Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Remember Polio

In February, 1954, Jonas Salk led the first mass polio inoculation among 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders in about 20 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania elementary schools, including mine.  The list is below. We knew we were part of an historic field trial, and our parents were desperate. Just two years earlier 58,000 Americans got polio, thousands died and many more thousands were disabled. My brother, older by three years, was one of the lucky ones who got polio but did not suffer terrible lasting consequences. Others in his class were not so lucky.

I remember the long tables with white tablecloths and the nurses in white uniforms in our school’s gym. I remember the gym mats laid out for the “girls” – who were expected to feel faint after their shot. And I remember a sense of importance – that we little kids were brave pioneers.

Salk refused to patent the polio vaccine, famously saying "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” He is said to have given up potential piles of money in exchange for the attempt to eradicate this nasty disease with a cheap vaccine. However, there is some controversy around this, with some scholars saying that the National Foundation on Infantile Paralysis (later the March of Dimes), which supported the polio research, had already concluded that the vaccine couldn’t be patented.

By the following year this experiment was declared a success – it actually worked – and Jonas Salk became a household word – especially in households like mine. Salk was, like my parents, the child of uneducated Jewish immigrants. In a time when anti-Semitism and racism were openly practiced – for example, there were many neighborhoods in Pittsburgh where people of color and Jews were unable to buy property – Salk was a symbol of pride to the community. After all, “A 1954 Gallup poll showed that more Americans knew about the polio field trials than could give the full name of the US President.” (Wikipedia).

Albert Sabin, Salk’s arch-rival, developed an oral vaccine that was licensed in 1962. Savin never achieved the same rock-star status as Salk, although it was widely used around the world. The two got into an ugly dust-up apparently, but the important result is that polio is no longer the kind of threat described in the scary novel Nemesis by Phillip Roth, which takes place during a 1944 New Jersey polio outbreak. I recently read it in the car and was reminded how the timing of the vaccine preserved my generation and those coming after us.


The participating elementary schools, mine included, according to the Pitt Chronicle: “In February 1954, Salk inoculated first-, second-, and third-grade students from Leetsdale, Emsworth, Sewickley, Fair Oaks, and St. James elementary schools. Later that month, inoculations were given to children at 19 city schools: Arsenal, Belman, Bennett, Burgwin, Clayton, Colfax, Conroy, Crescent, Davis, Dilworth, Forbes, Frick, Fulton, Linden, Madison, Rogers, Sunnyside, and Wightman. In March 1954, students were vaccinated at seven parochial schools: St. Lawrence, St. Stephen’s, Holy Rosary, Sacred Heart, Resurrection, St. Basil, and St. George.”

From Tamiflu to Bacon

To recap: It was a week ago this hour that my writing students watched in horror as I came down with the flu in a matter of minutes. They fled, and Tuesday morning I went to the Dr for an inconclusive flu test. On Wednesday, when my fever exploded from normal to 101.5 in an hour or two, I paid my fuckin $95 co-pay for Tamiflu – the anti-viral that mitigates the disastrous influenza symptoms I wasn’t supposed to have after getting the flu shot months ago. So much for inconclusive. So much for immunization. So much for Medicare. Life is so drenched in lies.

“By the time you finish these 10 pills in five days,” the pharmacist told me, you will be over the flu.”  I cancelled all my work and settled down in front of the Olympics. Within a day the Tamiflu started to work. Each day I improved – there was a shitload of improving that needed doing – and last night I took my last pill.

This morning I woke up without the sense that a rodent was rotting in my mouth or that my gut was roiling with gangrene. I could taste my Yorkshire Gold tea. I could eat a yogurt without feeling repulsed.

I woke up wanting to write and I wrote. I worked on the back cover for my book Lillian’s Last Affair. I was able to talk on the phone. I grew bold and decided that, after being sick to my stomach for 5 days, I would go out and get myself any comfort food I wanted. Or, to put it more succinctly, I’d go buy a pound of bacon. I put on underpants and jeans for the first time in a week, a big sweatshirt over my pajama top, and actually drove to the supermarket. I picked up fresh vegetables, milk, and Ritz crackers (the only food that went down well over the week). I grew tired. I pulled everything out of my cart onto the conveyor belt, only to remember that I hadn’t bought bacon. I put everything back in my cart and, with difficulty, found the bacon. I headed back towards the register before I remembered I needed tomatoes and white bread for BLTs.

Now I’m home, too tired to contemplate my return to work on Wednesday, sitting with my BLT, watching the Olympics.

Someone who knows everything told me that the company that makes Tamiflu offered to just sell it to the government to give it to people cheap (like the flu vaccine), but the government didn’t take it. So did I mention that my co-pay on Medicare was $95?

