I'm visiting some dear friends of mine this week, and all of us have at least one disability. While we were eating breakfast this morning we were discussing the impact medication has on our lives.
I was sharing how difficult everything was for me when I had moved to a new city where the cost of housing was much more expensive and I couldn't afford medication. Over the course of the year, my energy deteriorated rapidly. First I couldn't keep up with my job, then I couldn't keep up with housework, then I couldn't keep up with basic hygiene, and eventually even chewing and swallowing became difficult. Sometimes walking to the train, I thought about lying down on the side of the road and how long it would take before a cop would force me to move. I wanted to die but I didn't even have the energy to figure out how.
My friend asked me if I had chronic fatigue. I don't know, because I was never diagnosed. I don't claim it because right now I'm very functional. I can keep up with hygiene, cook, clean, do work, and even exercise! But this is only possible from the combination of four different medications. Right now, I am extremely fortunate in that I have much of my medical expenses covered by my wife's health insurance that she has through work. I pay $415 USD every month for these things I need. I can never take this for granted because I know so vividly how difficult it is to survive without them.
It is perhaps evidence of my own self-absorbed perspective, but my own experience of going without medication (feeling first terrified and then hopeless) has made reading about the Israeli strategy of destroying healthcare infrastructure in Palestine particularly vivid and gutting to me.
I remember reading the book From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine and absorbing some fraction of the devastation described by the essay "We Have Lost the Ability to Provide True Care: Three Doctors' Testimonies from Gaza." In this essay, Dr. Reda Abu Assi wrote: "We have lived through seven wars. In each war, we lost coworkers with who, we had memories. In each war, the medical services we were able to provide to patients deteriorated... We have run out of many life-saving drugs; we live on medical aid from abroad, and if it runs out, we have nothing to offer." That was written in October 2023, almost two full years ago.
When I was recovering from surgery earlier this year, I started texting with a guy in Palestine named Fadel (@fadel-dani). Like me, he also struggles with fatigue. For him he has an actual diagnosis--thalassemia, a blood disorder. Like me, he relies on medication for basic functioning, but his medicine is even more expensive than mine-- the equivalent of around $470 USD every month.
A few months after that essay "We Have Lost the Ability to Provide True Care" was written, Fadel experienced firsthand what Dr. Reda Abu Assi described. He survived a bombing of his home, and when he woke in a hospital, he learned they did not even have the supplies needed to remove the shrapnel from his body. They told him that he needed to get to a different country for urgent surgery. He set up a campaign to raise money for it, and had it vetted by @gazavetters (#197) and 90-ghost.
A lot of people follow this blog, and I have been trying to help him to get eyes on this campaign. I think about how isolated and defeated I felt when I couldn't afford healthcare, and it breaks my heart that he is experiencing something so much worse.
It's been so long since then, and he has only been able to raise €15,129 (around $17,700 USD) which is no where near enough. In that time, everything has only become more scarce and more expensive. He can't even think about the money from his fundraiser going to surgery, because he spends every month trying to figure out whether to spend the small amount of donations on his medication or on food.
He is in constant chronic pain from the shrapnel in his body, and he is so exhausted he is constantly dizzy and nauseated. I think about how suicidal I was the period of time I was so fatigued, and then I think about how minuscule my experience of exhaustion and hopelessness was in comparison to what Fadel is living with. The worst year of my life would literally be a relief to him in comparison with his current life, and he has no reassurance that there's any end to it. I truly can only imagine the enormity of exhaustion he feels every day.
The only thing that gives him a little bit of hope that this misery might end for him is receiving donations. Every donation reminds him that someone in the world cares that he's suffering and that there are people who believe he matters and deserves relief. I can't convey to you the difference it makes, even a single person caring enough to send a small amount.
If my words inspire any empathy or compassion in you at all, please donate something to him this week. Literally even a single dollar or euro makes a difference. You can do that. Leave some encouraging words in your reblog of this post or in the tags. I need to know someone is reading this and cares.
