Pain

I am amused when I find myself wanting traditionally "adult" things, take root canals for example, today I had one, it is my second and hopefully last, but in the days leading up to it I found myself really looking forward to the procedure.

This is because toothaches hurt like hell of course, as I write this, I am on my third Vicodin of the day, can't open my mouth all the way without pain even with the painkillers, my jaw aches constantly, and the size of one of my teeth has dramatically changed (it will be capped on Monday)

I feel physically and mentally better than I have in months.

I spent the last year up until today eating mostly with on side of my mouth, resigning myself to flashes of intense pain whenever anything cooler than body temperature was ingested, and having to deal with food getting stuck in the gaping hole in my molar. That is all over, the discomfort I feel now is temporary and I know it will pass. There is a massive difference between temporary and chronic issues that I probably still don't fully get, but have an inkling now. I didn't even realize how much living with something like a toothache effected my life until it stopped, and the change was instant.

I am pretty lucky though, I have decent insurance and a living situation that allows me to put money into my mouth, I also had a problem that was fixable. It isn't that way for a lot of people, and I hold in awe those I know personally who function and even appear to manage to enjoy themselves on occasion while enduring what I am pretty sure is a lot worse pain on a daily basis than I have had to deal with at my worst.

Like everything, pain is a political issue, those who are making the rules these days don't understand it, the powerful cannot conceive of a world where you have to make a choice between a root canal and rent, they can barely even understand that tooth problems can happen on that scale because regular preventative care is something that they take for granted. They don't seem to get that the poor can't afford to be healthy. Which of course means they don't understand how pain can drain energy and lead to all sorts of other problems

Take the person who works a forty+ hour work week at a minimum wage job, they are able to pay rent because they share a house with four or five other people, but they also are the only consistently employed person in their household, thus the lions share of expenses fall to them. They have a chronic pain issue, perhaps it is spinal damage, or a bad knee, or their teeth, it doesn't really matter what it is. They can't afford treatment and simply maintaining coherence saps their strength, so when they come home they are able to feed themselves (usually) do a few chores, and then go to sleep so they can do it all again in the morning. Even if they could save money one month, they know all it takes is for a roommate to lose a job, get hours cut, or simply flake out and spend their rent money on beer or something and they will need to use that money to make sure they have a place to live instead.

In this situation fixing the problem they have learned by necessity to live with falls to the bottom of the priority list, but even if they can live with it, it still effects their life, chronic pain sufferers commonly end up with mental health issues like depression, and their physical health decreases too, so they spend the occasional day or more having called in, assuming they work in a job that lets them of course, otherwise they drag themselves to work and it takes that much longer to get better. Pain generates its own extra costs even if nothing else changes.

This isn't an uncommon scenario, I would guess that a majority of  you who read this know, or are, someone in a situation very close to this, those at the top of the power structure have no idea, and along with the other problems, chronic pain and the health problems that go along with it, make having energy for activism pretty difficult if not impossible.

The only solution is reducing or eliminating health care costs, the ACA helps, but to those on the bottom, it still isn't enough, the insurance companies have too large a hand in setting prices and policy, and the poor don't have enough money or power to be worth pandering to. Free health care along the lines of Canada, the UK, or hell even Cuba, is the only way to fix the problem and raise the quality of life for what are probably millions of people. That requires money though, and the poor don't control the money, and very little of the power, so here we are. For now.