Sick Day

Jack got hit on Saturday, Michele went down Sunday, we managed to skip over Monday (apparently the balance of the universe was satisfied with pouring rain and generally Mondayishness).  Today,  woke up feeling fine, took Cate to a doctor appointment, everything was going well, until I dropped her off at school.  Somewhere between her school and the church, I started to feel a little off, and as much as I tried to deny it, I could tell the fast-moving ick had come for me.
As is usually the case, this sort of thing happened on a day when I had big plans, but providentially, nothing that wouldn't survive and go forward without me.  I came home and went to bed, sleep is apparently the thing this particular brand of sick requires, it let's you rest, in fact, it seems to demand that you do so.  That puts it in the category of a "nice" sickness.
When I woke up, I ate some toast and felt a little better, so I watched a movie: The Dallas Buyers Club, which I knew was about a disease that is not nice at all, HIV.  The movie tells the story of a self-absorbed, bigoted redneck who contracts AIDS in the mid 1980s, when it was still thought of as a disease that only hit homosexual men.  The story follows his quest to stay alive and also consequently become a better person.  He has to fight himself, he has to fight the medical/pharmaceutical industry, he has to fight the regulatory powers of the government.
To tell you the truth, the whole thing leaves you feeling a bit disgusted with the way we were, and also reminds you of the flaws in the way we still are.  The world of medical research continues to be the source of some of our greatest miracles and some of our greatest dysfunction.  When you hear about the processes that have to take place before we can do something so crucial as say, create an Ebola vaccine, you start to get a decidedly sinking feeling as the death toll rises.
Despite what movies sometimes indicate, science usually rides to the rescue very slowly.  There are things that slow progress at every turn, not the least of which is the economic reality of the pharma business.  Drugs that  are lucrative will get out there a lot faster than drugs that are going to basically have to be given away because, let's face it, the people dying of Ebola in West Africa aren't exactly the Botox set.
If you need a drug to help you look younger or give you an erection or help you pee less often, or poop more often, we're all good, but if you're dying of AIDS or Ebola, well we need to make sure anything you take is FDA approved, and getting FDA approval can take years, because, you know, we need to make sure we're safe... from lawsuits.
It's actually kind of sickening, and not in the way that can be solved by taking a nap, which I did again after watching DBC.  I know that the story was told with a bit of a lean towards the quixotic hero, I know the FDA is a necessary thing, but as I study the gospels week in and week out, I see pharisaic insistence on the rules over the needs and suffering of God's children as a devil that still haunts our shrubbery.
This fits sort of hand in hand with my snag from yesterday; do you think we can ever get over ourselves and really do the things we are so obviously capable of doing?  Do you think we can ever move past the need for massive bureaucracies and the slavery of economic "realism?"  Can we get over it?  Maybe after a good nap.