when we are receiving hospital care, we are all DEMOCRATS ; when it comes to paying for that hospital care, we are all REPUBLICANS

 Do you recognize anything of yourself, or that of friends & relatives, in some of my medically-oriented potted biography ?

I have been in hospitals as a PATIENT many dozens of times over my 70 years - thankfully only twice overnight. The worst was when I was 18, after I got Strep A related glomerulonephritis (kidney disease) so bad that one of my chemical imbalances was so literally ‘off the charts’ that it broke the mechanical recording pen!

 Since my brother had strep related Rheumatic Fever and my sister strep related Scarlet Fever, I was an extremely worried patient, particularly as my mother also had a strep infection that damaged her kidneys. In her case, it was bad enough to give her life-long life-threatening kidney disease and hyper high blood pressure. 

I knew, even as an 18 year old, that  there was some genetic connection to these severe auto immune reactions to relatively mild strep A infections.

Mostly as a result of my mother’s severe illness, I got used to sometimes being one of those PARENT-close relative-close friends who have a high emotional involvement with the patient being visited.

Yes I admit it, many other times, my hospital visits to see others involved little emotional involvement.

And at all times, I was an emotionally involved (cross-torn ?) PAYER of others’ hospital bills. In my province, the sale tax which is on pretty well everything but the air that we breath, is nominally assigned to pay our provincial health costs. In Canada, our income tax paid also has a big chunk handed over to additional pay for health costs.

Emotionally involved as a payer, in the sense that health costs are our governments biggest single expenditure and none of us likes to see so much of our our hard-earned pay going on possibly wasteful hospital spending.

In my case, unlike our Republican voters to the south, I don’t resent my tax dollars being spent on colored folk who “don’t bother to put enough aside to pay for adequate private hospital insurance”.

My resentment, instead, is mostly directed towards those Canadians who smoke, drink, take drugs or indulge in risky behaviour in their sporting activities !

I have never been a hospital administrator, where any personal empathy towards sick and dying people is usually dissolved by an overriding occupational need to prevent the hospital from going into bankruptcy by spending too much...on those sick & dying patients !

But I have been a political candidate, in fact once I ran solely to protest changes in hospital administration - so I have had to publicly stake my career on my public opinions on hospital costs. So yes, at times I have very much been a penny pinching hospital bill payer.

Most of us have donated on behalf of someone sick or dead we were close to - a few of us have also pushed a cart about, or danced with patients, as a hospital volunteer. (I have done all three.) We sign donor cards (me too) or donate blood (not yet).

But quite a few of us have got even closer to the very sick and dying, as a front line health care PROVIDER. And very few of us don’t have some close friend or relative that aren’t or were nurses or doctors.

In my case, my mom was a hospital lab tech and my youngest sister a certified nursing assistant. A cousin was a doctor, another cousin’s kid is about to become one. Among my in-laws, many worked throughout the entire hospital system from cleaner or laundry staff to emergency ward nurse.

I myself was a psych nursing aide, a ward-level front line provider, for four years, in two mental hospitals, on six different types of wards : locked quasi-forensic, severely disabled ‘children’, geriatric, open, acute admission - even in the ‘hospital’ (physical issues) ward.

Your emotional involvement naturally tends to be constantly high with patients who are largely admitted because of their emotional issues : deaths were rare but they do happen and you feel them intensely in patients you have gotten to know very well over the years.

In all of my four ‘medical’ roles : PATIENT-PARENT-PAYER-PROVIDER, I have always been heavily cross-pressured : helping people in need versus cutting costs.

I am always the person most scared when watching TV : its a family joke. I feel tremendous empathy for each and ever character right down inside my bones. This excessive empathy is both a curse and yet a blessing, as a writer.

Like you, I find myself always wearing four or more hats on pretty well any major decision I must make.

So, for instance, while I don’t mind my tax dollars going to be spent on me or my mother as the patient, but I do resent it when a distant in law isn’t willing to pay a taxi to the hospital because Veterans’ Affairs pays for an very expensive and very unneeded ambulance instead.

However, my empathy, my ability to sometimes think like a life-saving Democrat and sometimes like penny-pinching Republican, I think, will serve me well as I attempt a history of wartime penicillin ( and yes, and even WWII itself) as largely an internal conflict between most humans’ empathy for others in need and most humans’ reluctance to put themselves out much to help others, if it costs money, time or physical discomfort and danger.

So this will not be the classical explanation of WWII as a clash between Good and Evil.

This will be an account of WWII that sees the bulk of humanity was morally well intentioned but morally fundamentally lazy.

My tale will be the clash between being morally well meaning and morally lazy : a conflict not just limited as being between individuals in all sorts of nations, Allied Axis & Neutral, during WWII , but also a conflict within most of us, all of the time.

So, if in each very different book chapter and micro-drama (DRAM), I seem to take the side of the protagonists involved in that chapter, it is not an ‘act’.

I have held all of their various views, albeit perhaps in a very muted form, at various times of my life...