Sixteen Years Ago
June 12, 2009, my life was forever changed. Kaiser Permanente administered a Gadolinium-based-contrast agent (GBCA) injection during an MRI, despite it being contra-indicated for my condition. Despite my injuries, Kaiser physicians refused to acknowledge that the injection was the cause. The GBCA was manufactured and sold by Bayer Pharmaceutical and was known as Magnevist. I suffered renal failure and collapsed, and the subsequent injuries were severe. I was rendered permanently disabled as the toxic heavy metal that has no place in the human body destroyed ten of my eleven body systems.
Oh, after profiting from poisoning Americans, making billions of dollars, and after Europe banned it, Bayer removed Magnevist from the U.S. Market in 2018. Did you know IG Farben of which Bayer was a subsidiary, made Sarin gas during WWI and Zyklon B gas during WWII, the hydrogen-cyanide gas used in Auschwitz and Majdanken. After WWII, the drug manufacturer dropped its IG Farben name and expanded internationally under the name, Bayer Health.
For the last sixteen years, I underwent multiple surgeries, more than one hundred procedures, to treat the four toxicities caused by the GBCA, and the ensuing diseases and sequalae of injuries and symptoms. Yet, the surgeons repeated denials to accept Medi-Cal obstructed me from timely access to our health care system, enslaved me to the social services and caused me many years of immeasurable suffering. Consider, I am a prisoner of my own body, not so much due to the medical disorders but because of California’s prejudices against Adaptives–persons with disabilities. Consider, for now at least, I am a living, breathing data set. The problem is that the data has miserable implications. Worse, I turned to Medi-Cal, our politicians and the judicial system for help, but my pleas for help went unanswered; I was ignored and mistreated.
I now require sixteen more surgeries but no surgeon in California will perform them, not even our county hospitals. I have logged thousands of miles traveling throughout the state, pleading for my life. The medical providers–those refusing to accept Medi-Cal–refer to Medi-Cal enrollees like me as, “Medi-Cal Migrants.” The repeated denials of prescribed surgeries, unwarranted delays now exceeding thirteen years, led to protracted pain, medical incapacitation and exacerbated disabilities.
Regarding the injustice in healthcare, Martin Luther King Jr. stated, “Of all inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.”