My husband and I are medical system refugees.

Which is a type of economic refugee, although medical care obviously shouldn’t be tied to your financial resources. We moved to Europe because we needed to live in a place with socialized medicine. And two years in to our lives here, my hub had his first big surgery.

Now we are preparing for what we desperately hope will be his second surgery.

In the US, this simply couldn’t happen. The specialists who invented it are here, the recovery of many days in hospital just doesn’t fit the US model, the physical therapy he will need wouldn’t be provided – we couldn’t even dream of this in the US, even if money weren’t an object.

If you are a praying kinda person, please pray that we are able to get through the last couple German medical system hoops and get my beloved hub this surgery. His quality of life has deteriorated profoundly and he is in constant pain. I’m happy to sit in as many warteraums as it takes.

And I realize warteraums have become a whole area of my drawings here, not as big as the Unterwegs category, but still significant!

More about our first visit to the Trichterbrust surgeon here.

Drawing folks while I waited for the knee surgeon here.

Cyborg husband physical therapy fun here.

Waiting room at the immigration office here and here.

More medical waiting rooms here, here and here.

I am so grateful to my Patreon Patrons, whose monthly financial support makes it possible for me to continue making art and telling the stories of Berlin as a vaccinated but Covid-vulnerable disabled person.