Guaranteed Healthcare

I was in 7th grade when my father was away receiving advanced job training for his life long work on heavy equipment. He fell to the ground with a grand-maul seizure and with-in three days had brain surgery on his newly discovered tumor. Brain cancer was a hard diagnosis for a man who had barely suffered the common cold or flu. My step mother forced to decide whether or not telling her husband that six months to a year would be a best case scenario.

Months of chemotherapy and radiation were miserable but the cancerous activity vanished from the MRI, and we thought we'd been granted a miracle. Side effects of these aggressive treatments and the mere trauma that the body endures, however, made the years we were granted fill up with many other complications.

Every hospital stay and prescription comes with a price tag and social security/disability do not quite replace the thirty five years that had been severed off of a working man's savings and retirement. Being a life long workaholic who is now home-bound and terminally ill played a large part his long term depression. His wife was forced to quit her jobs to become the full time caregiver. The house's deterioration grew along with my father's advancing dementia and withering pride.

My dad's last days were filled with worry of the burden he had been to us and the debts he would be leaving behind; but he always tried to fill each of us with praises he felt he did not deserve. I watched my father's 16- year battle end at age 53. We watched him be so strong through his fight and knew that he tried to provide a good home, with security, for us. My only wish was that he could have left us, believing it was true.