Electric power is gone. Medical supplies cease to be manufactured and distributed. City utilities stop working. We’re in a post-apocalyptic world regressed to scavenging bits and pieces of what used to be modern society.
So, what happens to folks with temporary (or permanent) medical devices implanted or attached? Braces? IUDs? Pacemakers?
Those that need maintenance or input (energy, infos) will die.
Th others will die too but slower.
It’s not only devices, but lack of access to modern medicines will prove fatal fairly quickly for some conditions.
Maybe I shouldn’t have added the pacemaker in that list.
I guess what I’m curious about is how life-threatening various non-essential pieces of medical equipment might become in the absence of the professional expertise to remove them.
I’ve never had braces but I imagine that someone could remove them with a pair of needlenose pliers.
A corn on the cob is sufficient to pop off a few braces (source: personal experience). And the tensioning wire is just held on with rubber bands.
Plus after the apocalypse will it really matter if your teeth aren’t perfectly straight? (Don’t tell my dental hygienist but post-apocalypse, I may not be as consistent about brushing and flossing as she told me to be.)
When I had braces in the 70s they were metal bands on each tooth, cemented on. I can’t remember how they got them off but I think it was arduous. Now they have more sophisticated fasteners. When my kids got braces they were just tabs cemented onto the front of the tooth, and they used a cement that cured under UV or some other light, and when it was time to take them off it looked really easy. So maybe you could take your own off if they were today’s modern version.
An IUD might be a DIY job but if there are any complications it’s going to be difficult at best and could cause an infection if you are just using whatever is in your handyman’s toolbox.
I don’t think metal parts like hip replacements have expiration dates, at least not any earlier than the expiration date of the person they’re installed in.
I have an arterial stent which should be good for life, unless something goes wrong with it, in which case without a cardiac surgeon I’m probably going to have a fatal heart attack.
Dental implants are probably intended to be permanent but I’ll bet sometimes they fail.
Not sure what the life cycle is for a cochlear implant. When those are implanted, any hearing you might have had left is destroyed so if those fail you’ll hear absolutely nothing. I have no idea how it can be removed, or what would cause the need for it to be removed.
Some nice crunchy Corn Nuts worked well for me.
For deliberate removal at the end of my treatment, the ortho basically used pliers to twist each bracket off of each tooth; it didn’t take much torque. The bands around the molars took a bit more work, but I think it still was nothing fancier than brute force with levers.
Once all of it was off, there was some polishing required to get rid of the remnants of the cement that held all that hardware in place.
ISTM most of this could be done without modern technology.
I have an ostomy. I have to admit, when I heard they were shipping feminine supplies to Ukraine, I thought about ostomates - we poop or pee or both through holes that surface on our stomachs. We use disposable plastic appliances to contain the pop and or pee that adhere to the surface with some sort of adhesive, some bags are single use, others have the bottom edge open and fasten so they can be dumped [I use a 2 part version so in a pinch I can pop the bag off, empty it, wash it out, dry it and snap it back in place, so in a pinch I can eke out more than the 2-3 days, some people over on r/ostomy claim to have been able to use a single bag for 12-14 days. The ‘wafer’ or flange can unstick anywhere from instantly if the surface is not prepared right to my personal best of 6 days. The heat and moisture of a shower or bath is generally a main cause of unsticking the wafer.]
Back in the bad old days, they were made of rubber, and used a liquid adhesive that is actually still available, I have a bottle. I recently asked over on r/ostomy about the potential of making the units again, but instead of rubber [absorbed odors, and degraded because rubber degrades] out of that really nice heavy silicone. Barely anybody thought it was a good idea. I personally think it is a good idea for something like the current invasion/evacuation or in my personal case, an interest in not dumping medical plastic waste in our waste system. I mean, I use 2 wafers and 2 bags a week, not counting packaging. If I could have the exact same appliance, 3 sets [1 off 1 on and 1 drying from being washed and sanitized] and however many little bottles of adhesive, I would be thrilled. [and handling the appliance is no worse than changing a babies diaper, to be honest.]
