It's Personal

I don't have the head--or the heart--to say very much to you this morning, Bush. Yesterday was a very intense, very pain-filled day in our family's life, and it left me feeling dispirited and disengaged. I watched the evening news without interest or passion. So Saudi Arabia joins the chorus of those telling Syria to get out of Lebanon. Big deal. Martha Stewart gets out of jail, a half-billion dollars richer. Yawn. I was only briefly angered by your own talking head, going on yet again about the so-called crisis in Social Security. You and your Frist, who did an abrupt about-face from his previous postion. A couple of days ago he announced that the matter would likely not reach the Senate floor this year--leaving debate and voting to an election year, when none of your Republicans would want to risk their political necks. You changed his mind pretty fast on that one, Bush.

But all that paled beside a day spent in the emergency room at our local HMO, where the medical staff were, for the most part, I regret to say, unhelpful, unfriendly, uncaring, unconcerned. I know how overworked they are, Bush, and how much pain and suffering they see each day. I sympathize. One nurse told me there were only three doctors on duty, and that they'd had sixty-nine cases to deal with. Which does not, to my mind, excuse one of the doctors, who sat in his office "doing paperwork"--the nurse's words--for a full hour after being paged (several times) to help my daughter suffering from an acute crisis of pain. Patients and their loved ones were standing at the doorways to their examination rooms, just waiting for attention, and the man was "doing paperwork." I saw him, Bush, through the little window set in his office door. For a whole hour.

When he finally deigned to put in an appearance, he was interested only in the medical facts, as he interpreted them, and not the least in the human suffering, the affect. I refuse to excuse him for having seen a surfeit of pain in the course of his busy week. Not a smile, not a caring word, not a comforting touch or gesture. Inexcusable.

So you see, it does get very personal, Bush. And when it gets this personal, the big picture loses interest, loses focus. You, Bush, have a whole medical system in deep crisis, and you choose to spend your time instead on Social Security--a looming crisis, decades ahead. I have a daughter in crisis now, today. And, as you like to say so often, Bush, it's hard work.