Leseman called a hospital in the city she lives in and asked an intern to administer the injections. "I said, 'Look, I've got this stuff, I just need someone to give me a shot,' and they said they don't give medication that they didn't prescribe."
Next, Leseman remembered that she had a friend who worked as a travel nurse. "So I called her and she was like, 'Oh sure, I'll look through my closet for you,' so she goes to her supply closet and gets these syringes and alcohol swabs and brought 'em over to my house when I was having a bunch of people over. As a matter of fact, every time I have received this vaccine I have been under the influence of alcohol, so I hope that doesn't negate the effects."
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The next round of injections was administered at a "risotto restaurant." "We went into the bathroom," Leseman remembers. "It was one of those singletons, where it was just a toilet and a sink and you could barely move, and she shot me up with the second round there."
And then Leseman's friend moved away, but Leseman still needed to be injected with a third and final round. "I was like, 'What am I gonna do, I'm stuck with this third dose.' And I was like, 'Oh, my friend Jessica.'" Although Jessica is a physician's assistant, Leseman's third dose could very well have been fatal, thanks to Leseman's sloppiness at self-administering her medicine. "She almost shot me up with a shot of air, because I hadn't realized I had not filled the syringe."
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"I really feel like there's some kind of grace extended to people in their late teens and early twenties where if you do something stupid sometimes you can just get away with it or survive it," Leseman says. "I don't know if that happens for your entire life, but, you know, maybe there's some kind of cosmic grace that makes you feel invincible."
Or as writer Hassler puts it:" What I see with Gen Y — and I wrote about this [in 20 Something Manifesto] — is that they live in a bubble of invincibility."
"It's interesting that society sort of protects Gen Y'ers," Hassler adds. "They have their parents, and this isn't as true right now as it once was, but there are so many different kinds of jobs, people are extending their time in college... Some of the pressure to figure out what you want to do by the time you are 22 is removed; you're not looked at as a failure if you are still working at Starbucks when you are 24 and figuring out your passion. So there's almost that permission to have a little bit of a Peter Pan syndrome."
Hassler calls them "adultolescents." "It really is the adolescence of our adulthood — we aren't really grown up. There are two extremes — there are the Gen Y'ers that put tons of pressure on themselves and want to figure it all out and be responsible, but for the most part it's 'Well, this is sort of low on my priority list.'"
Many of them get so far as to actually ponder buying insurance, but once they weigh it in the balance against other priorities, they find it wanting. Why worry about an abstraction like health care when there is tangible fun to be had?
"They are more instant-gratification-oriented," points out Hassler. "So if I'm gonna choose between a night out with my friends, a trip to Europe or a car that I really want versus high health insurance when I'm a 22-year-old guy who doesn't get sick, I'm gonna choose the thing that's more instantly gratifying. Their behavior toward insurance is very similar to their behavior towards investing, 401Ks, IRAs, putting money aside for savings. They are more interested in short-term pleasure than long-term security."
But a lot of them are just making their way as best they can through the Western world's most expensive — some would say ruthless — health-care system. What's more, they are in the very worst situation. While only teenagers make less money at their jobs, twentysomethings are asked to pay the most for their health care.
Take Sam, for example. Fresh out of college, and long before he got a job with benefits, he suffered from depression. Once he was dropped from his parents' insurance plan, the price of Prozac proved prohibitive. That is, it did until Sam lucked into an underground source, one who dabbled in myriad forms of mood elevators.
"I had a pot dealer at the time who dealt in many other things, and he once told me that he could get any prescription drug that I wanted," he recalls. "So I used him to fill my prescriptions. Prozac doesn't have recreational potential, so they were extraordinarily cheap. I think I was getting 200 pills for like $5 or something. It was basically a service charge and he was throwing them in free when I bought pot. I have no idea where he got them, but they were the real thing and they worked, so it worked for me."
The lagniappe-dispensing dealer ended up moving to New York, which sent Sam trudging back to the doctor. Luckily, there's a happy ending: "That was probably a good thing, though," he says, "because I ended up not needing to take them anymore."
john.lomax@houstonpress.com