Sorry for the long digression. So, what are ostomates to do, wander around dripping pee and poop from their bodies? At least menstrual fluid can be contained in rags stuffed with moss that can be washed and dried for reuse, pre commercially available products, that is actually what women did [my grandmother giggled when she told mom and I about a trip she and her sister made to NY city to pick up her wedding gown - they had just finished and decided to abandon the little pile of soiled rags when they left to go home @_@]
Never mind braces – how about just a plain simple toothache? Tooth infections can be not only excruciating, but they can be dangerous if left unchecked and in extreme cases lead to secondary conditions like blindness and sepsis. Medical treatments that we regard as routine and just an inconvenience might become life-threatening. And how much of our well-being is dependent on simple things like nail clippers, scissors, or tweezers?
Well, yes, but humankind has a long history of living with (or, if not, then dying from) such conditions.
I think the OP had in mind things that we wouldn’t have to worry about if it weren’t for (relatively) modern technology.
“Doctors” in the previous centuries doubled as dentists - i.e. teeth pullers. I recall someone discussing these newfangled dentures (like what Washington sported) and suggesting that later in life it was simpler to pull teeth and use these.
The short answer is - some die (type I diabetes, for example) some get by with what they can (peglegs pre-date modern medicine, and so does - ARRR! - Captain Hook. Others, they die slowly or limp by. literally and figuratively. Each treatment is different.
Stents, for example - sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. My father had a stent, it didn’t do much and apparently grew over(?) but then balloon (angioplasty) worked for a long time. (My theory is that things like heart blood clots are a side effect of infections of the walls of the blood vessels, so when you have the infection, you get problems, if the infection ends, you no longer have problems or they stop getting worse.)
I suppose the problems with braces are minor compared to anything else - worse case they freeze your teeth where they are, which if you are too you and your skull an jaw are still growing… well, I’ve seen some pretty messed up teeth without braces (or because they never got them). Absolute worst case it pulls some teeth out, the person has an agonizing future, or finds some wire cutters. Personally I have zero experience with braces.
Seems to me, if individual pieces of one’s braces come loose spontaneously, in an uncontrolled fashion, one would potentially be at risk of the tensioning wire springing free and cutting or puncturing the interior of one’s mouth. In our current world, with ready access to medical care, such a minor injury rarely constitutes more than a temporary annoyance: swish with salt water, re-secure the wire with wax if possible, see the orthodontist in the morning. But in the post-apocalyptic world we’re hypothesizing, where medical care is very inconsistently available, the situation could become hazardous pretty quickly. You’d want to get your braces completely out of your mouth at the earliest opportunity.
Even if a dental plate or denture is lost or broken there will probably not be any way of replacing it*. Neither will a contacts wearer ever be likely to get the next pair for their deteriorating eye sight.
A prescription specs wearer may luck out and decapitate a zombie with a similar prescription but basically it wont be long before you’re going to not be able to tell the difference between that or a looter or paramilitary goon.
Survival of the fittest, most ruthless and the cunning will be the reality.
I never had the wire spring completely free, but the ends (near my molars) were often poorly trimmed/adjusted and cut/abraded the insides of my mouth. Painful, but barely qualified as an injury. Often I just had to live with it.
The wire could be removed with a stick to lever it out. The brackets would eventually come off on their own, or if you had generic pliers you could just twist them off. The molar bands would be more difficult and needed a special type of pliers. Not much harm in just leaving them, although they tended to trap food particles, so if toothbrushes have become hard to come by, they might indirectly cause tooth decay.
In any case, I’d remove them ASAP just to stop the pain… I barely thought they were worth it in a non-apocalyptic situation.
Personally, I’d rather keep cleaning my teeth post-apocalypse than face the prospect of having a cavity or an infected tooth nerve and being unable to treat it. But different strokes, etc.
I hope I’m not hijacking the thread, but as a pensioner who gets my food delivered (by supermarkets and takeaways), I’d expect to expire long before my teeth became a problem. 
I was in Iraq immediately after the US invasion and had an Iraqi colleague with a relative that needed regular dialysis. Huge parts of the city didn’t have power and the relative died eventually. It’s been a long time and I don’t remember all the details, but I remember that they died because they couldn’t get access anymore.