THE ATLANTIC: Living Sick and Dying Young in Rich America
"It's not just that Americans are getting sicker. It's that young Americans are getting sicker."Living Sick and Dying Young in Rich America
Chronic illness is the new first-world problem.
LEAH SOTTILEDEC 19 2013, 9:01 AM ET
We were standing at Target in an aisle wed never walked down before, looking at things we didnt understand. Pill splitters, multivitamins, supplements, and the thing we were here to buy: a long blue pill boxthe kind with seven little doors labeled S M T W T F S for each day of the week, the kind that old people cram their pills into when they have too many to remember what theyve already taken.
My husband, Joe Preston, shook his head. Do I really need this?
I grabbed it off the shelf and threw it in our basket. And when we got home, Joethen a fit and fairly spry 30-year-old man with a boss-level beardstood at the kitchen counter, dropping each of his prescriptions with a plink into the container.
I guess its true that life is full of surprises, but for the three years since Joes crippling pain was diagnosed as the result of an autoimmune disease called Ankylosing Spondylitis, our life has been full of surprises like this one. Pill boxes, trips to the emergency room, early returns from vacation. Terms like flare-up have dropped into our vocabulary. Weve sat in waiting rooms where Joe was the only person without a walker or a cane. Most of our tears have been over the fact that these arent the kind of surprises either of us thought wed be encountering at such a young age.
But heres the thing: We recently realized we werent alone. Almost all of our friends are sick, too. When we met our friend Missy Narrance, Joe found solace in talking to her about his health. Shes 29 and has been battling lupus and fibromyalgia for the past 10 years. Shes been through chemotherapy twice, and her daily symptoms are so extreme that she was granted federal disability status when she was just 23 years old. In our close group of friendswho range from 25 to 35 years oldwe know people with everything from tumors to chronic pain. Sometimes our conversations over beers on a Friday night turn to discussions of long-term care and miscommunication between doctors.
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Link from: http://www.ageofautism.com/2013/12/the-tragically-hip-chronically-sick-americas-young-.html
Warpy
(111,270 posts)because most of us had really horrible health conditions. And those that didn't seemed to develop cancers.
The stereotype is of old folks is that they sit around talking about their ailments and operations. Now it's the younger people who have had to neglect their health because Nixon and Reagan fucked us over by favoring corporations over people, leaving us with health insurance that didn't insure basic health care needs.
Chronic pain is really the big one now, most people reporting they go through their days in varying levels of pain thanks to a combination of the war on drugs with poor access to decent care.
Decency is what is most lacking in health care today. Ending the drug war would be the biggest step toward restoring it.
KT2000
(20,583 posts)Autoimmune diseases were called the silent epidemic a couple decades ago. Reading the environmental health literature - Environmental Health Perspectives in the US and foreign journals, especially from the Scandinavian countries will give the reader the clues to figuring out why this is happening.
People like to say that our life expectancy is increasing - but that can only be said of the current elderly population. The next generation, on average, will not see such long lives'
Viva_La_Revolution
(28,791 posts)and now he's looking a life of chronic pain. this really sucks.