I wouldn’t have been born at all, as oddly enough, my father also had to have surgery to correct an intestinal blockage when he was a baby.
Otherwise, probably when I was 24. I miscarried twins and started hemorrhaging severely because I was stupidly putting off the D&C. (Didn’t want to do it on my husband’s birthday. He ended up rushing me to the hospital on his birthday anyway.)
I got a nail through my foot around age 10, so w/o that tetanus shot, I’d have croaked 37 years ago.
Let’s see. My immune system has always been pathetic. I suffered through multiple infections with the help of antibiotics. If none of those got me, then maybe the shattered ankle at 9. That took two surgeries to set to rights. I would definitely have been a hunchback, as I had severe scoliosis, also corrected surgically. If not that then cancer at 12, unquestionably.
I would have been dead already but, my diseased gallbladder might have gotten me, if it had ruptured before its removal. That was October 2005, I think. It’s kind of sad when you’ve been cut open so many times you can’t keep track anymore. :rolleyes: 
All together I’m missing my left kidney and adrenal gland, gallbladder, half of my left lung, three disks, and two ribs.
I’d still be alive. I’ve only ever had to go to hospital to have a dislocated finger put back.
Without the discovery of insulin as a treatment for diabetes, I would have expired 22 years ago, at the age of 22.
Maybe at birth – I was breech born, butt first. Don’t tell anybody.
Certainly I would have died at age four – I had my tonsils out and after I was discharged and was home, I woke up in the night to a pillow soaked with blood. Lucky I woke up, huh? Ten years later a young friend of mine bled to death after the same surgery in the same place with probably the same doctor. It wasn’t the doctor’s fault either time.
My brother was born in 66, I believe, and he was 3 months premature. He was not expected to live, and he was in an incubator for two and a half months. I think that he was the smallest birthweight to survive in the area.
I think that I would have survived my childhood, though I would have been deaf from ear infections and I am extremely nearsighted. I can see to do very close work, but I can’t see to walk across a room. If I’d managed to get married, then I would have died during pregnancy. I had toxemia/pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes. Now I’m an insulin dependent diabetic, and I do need modern medical care.
So…I got married at 19. The first pregnancy would have killed me, probably at age 20 or 21.
Barring possible death at the hands of childhood diseases, I would likely have eventually died of skin cancer sometime in the last ten years (removal of seven lesions). Type II diabetes might have gotten me in the last six years (you don’t die right away with this). I would definitely have died a month shy of my forty-sixth birthday from an abcess on my backside.
If I wasn’t dead now, at 54, I would probably be in pain, and very poor health.
My right kidney fought the kidney stones, and the stones won. Without modern surgical technique, and without the antibiotics to kill the infections the stones brought on, I could be dead.
My father had a heart attack at the age of 52 and now, at 80, is is good health. Gotta love clot-busting drugs, angioplasty, and open heart surgery. His own father died at the exact same age, of a heart attack. So my dad lost his father when he was a little boy, and I still have mine.
I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in “the good old days”
The one improvement that is big for the USA is the treatment of heart problems. My dad lost all but one cousin to heart failures at about 40, He got the new angioplasty procedure at about 50 and made it to 64. I grew up with school mates that had lost dads to heart attacks.
My mom was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was a teenager, so I would never have been born.
That aside, I expect I’d still be alive. I’ve never had a serious illness that required major medical intervention. I’d have a pretty lousy quality of life, though, due to the really terrible vision.
Eyeglasses predate “modern medicine” so maybe not.
My sister might have been stillborn before modern medicine. My mom is Rh-negative and my sister and I are Rh-positive. I know it was once common for a woman like my mom to be able to have only one healthy child.
I’ve never been seriously ill, but possibly I would have died in childbirth, because I never went in to labor on my own.
I would have been made miserable by my wisdom teeth, or maybe they would have killed me trying to remove them. And with my severe nearsightedness I’d have been functionally blind.
Never been in a medical emergency. Not to say I didn’t appreciate the services of a doctor for various broken bones and alleviating the effects of gout but fortunately I’ve never been anywhere near the point where I’d have died without intervention.
To answer the OP - I probably would have died in January 2007 of norovirus as I couldn’t keep anything down for a week, not even water. Before IV’s I would have died of dehydration between the vomiting and the diarrhea. Funny that such a simple thing was the difference between life and death, isn’t it? Age would have been early 40’s.
There’s a lot of debate about what causes nearsightedness, but I’m quite sure that mine was entirely hereditary - I was five years old when I started wearing glasses, which is way too young to blame any sort of close-up work.
There’s also the fact that both my parents are myopic, and that my vision stopped getting worse at exactly the same point that I stopped growing and has been exactly the same for nearly 10 years now (even though I do much more close-up work now that I ever did in my teens).
RickJay, while that’s true that glasses have been around for several hundred years, I’d probably have had trouble finding lenses strong enough to provide the correction I need and even if I had, I’d have had to be wealthy to afford a pair. I need a -7 dioptre lens for my good eye, and a -8 for the other.
I haven’t gotten anything that would have killed me - of course, I was vaccinated against a lot of stuff. More likely I wouldn’t have been born to start with, as my mother was 38 when she had me. And I probably would have walked into a ditch or a firepit or something long before adulthood, since before LASIK I was the most nearsighted person I knew who wasn’t blind.
Without antidepressants (and a great support system) I probably would have offed myself … I thought about it enough even with the drugs and love.
Physically, there was the nasty cut on my foot when I was 10 that required a tetanus shot and stitches, but that’s about it. No real illnesses, no broken bones, and boringly normal pregnancies/deliveries. Maybe deaf from a string of ear infections when I was 12. Maybe I really did chop my own head off at 21 from a sinus infection so bad I didn’t want to open my eyes (I thought they would fall out). But no organ failures or systemic maladies.
But my husband would have been dead at 12. He has an autoimmune disease (IGA nephropathy?) where his body thought his kidneys were foreign objects and tried to reject them. His urine looked like coffee.