Up and Down

While arting.

Being sick costs a lot of money.

It’s not always the medical costs that get you it’s the years of lowered income from lost productivity.

Someone posted a comment that if I’ve gone into medical debt, it must be because I simply don’t know how to manage money. Why I should just join Debtors Anonymous and learn how to track my cash! Surely, then all problems would be solved.

Everyone I know who has ever had chronic illness read that post and gave an eye roll.

While I’ve struggled with this thing my whole life, I wasn’t diagnosed until 2016. And it wasn’t until 2007, that I realized something was seriously wrong. Chronic illness can flare up and die down, and eventually, it just grinds you to bits. I had trouble getting projects done, had to quit some jobs, got ditched from others. My average income dropped by 2/3 and for a few years in a row, I had less than $10,000 in taxable income.

Some of my detractors naturally drew the conclusion that I must simply be over the hill and unable to get jobs, which is the sort of thing some of the snottier people in comics like to dish out to anyone over the age of 30 (at this juncture, I struggled with myself to not name names, because I’ve been hearing this old saw since I was about 28). I had symptoms of chronic illness when I was a kid, and for my entire adult life went through periods of unexplained high and low output and struggles with illness. Low output had nothing to do with me being unable to get work and everything to do with me being able to do it.

You need spatial reasoning skills to draw, and mine deteriorated markedly when I was at my worst. I developed mild aphasia as well, had trouble writing, working with numbers, seeing and drawing symmetrically.

If you go for over a decade with a 2/3 drop in income, and your medical expenses exceed your net business income, you’re going to have a problem.

In an average year I made enough money to live comfortably, but I no longer had average years. What I did have was an income drop of tens of thousands per annum, and a near $10,000 per year increase in medical expenses, as well a whopping near $100,000 bill for the interest in the debt I had to pay to cover all that.

I don’t need another app to tell me how to watch my money: I watch it very carefully, which is how I’m paying bills that would have bankrupted most people. I did it entirely on my own, with my efforts, and with my intellectual property. I didn’t have a gofundme, and my Patreon isn’t one of those that just seems to sit there and offer nothing to supporters. I have one of the most productive Patreon’s on the site.

Sick people make less money than people who aren’t sick. It costs money to manage chronic illness. Your income drops, your expenses increase. For years. Getting another job would not have made me more money, because I would have been physically incapable of doing another job. And if you are paying more in medical bills than you are making per year, over time you accumulate debt.

I would have needed six figures in cash reserve in order to avoid debt. Which most 30-something year-old cartoonists simply don’t have. I had no debt and a year’s reserve in the bank in 2007, and by 2009, that was gone.

My 40’s, which should have been my most productive years, preparing my nest egg for retirement, were not only my least productive years, but they drained my financial and physical resources. Now I have to produce twice as much income to make up the slack.

If you want to make believe that all the girl needs is a debtor support group, well, for your sake, I hope you never get really, really sick. For, like, 12 years straight.

Because then you’ll get a taste of this reality. And you won’t like it.

I’m a cartoonist. I make books. You can buy them here.