Love in the Time of Corona

With inspiration from Medicare for All à la française

Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike and Urban Everesting)

My wife Martha and I come from opposite ends of the blood pressure spectrum. Perhaps her growing up in thin air, 12,000 feet above sea level, resulted in an atypically normal low blood pressure, averaging 100/60. I envy her! I have essential high blood pressure: medication required.

Her pressure never measured higher than mine. Never. But on May 12, 2020, I did something stupid, triggering a role reversal in our relationship. In a moment of absent-mindedness, I took my calcium blocker med for a second time, same day.

After discovering my dangerous error. I rushed to my computer. Every internet advice site shouted: “Go to the emergency room,” but that was a no-go place during the pandemic. What could I do to stop the inevitable blood pressure plunge?

I tried to hold it off, but eventually it took the express down elevator. I avoided fainting by sitting down and resting my head between my legs. Martha was alarmed: “You’re pale as a ghost!”

Which was better? Going to the ER, risking Covid-19, or having an easier death at home, by passing out and “not being there when it happened,” as Woody Allen termed the ideal death.

Martha brought me a double espresso, which temporarily raised my pressure out of the death zone.

She had her own condition, treated by a cardiologist. Her echocardiogram had come back “looking OK,” as the cardiologist said over the phone. Except, for the first time in the 20 years of blood-pressure monitoring, Martha’s pressure zoomed up to where her systolic (the upper number) was nearly twice as high as mine. I was frightened for her, and she was frightened for me.

In the history of role reversals, this was one of the greats. As if Mercury had switched to the outermost part of the Solar System and Pluto orbited nearest the sun. Or if the Baltimore Orioles led the American League East Division with the Yankees at the bottom.

Maybe Martha, out of solidarity, was keeping the average pressure between the two of us at an equilibrium, by raising hers to compensate for my all-time low. No spider could have woven a more perfect yang-yin symmetry.

Masked Man

With the ER not an option, we telephoned a French healthcare service called SOS Medecins. For the first time in almost four decades, we both needed a doctor at precisely the same moment, for a condition in total reverse of our essential biology. If this were fiction, the critics would slam it as far-fetched.

The intake operator took down our notes and sent a doctor to our apartment. While we waited, he connected us to a second doctor, in case immediate phone advice could avert a catastrophe.

Love Triangle

The masked man from SOS Doctors arrived in a half hour, just before my habitual homage to Monk’s “Round Midnight,” and we greeted him with our masks in place. No handshakes of course, but even without contact, he exuded humane compassion. It was a love triangle: Martha, me and the French single-payer healthcare system.

He examined us meticulously and then assured us that none of the nightmare scenarios we’d read on the Internet were going to happen. He shared some useful advice, including a medical specialist referral, and then he was on his way…but not before we paid him.

If you reside in the USA, how much do you think this post-midnight medical home visit cost us? Do they even do home visits in your city? Do you have to look up your deductible between fainting spells? Even if you’re lucky to have insurance, what if the particular ambulance company you locate is not covered?

Our bill was 80 Euros each. It would have been 25 Euros if we’d chosen to have our crisis during work hours. We paid with a credit card. The doctor filled out two forms for us to send to the French Social Security for our partial reimbursement. Since this is a single-payer system, there’s only one payment-reimbursement system. The bureaucratic savings from having a single payer redirects billions of Euros from wasteful paperwork into real health care.

After the masked man departed, we shared a moment of hearty laughter about the bizarre reversal of our systolic dialectic. Such a catharsis could not have happened without the tranquility and security of being able to call a doctor with no fear of going broke.

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