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Love In The Time Of Organ Transplants
PREFACE: Most of us will deal with chronic illness at some point. We no longer live lives brought to swift ends by epidemics, infections, traumas of childbirth, and accidents. From the nagging of arthritis in aging limbs to the life compromises of chronic pulmonary disease or the transfigured personality of Alzheimer’s disease, chronic disease is the price we pay for living long. Few of us would choose to return to the mortality patterns of the past, but living with chronic disease raises new and once unimagined issues. Eric Trump, who had kidney disease in early life, was given his "life’s encore" by a transplant, but he now faces a life of financing splendidly effective yet pricey anti-rejection medications. They are out of his reach without health insurance—an issue, he writes, that brought a novel problem into his life. Phyllis Richman’s issue isn’t coverage but invention. She provides a vivid description of her life with Parkinson’s disease as she waits for the next generation of therapy—and the long-hoped-for cure. Richman voices the concern of millions of patients with chronic and potentially terminal diseases as she questions how to improve the funding and focus of research to rescue her and others.
DESPITE WHAT FRANK SINATRA sings, love and health insurance might go together more frequently than love and marriage. For the millions of Americans without consistent or comprehensive health coverage, love might not always be the first consideration when crossing the threshold into married life.
The question of health care was and is especially germane to me. I was born with one damaged kidney; a day after my twenty-ninth birthday, my aunt Inge gave me one of hers. As I soon learned, surgery was the easy part—paying for blood tests and anti-rejection medications for the rest of my life would
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