For Lee

Why this tumor wasn't found before now, I have no fucking idea, except that she was fucked out of her disability payments, and therefore had no access of Medicare or Medicaid nor REGULAR proper MRIs & CT scans. With a disease like Neurofibromatosis, you can NOT wait around for the symptoms to show up, because then it's too late. And because this strong, determined, bright and titanium-ovaried young woman was too independent and too energetic to stay home and stay down, because she TRIED to work part-time, she may lose her life.

Seems fair, don't it?

That's "compassionate conservatism" --- fuck the poor people, after all, as Dumbya has been quoted, "People are poor because they're LAZY," right?

I know that there are billions of other issues going on in the world right now, and I am so grateful to my fellow Mark Of The Beast bloggers for continuing to cover them while I'm on this mission.

But for me, personally, as I sit here at home and allegedly "recuperate" from my surgery, and watch the Murkin sheeple spend themselves into the hole for the annual "allegedly christian holiday consumerism orgy", I can't help but stay pissed-off.

Pissed-off that all the strides that have been made, just in MY lifetime, have been turned back, "re-assessed", annihilated, all in the name of republicunt greed. Pissed-off that, as much and as often as I have bitched, moaned & complained about the pathetic-and-sadistic-as-hell state of Louisiana public "healthcare" (poor people aren't "people," they're GUINEA PIGS, and this was WAAAAYYYYYYY PRE-KATRINA!!!), that IT'S STILL GETTING WORSE, EVERY FUCKING DAY. Yes, there are brave volunteers and pioneers in NOLA, attempting to provide real healthcare to the few actual NATIVES who are left (as opposed to the white-flight yuppies who want to re-populate the actual city with more republicunts, as ordered by Karl Rove), but up here, north of Baton Rouge, poor people are still fucked.

I'm tired of being so terrified that my friend is going to die.

And I don't just mean a sudden, "painless" death, either.

I'm talking about the kind of death that makes you hate Rush Fatfuck Limbaugh even more, knowing what giant gelatinous pieces of shit like him have done to deny REAL PAIN RELIEF to REAL PEOPLE WITH REAL MEDICAL DISABILITIES AND REAL TERMINAL DISEASES --- if Lee dies, if we didn't catch this shit in time, if we can't get the money together before the applications go through, it's going to be slow and horrible.

It's going to be humiliating, torturous, and pure hell for Lee.

Imagine becoming a 99-year-old person with every imaginable "old person" disease all at once, along with a GIANT FUCKING BRAIN TUMOR. Would YOU give up your personality, your memories, your intelligence, your very control over your own body, if you had the choice?

I don't want Lee to have to choose between becoming a vegetable and trying to find a Kervorkian solution.

And hell yes, I'm doing all of this for purely selfish reasons.

I want this young woman to be a part of my life and on this planet for a very long time.

And this is how I know how to get shit done. We did it last year for Katrina evacuees, we can do it again. But we gotta do it NOW.