To paraphrase the lyrics of an old country song, I beg your pardon but no one promised me a rose garden.  I know this to be true, but the current health care bill makes me feel reality slapping me in the face harder than I imagined it would.  This comes as the second anniversary of the death of Dan Fogelberg occurs.

To not know the music of Dan Fogelberg is to not know music.  I had never heard of him until the 1970's when a friend on my college dorm floor introduced me to his sounds.  I fell in love with his albums immediately.  We listened to them endlessly.  We were aware of all the great music from that decade as it occurred, which we also enjoyed, but Dan held a special place in our hearts.  Few write, sing, and play musical instruments on album tracks.  Dan Fogelberg did it all.  And he invited some of the best back up musicians to accompany him.   

He had a way of taking the ordinary and describing it, making one feel it at an extraordinary level.  My favorite song of his is on a double album, one that spawned many hits, though this was not one of them.  It is a song titled "The Reach."  He added a bit of his mild Scottish brogue into it and I close my eyes every time I hear it.  It's that good.

Dan was silenced by prostate cancer, and his wife Jean carries on an awareness campaign of this devastating illness.  We all die but I feel cheated that he was taken away from us when he was.

This week I feel cheated in another way.  The health care bill as it stands today (and it seems to change hour to hour) is being done in by the very party I entrusted to uphold my interests last year.  I expected huge lobbying by pharmaceutical companies, but many of these companies are headquartered in a state that has a senator who is easily influenced and now stands at the ready to kill the meaningful bill.  Joe Lieberman seems peculiar and to be honest, I couldn't tell you one thing he stands for. 

I trusted the Democratic party to get this done.  It hasn't.  Even the president calling leaders to the White woodshed yesterday didn't seem to change many minds.  My memory is long and this will affect my future votes.  I have not given up on democrats yet.  But I am looking for leaders, not Chicken Littles.

I need health care reform - true change - to pass.  I need it to stay healthy and to diagnose my many health problems.  I don't hide the fact that my stake in this is purely personal and some may say selfish.  But when a stroke caused me to fall and thus break my left shoulder in 3 places, health care was up close and personal to me.  Especially as I watched the orthopedic doctor's face literally change when I told him I  am uninsured.  He stated then there could be no surgery due to the expense.  My mind was made up then and there.  I will fight every day for equal access to health care for all American citizens. 

Which brings me back to Dan Fogelberg.  His song "The Reach" has a lyric that can sum up my health care education this year, though it was written with a different meaning at the time:

"I will take from the Reach all that she has to teach, to the depths of my soul."  Health care reform is my symbolic reach now.  And oh, what an education it has been.