My trip to Walgreens and a distant memory

I met a patient one day when I was still an ER tech whom we put into the cast room; an appropriate choice because he was dying of bone cancer. I've smelled bone cancer. It is so singular I can still call it up, 10 years later, at will.

He was black and had five children and a wife and they lived in a car together. But now he was in a hospital in Prescott Arizona in the cast room smelling of bone cancer and it was close to the end of the line. Homeless, and soon his children would be fatherless.

I remember this man, living - and dying - at the farthest margins of society and I think of the lady I met at Walgreen's today who showed me the way to the eyeglass screws.

"If we go to group health, those screws cost $10 each. Here," she said. "This eyeglass repair kit is only $2.99."

I was in a good mood today. I didn't bother to tell her how many of my friends would love to be able to complain about the challenges of group health, but we live on the margins - we like it there, to be honest - and on the margins, there is no group health.

On the margins, cancer can kill without a lot of grace.