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C A L I F O R N I A N U R S E D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 5 9 remember. Recently, he tried on a pair of his friend's glasses and discovered that he could read faster with less strain and greater compre- hension. "I felt like I could pull the words off the page more easily," he remarks. "Maybe I need glasses." Usually his lack of health insurance slips to the back of his mind behind more pressing is- sues like how to stretch his $1000 monthly in- come to cover all the costs of life. Right off the bat, there's $500 for rent on his apartment in Capitola. Since gas prices spiked over the last year, filling up his truck now costs $60. So much for the $100 he usually budgets for this expense. Then there's money for auto insurance, books, utilities, cell phone, food and groceries, and, oh yeah, some fun. But the nagging feeling that he's vulnerable to physical and financial ruin never goes away. Every few months, he fixates on a different potential problem. For a while, it was his teeth when he realized they'd been neglected for six years. Lately, it's car occasional bad flu or minor sprain, Taylor had stayed very healthy. But now he was clamber- ing around on roofs, struggling to hold electric saws at awkward angles. "I thought to myself, This could not go so well. I could cut off my hand!" says Taylor. But his employer simply didn't offer health insur- ance, and he couldn't afford to buy a plan on his own. He says that summer was the first time he started to become concerned about what would happen to him if he got into an accident or became so ill that he would need to go to the hospital or emergency room. "That was the summer that I started thinking more about where I was headed, right be- fore I went back to school," he remembers. Later that year, he was talking to a friend who had just seen the dentist, and Taylor realized he hadn't had his teeth cleaned or checked since he was 19. He hasn't had his vision checked since junior high or maybe high school—it's been so long he can't "Everybody looks at life through a lens. Mine is a lens without health insurance." Chris Taylor, a working student, doesn't get regular medical care because he has no health insurance. Taylor sometimes depends on his RN mom, Lorna Grundeman (right) for help accessing healthcare.