STRETCHED
MANY YOUNG PEOPLE ARE JUST ONE ILLNESS
BY MIA ISABEL LAZO
8
W I N T E R 2 0 2 6 • N O. 1 4 8
Photos: Adobe.
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ourteen years ago, on my last day of kindergarten before Thanksgiving break, I stepped out of my father’s car and straight into a sinkhole. My small body was scraped and bruised, and when my dad pulled me out, he did the only thing he could in that moment: He patched me together with Scotch tape and scraps of paper from his glove compartment. He asked me to be brave and go to the school nurse. As I watched him drive away, I burst into tears, not only from pain but from wanting to be held. It took years for me to understand why he reacted that way. He was working two jobs, and we relied on food stamps; we had no health insurance. His fear was not only for my injuries but for the medical bill he knew our family could not afford if he missed even a single shift. This past summer, 14 years later, I found myself in almost the same situation. After passing out one afternoon, I woke up with a fever of 105 degrees. For the first time since childhood, I was uninsured again, this time because my father had lost his job to cancer. I was living more than 300 miles from my parents, completely on my own, and the only medical provider in reach was a single for-profit hospital. For days, I tried to convince myself I was not sick enough to go to the doctor. I did not have money for an Uber, much less a hospital bill. Eventually, my symptoms became too severe to ignore, and I took a bus across town, dragging myself into the waiting room. Inside, every seat was filled. Mothers held their children in their laps, because there were not enough chairs. Staff had propped the main door open with a phonebook, because the line of patients stretched all the way to the entrance. In the emergency room, I overheard people talking about how many of them had traveled from counties with no hospitals at all. Many people had Medi-Cal, a California state-provided health insurance for lowincome people, yet they had still been waiting for hours. I sat in a plastic chair, dehydrated and shaking, crying from fear and loneliness until a staff member called someone to be with me. Hours passed. My IV bag ran dry more than once before anyone noticed. When a doctor finally located my chart in a pile of others, he told me I had severe sepsis and that if I had waited any longer, I would have died. My first feeling was not relief that I would live but dread. I thought about the cost. I thought about my family. I worried about losing my job. I wondered how I was supposed to build a future when a single medical emergency could bury us