Medicare Rip-Off (subtitle: I’m sick)

I’m teaching my Monday writing class and all is going well the first hour, but then in the final 30 minutes I suffer a sudden decline of health. Sniffles, headaches, an elephant sitting on my chest. My students notice, in horror, grab their notebooks and flee my cooties in all due haste.

On Tuesday I’m a mess and call my Dr. I see her at 11:00 and she checks me for the flu – many people are getting the flu despite having taken the flu shot as I did back in September – but the results are inconclusive. “Call me if your fever goes up.” I stop for chicken-soup ingredients and barely get my soup made at home before becoming too weak to eat it.

As my coughing worsens, I decide to cancel my Wednesday elder fitness classes – for only the second time in 11 years. That means getting some students to help me call 65 others. I have no voice, just some gravel scratching at my throat.

I barely sleep and on Wednesday morning my fever climbs from 99° to 101° to 101.5° I call my Dr and her assistant tells me to take Tamiflu – that they’ve sent the prescription to my pharmacy already. I call to check that it is ready and the pharmacist says, “You do know that the co-pay is $95, right?”

I call Coventry – the pigs who supply me with my Medicare Part D, serious rip-off artists. This is not my first run-in with this devil-masquerading-as-a-company. “Yes, it’s $95 co-pay,” the woman tells me after I have waited on hold for over 45 minutes. “Let me put you through to the Tier Exception team,” and I wait another half hour on hold, before giving up. I’m too sick for a war. And I’m too weak to drive. I decide to walk the two blocks to the pharmacy, since that only puts me at risk.

I feel like the tortoise in those commercials about tortoises preferring dial-up to digital. I walk a few steps, stop and try to breathe, before walking another few steps, my head lolling on my chest, my shoes dragging on the pavement. At one point, I start to flag and need to lean against the wall of a building. “You okay?” asks some man as he charges past me without waiting for my answer. “No,” I say too weakly for him to hear way up there ahead of me.

My throat is flaming, my lungs are struggling, my cough is off the charts. I need a solution. And if I didn’t have $95? If I didn’t have the strength to pick up the medicine?

My message: Medicare is nothing like I expected, having lived in places with a national health system, where there is a single charge across the board (like $10) for expensive medicines. Medicare turns out to be a complicated, convoluted, divided system which has handed private profit-making companies the right to rip-off seniors for their prescriptions and their “supplementary” insurance.

The good news? I get to watch hours and hours of Olympic skating without feeling guilty or being inconvenienced by such things as work or a social life.

Film Review: Nebraska

I liked the film Nebraska, not the least because of the kick-ass acting job done by both Bruce Dern as Woody Grant and June Squibb as Woody’s wife, Kate – both Oscar-nominated for their roles here. Bruce Dern plays a Korean War vet who gets and believes one of those scam letters “You’ve Won $1,000,000,” ignoring the fine print that notes the requirement to have a winning number. As he is no longer allowed to drive, he sets out on shaky legs to walk from his home in Billings, Montana, to Lincoln, Nebraska, to redeem the sweepstakes prize.

His son David (played by Will Forte)is a loser who works in a stereo store and who has just been dumped by his two-year live-in girlfriend because of his inert life. He keeps trying to stop his dad from walking to Lincoln, as the mother loses all patience. At last David agrees to drive the grizzled Woody, whose alcoholism and taciturn lack of cooperation turn the trip into a series of disasters. After Woody lands in the hospital, David decides they’ll make a stop in Woody’s old home town in Nebraska, where both June and David’s brother Ross (played by Bob Odenkirk), a local TV newsreader, meet them at the home of Woody’s brother.

Woody’s family of brothers prove that his monosyllabic, brusque, unresponsive relationship to the world is a family trait. The men are boors; their sons are bullies; only the women ever smile or chat.

Bruce Dern is rather tone-perfect as an aged, beat-up, emotionally petrified geezer, and June Squibb charms as his vigorous, straight-shooting, fearless wife. Only Will Forte lets us down a bit. He’s playing a character who has little wit and less spine, but Forte does it with an unrelenting depressed pout. His character is incapable of standing up to his father while desperate to win his favor. Nonetheless, it’s a shame Forte didn’t bring a spark, something special, to his pale character. Stacy Keach convincingly plays the film’s bad guy, Woody’s old business partner, Ed Pegram. And the lay-about cousins Cole and Bart are a gross hoot.

Much is trite in this well-done black and white film, in which family and old acquaintances all buy into Woody’s delusion. It certainly has no intellectual pretentions. The characters could serve as evidence of the emotional disability caused by the broken X chromosome, if one bought biological arguments, which I try very hard never to do. Nebraska provides some great giggles and ends on a predictable and optimistic note. Mid-westerners particularly “get” this film and I happily recommend it.

Here's the trailer: