Funny thing about appendicitis. I worked as a night call Lab Tech at a Hospital in Western Mass back in the 50’s-60’s.
I could be mistaken, but I think my boss, the Pathologist (or maybe one of the Surgeons, or both), said that half the appendices that are removed are normal.
The patient can present all the classic symptoms of acute appendicitis and have the operation. But half the time the appendix will be perfectly normal.
Yet in either case, the symptoms go away and the patient recovers uneventfully.
I could very well be dead of a kidney infection by now if it weren’t for today’s antibiotics. I’ve had problems with recurring bladder infections, which we know can spread to the kidneys if not treated. My great-grandmother died of a kidney infection at 27 so it may be hereditary.
When I was a young’un, (under 7, I think) I got some sort of continuous-vomiting disease and couldn’t keep anything down, even water. I got some nice IV fluids in the hospital and felt much, MUCH better. I don’t know if I would have actually died without them, but that’s the most severe thing I can think of at the moment.
My physical health has really been quite good, honestly. I probably would have survived long enough to attempt to reproduce and replace all of the rest of you. That is, of course, assuming that my general physical ineptitude didn’t get me eaten by tigers or something.
If the many ear infections I had as a kid didn’t kill me, the kidney infection that developed from a urinary tract infection when I was 23 probably would have.
Damn! At the time of my x-rays (car accident, I was unscratched but they wanted to check) I didn’t think of asking to keep them . Must engineer some situation… not involving cars this time.
So if you don’t mind me asking, is your shunt likely to break? What would happen then?
Well, I went through a really shitty period when I was about ten. The damned thing broke three times between the time I was ten and twelve. But I’ve had this one since then, so that’s twelve years.
A broken shunt is not fun. (Begin TMI) Take the worst headache you’ve ever had, including migraines, and multiply it by about twelve. That’s a shunt headache. Now add in some vomitting for spice. I’ve always assumed the vomitting is because of the pain, but I dunno for sure. Then it’s off for surgery.
This only became a problem when I was in the Caymans with my family when it decided to break. It had already broken, it turns out, before I got on the submarine that afternoon which explains why I can hardly remember that part of the trip. That night I convinced my mother of how much pain I was in. We all had to catch the next flight back to the US, but I’m extremely hazy on the details. I remember the wheelchair at the airport. My parents are both doctors so they decided I’d make it back to my neurologist in Memphis, but those two flights with my intracranial pressure screwed up are some I’d never like to repeat.
-Lil
I did get the vaccine, yes. With rabies, as long as you’re vaccinated before you start to show symptoms, you’re generally all right. Because we were in Indonesia and my dad, the only doctor in the area, didn’t trust the vaccine’s potency, I got 30 intramuscular shots in the abdomen. Lest you think that’s bad, he had to give himself the same number. The dog, unfortunately, had to be put down, which hurt me far more than the shots.
*p.s. The quoted exchange may well be the one that finally convinces Mr. Legend he belongs here and should register. *
The asthma might’ve done me in - I’ve never had required modern resuscitative techniques because of it, but modern preventive meds have kept me from getting that far gone.
The main thing that might’ve killed me was the pre-eclampsia (toxemia) with my second pregnancy. A few more days and I might have died. And without modern NICU techniques my daughter might have died or suffered severe respiratory impairment.
I was in the hospital twice as a kid. Once from Bronchial Pneumonia, the other time from tonsilitis.
It seems to me that just about all my childhood friends had their tonsils out, like me (although Pepper Mill didn’t). Was there a particularly bad strain of tonsilitis at the time, that demanded such extreme treatment? Or were we the victims of a medical fad?
It’s possible that something else might have popped up, as well. We were all immunized against Polio as kids, first with the multiple-needle Salk vaccine, and later with the oral Sabin vaccine. But my wife’s sister was old enough to catch the disease before either of these were available, and she did. Survived without ill effects, fortunately, but i still grew up on horror stories about FDR and iron lungs.
Another case of cephalo-pelvic disproportion here, diagnosed after my first c-section. My first-born was also twenty-five days overdue and I never went into labor. My OB tried to induce which resulted in fetal distress and the decision to do a c-section. There was almost no amniotic fluid and my daughter had begun to lose weight. Would I have gone into labor before my daughter died? If so, would the cephalo-pelvid disproportion have finished us off? I don’t know, but I have my doubts that either of us would have survived.
Oddly, modern medicine has tried to kill me much more often than it’s saved me.
I have a quirky life-threatening allergy to the NSAID class of drugs. My reaction is characterized by a really, really, really high fever, severe vomiting, blinding pain, and anaphylactic shock. It didn’t get diagnosed until I was around ten - which meant I used to get treated for routine childhood illness with aspirin or Tylenol only to suddenly get really quite ill.
Other than that I had a few respiratory infections and the occasional bout with strep throat and UTI that may or may not have done me in without antibiotics. It’s hard to tell if the drugs saved my life or if I’d have fought off the infection without their assistance in the end.
Yikes :eek: thanks for the info. You’ve inspired me to go look up this stuff on the net. I guess I was lucky, they removed the shunt tubing when I was five and I’ve hardly thought about it since (there’s just a scar near my stomach). Still got the catheter in my braaaiiin though. Guess they had second thoughts about getting that out.
I might have died of heart failure…gulp. I had surgery when I about 2 or 3. It was a repair of the patent ductus arteriosus. There’s this small blood vessel in everyone’s heart that is supposed to close up when you’re 3 or 4 weeks old. Unfortunately, like my mom, mine did not close up, so they had to slip a very small piece of metal up through a vein in my leg through the aorta to cover the hole.
Sorry that the explanation isn’t exactly clear, I’ve been asking my dad to explain this to me.
Actually, in most babies, it closes within 3 **days **of birth, sometimes even hours. It’s pretty neat. The hole is there in the uterus to allow the blood to bypass the lungs - the fetus doesn’t breathe on his own. Once the baby is born and oxygen hits the lungs, the hole starts to close. Or it should, anyway.
If the ductus arteriosis doesn’t close soon after birth, then the oxygen rich blood that just came from the lungs to the heart can go back to the lungs, instead of through the rest of the body. It mixes with the oxygen-poor blood that’s being pumped to the lungs to get oxygen. This increases the blood pressure in the lungs, sometimes to dangerous levels. Additionally, the pulmonary artery will become inflammed (well, the lining of it will), and prone to bacterial infections. Not a good thing.
Some kids with a PDA are just fine, and don’t need any treatment, or only nutritional support. Usually they try giving the baby a drug called Indomethacin, which is similar to asprin or ibuprofen and can help the PDA to close. (This feature of asprin and ibuprofen is why they are off limits to pregnant moms in their third trimesters - it runs a small risk of closing the PDA too soon.) Other kids need surgery. In your surgery, they took a catheder (tiny tiny flexible tube) and fed it through a small incision in the groin and through your largest blood vessels to the heart. Then a little coil or occluder was fed through the catheter and put into place like a marrionette. The catheter is then slowly pulled out the groin.
Pneumonia almost finished me off at the age of three. This is the earliest child-hood memory I have. My mom, who was a RN, took me to the hospital. I was put in the children’s ward. My Dad came in from work and told me later that he demanded I be put into a semi-private room because he figured I’d die and no one would notice. (he also told me 40 years later that he was very angry with me; when I asked why, he said, “because I was totally helpless and scared that you were going to die.”). I remember it was really noisy in the ward.
When they moved me to the semi-private room, I missed a second brush with death when the old man in the next bed wanted to kill me for holding down the channel button on the “remote”. In those days, the “remote” consisted of an external channel changer wired to an electromechanical relay. It made a satisfying “cha-chunk” for each change. Now imagine holding it down for an hour or two… well, it seemed like an hour or two. The nurses showed up and seized the remote from me; they were pretty surprised to find that someone as ill as I was proved to be pretty obstinate about letting go of my new “toy”.
. Must engineer some situation… not involving cars this time.