Heh, no problem. I can go on if you want… Sometimes I can hear my shunt bubbling. It’s like when your stomach makes noises but in your head.
-Lil
Born with a dislocated hip. I’d have been pretty well outta luck with that. I should ask my parents for more details, but I remember looking at the pictures of baby me in a half-body cast. With a little hatch in the arse. 
Stroller with wooden pegs to wedge me in so I didn’t go shooting out of there.
They operated on me to fix my hip, and nearly thirty years later the only evidence I have of the experience bar pictures is a tiny scar in my left groin where the docs apparently snipped a tendon or ligament or something in order to get my hip back into the socket.
And asthma. I never had the O2 tent, but my dad’s an MD, and I vividly remember the big blue contraption, glass bottles and tubing and a little cork ball in a jar and all. I got really good at measuring out the medicine for putting in there at an early age. I’m stoned on cold medicine, so I cant’ remember what it’s called. I used to get attacks just from doing one loop around the living room sofa sectionals. Was on Slo-Bid for yonks. So I guess it was pretty severe asthma.
[minor hijack] Ditto. Did they try to give you a transfusion? Before my surgery, my doctor asked me if I would accept one, and I emphatically said, “NO.” He kept asking me and asking me, as though I’d change my mind. I had decided long before the incident that I never wanted a transfusion–that I’d rather die than have one–but doctors don’t like that idea much. Modern medicine and all that.
After the surgery, I had a hemoglobin of 6, but I recovered just fine. You? [/minor hijack]
The Vorlons are friends of the Medical Mafia :rolleyes:
Mrs. Vorlon has enough scars on her to play a few games of tic-tac-toe.
Gallblader gone
Knee scoped
Bowel adhesions from the gallblader trip removed
Girly bits cooked and snipped
Bilateral pulminery emboli. The game-over issue. Had to go cross country to have her lungs roto-rootered. I have the pictures here somewhere. You are in sad shape when they give you a t-shirt with your number on it, and its in the mid hundreds…
I got to have 3 strokes while 1500 miles away on a business trip. Got to spend 11 hours on the table, over 2 days, watching them play Nitendo in my brain puting in a stent.
Yes, you get to be awake for the fun.
We are frequent flyers to our phamacy.
I would have died of asthma before my first birthday. I was revived by paramedics five times in my first year. My mother had recurring dreams of being in a cemetery looking at my headstone.
… are you a Jehovah’s Witness, or someone who has some other religious objection to accepting blood transfusions? Otherwise… why such strong opposition to it?
Though my father was unable to capture the cat (and have it tested for rabies) that scratched/bit me while I was an infant in Turkey (father was a USAF Airman stationed there) in the early 1970s. I underwent the old fashioned treatment of shots to the belly… lots of them apparently. I was too young to remember it (that part I’m happy about, but I wish I remember the time we lived there).
Mrs. Butler and the now 10week old Butlerette would have died on the table back in ‘olden times.’ Butlerette decided to look where she was going, instead of putting her head down and charging through the (too small anyway) birth canal. Any future Butler progeny will be by c-section as well.
Mr. Butler would have likely wanted to die if the above mentioned Butler girls had died during childbirth.
A c-section saved 3 lives in this case.
Other than a few cuts that required stitches (hint: say NO to experimental stiching procedures. My knee scar is as big as the original wound, YMMV) and a fracture in each leg from various stupidities/accidents in my misguided youth, I’ve done pretty well.
Mr. Butler Sr. would likely be dead if it wasn’t for his blood pressure medicine.
No, I just don’t trust the Red Cross. It’s not that I don’t believe it does everything it can to ensure its blood is safe; it’s that every 5-10 years, there is another story about yet another disease no one knew was transmittable by blood until it turned up in thousands of patients who had received blood transfusions years earlier.
I don’t want to survive near-death from an ectopic pregnancy merely to spend the rest of my life with some yet-untested-for-disease I obtained from a transfusion.
Yes, I realize the risk of receiving an illness from a transfusion is low, but it just wasn’t worth it to me.
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I fell through the ice on a lake when ice-fishing with some friends and their dads when I was 9 years old. The ice kept breaking when I tried to pull myself out, so they made a human chain of sorts and pulled me out.
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I fell about 20 feet when working construction with a pair of metal stilts attached to my legs. I landed head first on the ground, and was out cold for about 36 hours. I lost 6 months worth of my short term memory, including getting married!
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I flipped my best friends car into a canal leading into a lake we were fishing at. We landed upside down in the water and the car was completely submerged. Scariest moments of my life without question. Luckily, we must have hit a tree or something on the way into the canal and it broke out one of the windows. This did fill the car with water almost immediately, but I eventually found it and escaped.
