October 9, 2009

Jo Carson, a founding member of Alternate ROOTS, is in the midst of a pitched battle with colon cancer.

Jo has been a self-supporting artist for more than 30 years.  Since quality, affordable health insurance is extremely difficult for independent artists to obtain, the insurance coverage Jo has is utterly insufficient to her current need – her policy will cover her surgery, but not the extensive chemotherapy and radiation she is currently under-going.

You can help by making a donation through ROOTS to Jo's Medical Expenses Campaign.  Please click here to make that important contribution.

Congratulations to Michael P. of NY, who won the two tickets to Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! at Carnegie Hall on October 22 as a part of the fund raising efforts for the Jo Carson Fund. We hope you enjoyed the show, Michael - wait, wait, don't tell us - we're jealous!

Please read this blog entry, originally written for the October 2009 Member Newsletter:

October 9, 2009
by Jo Carson

Today is October 9, 2009, and I am 63 years old today. I go for my next to last radiation treatment for colon cancer later this morning. These treatments make me sick, and I have been very, very sick during the last 6 weeks, but when my mother was 63, she was already in the throes of early onset Alzheimer’s, and this radiation sickness hardly compares when you think about it. I’ve still got my brain in relatively good working order, and I can beat this item in my colon if I can just be still enough (moving around makes me throw up), and I try to keep that in mind.

I spend rather a lot of time on my back right now trying to be still. 

I’m thinking a lot these days about choices I have made. Choices like--for instance-- that I didn’t carry enough insurance to pay for the riddance of this cancer. I have hospitalization insurance. I bought what I could afford, and I shopped around when I bought it, but I’m self employed, not a member of a group, and the list of exclusions on it is appalling (for instance, I’m deaf, and it won’t touch any ear or hearing troubles as a preexisting condition). Good insurance for me is 900 dollars a month, adequate is 600+ a month. I pay $330 a month for inadequate insurance with a high deductible. And I have used it twice in the last six weeks with emergency visits to the hospital for illness caused by the radiation treatments. I have so many days worth of hospital time (not very many) left on what it will pay this year, and two (I hope, I’d rather not wear a plastic bag hanging off my side for the rest of my life) surgeries to get through, one to remove the cancer, the second to reconnect the colon to the rectum when the colon is sufficiently healed.

A colonoscopy to find out why you are bleeding from the bowels is an outpatient service. A biopsy is an outpatient service (almost 40 of them actually, I had a lot of polyps in my intestines, one was cancerous). CT scans to hunt for other cancers in the body are outpatient services. Chemotherapy and blood tests are outpatient services. Radiation is an outpatient service. I never thought of what all might be out patient services…

A person doesn’t usually think of making art as a choice that entails risking one’s life, but in this country, in 2009, with the right wing still trying to pull red scare tactics (didn’t we learn anything from the McCarthy era?) and behaving like Brown Shirts at recent public health care forums, making art in this country is a choice about risking your life. I made some choices. I chose to pursue writing even if it did not pay as much as some other things might (in money or in benefits). I chose to do that because I thought it really might be important and I evidently want my life to have meaning more than I want to make money, though I am certainly not opposed to making enough money. I do make enough money to live in this world in an appropriate and comfortable way. I like living in an appropriate way. So I actually win this one, I win it right now, no matter what happens: my life, my work does have meaning to me and to others.

I gambled on basically good genetic heritage (the Alzheimer’s was scary, but they can’t fix it medically anyway) to get me to 65 and Medicare, and—to put it bluntly—I lost this bet. Game ain’t over yet, I am a tough bird, and I don’t give up easy, but I didn’t get to 65 before I needed major medical intervention.

An appeal through ROOTS—bless you every one—has raised money to help with all those “outpatient services” and the multitude of things my insurance won’t pay. I will use it as wisely as I know how. I plan, at the moment, to accumulate those bills that do not have interest connected to them, and then negotiate for what percentage on the dollar paid in the moment will retire the debt, so maybe the money can go even further than the numbers. I will repay generosity first—there has been some, and it should be encouraged.

Your own generosity is overwhelming. I have no idea how I might begin to say thanks except to promise to keep working, to commit as best I know how to paying forward those gifts among us that come as real grace.


Jo Carson is the author of more than 30 community story plays, she’s
the award-winning playwright of Daytrips and many other plays for the
American theater, and she’s the author of several books including
Spider Speculations: A Physics and Biophysics of Storytelling and a
founding member of Alternate ROOTS.