I had bad rubella and croup as a kid. I’m not sure if that would have killed me or not.
I was in a horrific car accident as a child requiring a lot of surgery and a long recovery. If I hadn’t died, I certainly would have ended up a crooked, crippled hunchback or something! Okay, so I probably wouldn’t have been in a car accident, but maybe my carriage would have toppled over or something!
I know you said not to count vaccines, but considering the amount of things I managed to step on and cut myself with, I’m sure tetanus would have carried me off had I been a child 200 years ago!
I’ve pretty healthy, but not too long ago, I’d never have been born at all. My mom was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was nineteen. I was born when she was thirty-three. Yay, medicine!
I had several bouts with kidney stones and their ensuing infections. If not for modern surgical treatment(I had my right kidney out) and antibiotics, I might be dead now, or at least invalided,
I was born in India and got the malaria for the first time there, at age 2.
Then, when I was 15, I had a chance to visit India unexpectedly. It was like, SUnday, and they said, “Do you want to fly to India a week from Tuesday?” I loved it so I said “Sure!” We went to the doc and I got all my anti-malarial pills, but you’re supposed to start taking them two weeks before or something, and so I must have caught it right after I got there. Then, the gestation period can be up to two months…so I went there in July and came down with it in early September.
As for the world health community investing more resources, I’m inclined to think AIDS is a bigger priority. AIDS is a disease that’s even more easily prevented than malaria, after all, you can’t control what mosquito bites you but you can control who you sleep with. So I think the majority of resources should be dedicated toward AIDS prevention - but quinine should also be more regularly available.
Two more interesting things and then I’ll shut up:
American doctors simply cannot diagnose malaria. They told me it was hepatitis, a virus, anything but. We finally went to an Indian doctor who diagnosed it easily and gave me quinine.
Malaria attacks your red blood cells and stays in them for up to five years after. I was not able to donate blood for quite a while even when I turned 17, and then even after I had to donate & mark I had malaria, and so they wouldn’t use the red blood cells. Also, you can get sick again if you don’t take quinine, apparently.
Considering all the stitches I had as a kid, tetanus would be my first guess, with scarlet fever a close second (infected tonsils). They would have gotten me long before I could have developed my current Type II diabetes.
Or, maybe killed by wild animals because of CSS (Can’t See Sh*t)
I dunno, Anaamika, you might have been fine with the malaria without 20th century medicine. Quinine has been used since the 17th century to treat malaria and has been widely available since the mid-nineteenth century. Synthetic quinine was a twentieth century development, though.
I probably would have died from Type I diabetes at a young age. I can’t think of anything else that would have made me shuffle off this mortal coil, except maybe the bronchitis I had when I was 16 or so. My throat was so raw and swollen that it swelled shut every now and again. The other times I’ve been prescribed antibiotics for upper respiratory infections it was more cautionary since I’m a diabetic and the doctor wanted to nip the infection in the bud.
Check the encyclopedia. I don’t remember the exact percentage, but there was a percentage of people who died even with the administration of quinine, simply because you can’t eat & you can’t drink.
A 2-year old child sick with malaria in India stood a good chance of dying.
For myself, my tonsils were constantly infected, which also caused ear infections. My tonsils would routinely swell to the point that I had practically no airway, and when I would lie down/fall asleep, the airway would close up and I quit breathing.
Also as a result of so many burst eardrums from infections (my dad didn’t cotton to paying for doctors) I have a lot of scar tissue and hearing loss. Not fatal, but definetly a bit of a problem.
I forgot fish poisoning, which I got while working on a boat. I was helping bait up for a halibut trip and cut my finger while cutting bait (herring). Although it wasn’t modern medicine that saved me, when a red line began creeping up my arm the skipper had me soak my hand several times a day in the hottest bleach water I could stand. It worked.
Hydrocephalus as a baby - I was nearly three months premature. But I’ve got a really cool head x-ray out of it. Big tubey thing right in the centre of my braaaiiin.
Nail through my hand as a child, with a nasty infection (grossly swollen hand). Also, a ruptured appendix a few years back, with sustained high fever and some delerium; I imagine either of those would have killed me without antibiotics.
Would’ve died in the womb if not for my induced birth.
Allergic reaction to the pertussis vaccine (which gave my little sister severe brain damage as she went untreated)
2 months with Pneumonia.
Drug Overdose.
Spider bite.
Me? I might have died in childbirth - I was a c-section, but at the time, the trend was for a difficult birth to be delivered by c-section, whether it was necessary or not. AIUI, there was no reason beyond a difficult delivery for the decision for a c-section.
And I was nearly killed by modern medicine. I got infantile pneumonia, and was given penecillin. And got much worse. Turns out I’m allergic to penecillin.
Of course my father, who predates even sulfa drugs, also had infatile pnuemonia. When he was doing most poorly they ended up having to physically drain fluid from his lungs. At the time the surgeon would be shown the case, and the patient was prepped, then operated on. Once the operation was over, the surgeon had nothing more do to with the patient. Now, draining fluid from the lungs of an infant involves a lot, including an incision between the ribs, that left a pretty prominent scar. If the patient survived.
I think it’s incredibly telling that when my father was getting his school physical a few years later, it was the same doctor who’d been his surgeon at the time. (This was something the surgeon did as a return to the community sort of thing.) When he saw my father, he’d had no idea who he was. But when he had my father turn around, and he saw the scar, he said something like, “You’re that baby! You’r still alive?!”
Heh! I can top that. I have a shunt card with my ct scan right on it in handy wallet size. It’s supposed to be if I’m out of town or in some other situation where the originals aren’t handy when my shunt breaks, but it’s also a good conversation piece.
-Lil
The big one would have been around seven years ago when I went to the doc with a fever, abdominal pain, and a little voice in the back of my head saying "go to the hospital, NOW. Good voice. Turns out I had a strangulated bowel caused by scar tissue from a bout of PID. Had medical science not been available to put me under general anesthesia, cut me open, and remove the scar tissue, my bowel would have ruptured, and I would have died of an infection caused by my own wastes filling my abdominal cavity. Talk about the promise of ugly, agonizing death.
That must have been a different kind of mono than my daughter had. Our doctor said mono is caused by a virus. The only treatment was the usual rest, liquids, etc.