That’s all.
Okay, so I failed to read the OP very carefully. My apologies for the above post.
Childbirth, twice. First one, cervix would not dialate past 3 cm without pitocin, and doc had to use forceps, also. Second one (The Sausage Creature), labor stopped after delivery with placenta still inside. Had to induce to deliver it, or hemmorhage and/or infection would ensue. Sorry if TMI.
I fully understand not getting a transfusion if you can survive without one for those reasons. But… you would rather die than get a transfusion because your donor might have an as-yet-undiscovered disease… that might be transmittable by blood… that you might get… that might be fatal or incurable? (Malaria and syphilis are transmitted by blood, and we can treat them quite well nowadays.)
Well, to each her own, I suppose.
Given your views, have you considered banking your own blood?
I think that you can bank your own blood but it doesn’t last long…
When I had placenta previa, I started to bank my own blood - there was a three week cycle, as the hospital I was in only kept blood for 21 days before chucking it. In my case, they recycled it back into me!
The first week I had 400ml (about a pint) taken, and injections to stimulate production.
Week two I had another 400ml taken.
Week three I had another 400ml taken.
Week four I had 400ml taken, the first 400ml put back, and 200ml taken for a net gain of 200ml.
That then turned out to be a bit of a disaster, as I went all sick and sweaty, and lay there sobbing as they gave me fizzy lemonade and rubbed my feet. I think it didn’t help that my blood seems to clot easily, and it was clogging the filters, which they kept changing. At one point one of the technicians mislandled the bag, and blood leaked all down his arms and onto the floor - urgh!
At that point I had one litre banked, and they said they’d stop, as the upset was making me have contractions, which they were trying to avoid.
In the end I lost 2 litres of blood during the birth, got the one back and made up the other with fluids, injections and being unable to sit up for a week without fainting.
The Dr said that women can survive the loss of a litre of blood but that men can not. She said it was one of the things that helps women to survive during childbirth.
In this instance, the risk wasn’t worth it to me. Life is good, but life is also hard. I have done most of the things that I wanted to in life, and wouldn’t be that devastated if I died tomorrow.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be future instances where I would consider a transfusion; I just can’t think of one at the moment. I’m in the middle of making my advance health care directive, which will address all that should I be unable to verbally offer it.
I did look into banking my blood, but I move and travel too much to make that practical.
I should add, too, that one doesn’t know in an emergency situation whether one can survive it or not. Time is what will tell. I did not know at the time that I would survive, though the odds were very good. That helped me make my decision. But people die all the time in surgery.
Well, I had my first blood infection resulting from a kidney stone when I was 22, so that would almost surely have done me in. Then, if I’d been lucky enough to survive that, either of my first two birthing experiences would have done the job; I had very large babies, and a small birth canal, equallin labors that would not progress, leading to C-sections. Then, about six years after my second child was born, another blood infection due to kidney stones. My doctor assured me that 100 years ago, the infection would have killed me (temp of 104.7 when I reached the hospital, and blood pressure of 84/40); he also said that 50 years ago, I’d have had a maybe one in four chance of surviving it, and as recently as 10 years previously, I’d have been in the hospital for at least a month, instead of the ten days I was actually in.
My husband would have had to have married someone else, because, as near as we can figure, he’s had nothing that would have killed him. He’s never been hospitalized (aside from his birth, of course), only been on antibiotics once, and never suffered from anything painful enough to require narcotic pain killers. He’s never had an IV, either. I hate him. 
Ahh, all right. I was giving too much weight to your earlier “rather die than have a transfusion” statement, then, I think.
Well, no, I don’t think you were. I do mean that I would rather die than have a transfusion. I’m just saying that each situation would be unique, and that there is always the possibility that I may change my mind in the future. But I honestly cannot think of an instance where I would accept a transfusion.
How about you? Would you accept a transfusion if a doctor suggested it as a precaution before emergency surgery for internal bleeding, or only if you thought with a level of certainty that you’d die without it?
Penumonia - I had it when I was 4, and have a vague memory of being trundled to the hospital several times a week for some shot or another.
I’d have never been conceived because my father would have died as a child due to asthma. In fact, he was given Last Rights three seperate times as a child before they could get him breathing again.
I had trouble breathing the last time I was stung by a wasp (on the wrist, with my arm up to my shoulder swollen tight as a sausage). The antihistamins I took helped, but I think I might have lived anyway.
Without all the sweets available nowadays, I suspect that my type II Diabetes would never have manifested
So despite those things, I’d probably still be here. . .
Mrs Stone had a half dozen lung inflamations as a baby as well as chronic inner ear inflamations. Without antibiotics, she’d likely be either dead or at least deaf.