a future for myself,
a solid one, she who always put fifty cents in the bank
for every dollar I earned, and so it was
II. Until the sores, the serious sores in her mouth,
her dentist found, referring her for bone marrow
biopsy, and it had already turned, I think
you call it, number three stage, the most
advanced, she was totally out, out of my mind,
walked out, I couldn't, just couldn't hear it, I'd
never been sick in my life, the doctor telling her
bone marrow cancer, multiple myeloma, four
months to live and when she started chemo
banquezine and the deadly dexadron,
Oh God, I wish nobody that, to be mangled
like clothes in a washing machine, wanting
she said, to stay home and die, until yes, she
began again, determined I will lick it, knowing
there is no cure, she would, as she'd taken life,
take bull-death by the horns, I can live a few years,
a fairly good life
III. Looking back, she's been preparing for this
somehow all her life -- la catastrophe -- the solid
insurance plan, the money in the bank, face it,
I am she is, slipping down some hollow end
what shift, what world is this, this
feels so Un-American, or is it --
years paying insurance that doesn't insure,
doctors -- thirty percent care, the rest
care more for money, savings she
worked a lifetime to build, torn down
in one year, and social security, denied --
you're 59 , you make too much money,
come back when your savings are all used up
and Gabe in the living room launching letter after letter
- Frances Payne Adler, © 1993