The uninsured: One man's anguish

(Photo: Jim Gupta-Carlson)

A year ago, the man’s name didn’t fit.

He tended bar at Galeria’s restaurant on Broadway, and yes, he was in pain. But he’d lean against the bar for a little relief. He wrote off the pain that shot from his back and down his leg to the occasional case of sciatica he suffered.

It would get better, Larry Anguish thought. And besides, he had no health insurance.

The economy was going south, and the bartenders were the among the first to feel it.

Tips were down. “I was barely scraping by,” Anguish said. So he took Ibuprofen and saved the money he would have had to spend out-of-pocket for the rent.

The other afternoon, Anguish was leaning against the wall outside the Deluxe Bar & Grill smoking a cigarette.

He leaned on a crutch he uses to hobble around on his walks. He needs to get out of the house, he said. “What am I supposed to do? Stay at home all day? That’s a recipe for suicide.”

Home these days is a cot in a friend’s closet, anyway.

His voice still has disbelief in it. “I’m 36 years old, and I need hip-replacement surgery.”

He is depressed and bewildered.

There was a march a couple of weekends ago for universal health care. He didn’t go. He couldn’t.

He could have had he been insured. But then he could do a lot of things. Such as work.

His is one of those there-but-for-the-grace-of-God stories you hear if you spend enough time in bars, a story about how life can go downhill fast. So fast it’s hard to believe.

The anguish is even more when it was so easily prevented.

Anguish is at the bar. He’s not much of a drinker, but he’s there for the company. Patrick, the bartender broke his foot in a fall a couple of years ago. Insurance is a foreign concept in the restaurant industry. But he found a surgeon willing to donate an operation for free. He was lucky. He moved briskly around the bar.

For Anguish, though, the pain last year kept getting worse, he said. He says he lost his job during the snowstorm. The buses weren’t running from Queen Anne. He couldn’t walk up the hill.

The better days are frustrating. He’d managed restaurants in Florida. “I used to work six days a week, 12 hours a day,” he said. He used to handle “happy hours” with ease. Now he can’t stand long. He can’t even sit long. And so he’s unemployed. “I used to exercise a lot. I’m bursting with energy, but I can’t do anything.”

Finally the pain got bad enough. He swallowed. He asked his parents for help. X-rays were taken. They showed that his hip was fractured and had fallen toward his pelvis.

The condition was something called Avascular necrosis, which inhibits the flow of blood to a certain part of his body – in his case, his hip until it weakened and eventually broke.

He’s been walking around this way for months.

He has no money for surgery.

He has a vague idea that there are problems out there, and he’s gone to the Department of Social and Health Services. With the loss of his job came the loss of his home.

“I’m technically homeless,” he says. Mail from DSHS was returned because his name is not on the lease.  There may be help out there. He says he’ll look into it more. But it seems unlikely that relief will come any time soon.

And there are too many days when it’s hard to do anything at all.

So he pops Ibuprofen. And he limps along, hoping he’s not doing more damage.

But he has to get out of the house.