The Illness That Became a Promise

In 2022 I was very ill. I will not dramatise it beyond what it was, which was this: several weeks in which I was not sure, for some of them, that I would fully recover. COVID-19 had taken a serious form, and I spent much of that time alone with my thoughts in a way that I had not been before.

What I thought about, more than I expected, was access.

I had a doctor I could call. I had medication that was available to me. I had a clean, comfortable place to recover. I had people who checked on me. These things — which I had never once thought of as privileges — became, during those weeks, the only things that seemed to matter.

And I found myself thinking about what it would mean to go through this without them. Without the doctor. Without the medication. Without the space and the support. I knew, in the abstract way that comfortable people know things, that this was the reality for many people. But illness has a way of making the abstract concrete.

I made a promise to myself during that period. If I recovered fully, I would do something about healthcare access. Not grandly. Not immediately. But I would make it part of whatever I was building.

The Foundation's healthcare pillar is that promise kept — or rather, beginning to be kept. It starts with respiratory care, with asthma support, with medication access for those who cannot afford it. It is a small beginning. But promises kept at small scale are still promises kept.

I think about those weeks often. I think they were necessary.

From the archive