Miranda's Last Gift

March 21, 2024

She was diagnosed with a brain tumor and then she had surgery for it. It's a very strange article in that Frum uses ~20 times as many words to talk about her dog, Ringo, then he does about the final months of her life and those "colds". It smells like guilt to me.

The pandemic passed. Miranda rented an apartment in New York.

[...]

Through the winter, Miranda had suffered a series of bad colds; getting her on the phone had become hard. I texted her, but unusually for her, no swift answer came. [...] The next morning, February 16, we received the devastating news that Miranda had been found dead in her Brooklyn apartment. Illness overwhelmed her depleted immune system and stopped her heart. She collapsed at about three in the morning. When she was found, Ringo was lying beside her.

In other news she lived in Israel for a while because of course she did. Frum rants about her HMO in the usual right-wing way. US healthcare impacts somebody he loves - so he cares.

When Miranda returned from Israel, she had signed up with the least-expensive HMO she could find in California. She was only 26; how much medicine could she possibly need?

The inexpensive HMO had no intention of allowing access to the right doctor. It insisted on assigning Miranda to its in-house team. That team proposed slicing off the top of Miranda's skull and then groping down to her brain stem. The doctors candidly confessed that the chances of success were meager.

When Danielle protested that she had found a doctor who promised a less invasive technique with a better hope of success, the HMO's chief brain surgeon pooh-poohed her. I could have advised him that patronizing Danielle was unlikely to go well, but he kept at it. Then he addressed her as "dear." The room exploded. "I know why you think this operation cannot be done," Danielle said. "Since this variety of tumor was first identified in [I forget the year, but Danielle knew it], there have been [again, Danielle knew the number] successful operations in the United States. You've performed none of them. Maybe that's why you misdiagnosed the tumor in the first place. The doctor we want is the only one who has even recognized it for what it is."

The HMO never relented. Mercifully, we found an opportunity under the Affordable Care Act to shift Miranda to a different insurer that had the right doctor in its network. Miranda's surgery was scheduled for April 2019 at Stanford University Medical Center. In the meantime, she and Ringo came to live with us in Washington, D.C.

  • miz [any, any]
    ·
    1 month ago

    The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice.