Why I Trust Science: That One Time I Probably Would Have Died

    As we all know, the average human life span has been steadily increasing over the recent course of human history. This trend is especially obvious in developed, industrialized countries. In the old days, a person could die as a result of any number of causes that are now easily prevented or rectified by technology. For most of my life, I have known that I have been living on time given to me by technological advancement. Without advances that occurred in medical science during the twentieth century, I think I would have died in 1982 when I was 9 years old.

    I can’t remember why I was at the farm in rural Indiana with Grandpa Paul (Pete) and Grandma Arline Pogue, but the rest of the family was elsewhere and Grandma took me on the icy country roads of Grant and Wabash counties for a necessary trip to the pharmacy in LaFontaine. This was in the era before seat belts were required by law and I remember that I hated wearing a seatbelt and thought it was both uncomfortable and sissified¹. I argued with her about putting on the seatbelt both leaving the house and returning and she finally left from the drug store without me being belted in. She said I was a “little pill,” one of her favorite phrases, but she gave up the argument. Somewhere not too far from the boundary of the farm, she drove onto obvious sheet ice along a wooded stretch and the rear-wheel-drive car fishtailed out of control, slid into the snowy ditch, and crashed into a tree. I split my head open on the windshield. I looked at a small bloody spot on the windshield but I was in denial that it came from my head.

    Grandma was injured even though she was belted in. It was her back, which had already given her some trouble in the preceding months. I was injured too but did not admit it. I remember writhing immediately after the impact, my back and neck having been wrenched terribly. I pushed the door open because I had heard about people burning up in a car and said that we needed to get out. It was also common advice in that era to always get out of the car and get away from it in the event of a crash². Grandma told me to close the door because I was letting in cold air. The car did not explode.

    Grandma tried to start the car. It would not start. She leaned on the horn to try to attract the attention of the residents of a house back in the woods. Nobody showed up. This went on for several minutes, and we hoped for another car to come along, but the road conditions were bad and we were more or less in the middle of nowhere. There was no traffic on the road.

    We finally got out of the car, with Grandma in significant pain, and walked down to a nearby neighbor’s house. These were friends of the family. They shared a telephone party line with Grandma and Grandpa and so were familiar people. [If you are too young to know what a party line is, read this because it defies belief in our contemporary world (link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_line_(telephony))]. Anyway, after several minutes of pounding on the door^3, we finally got a response and got in out of the cold. Grandma had fretted terribly about the fact that I did not have a hat with me, by which she meant a toboggan hat (sock hat, knit cap, teuk, etc). Common folk wisdom in northern climes in those days was that “you’ll catch your death” if you didn’t wear a hat outdoors in winter. I do not know if the failure to wear a hat was responsible, because I believe in germ theory, but I do know that sometime around then I did, in fact, catch my death, or at least it would have been my death if not for medical science.

    Within a few days, I had developed a deep and painful rattling cough accompanied by a fever. The fever quickly escalated and my mother took extreme measures, bathing me in a solution of rubbing alcohol and cold water in the tub. I cried. I suffered. I went to the doctor with a temperature of 105 degrees Fahrenheit and was sent to the hospital. Fever starts to become fatal around 106 degrees, and can result in brain damage beyond that point, so that is a fever of the utmost severity. It was such a high fever that I lost track of much of what was going on around me and my memory of the sequence of events is pretty vague. At the hospital x-rays were taken, spirometry tests were administered, breathing treatments were given. I was admitted to the pediatric ward. The diagnosis was double pneumonia, an infection of both lungs.

    I lay in the hospital bed suffering and coughing until I could barely breathe. My air passages wheezed and rattled with every breath, and sharp, searing pain shot through my chest cavity. Antibiotics were pumped into my body intravenously. Analgesics were administered back-to-back-to-back endlessly. My body temperature was monitored continuously. Nurses came daily to drum on my back to break up the mucus clogging my lungs. Ministers from the church came and prayed over me. Relatives visited. Eventually I realized that my illness was very serious. I think it was due to the gravity of the minister’s prayer. I had not realized that my life had been in danger until that point.

    This realization caused me to look around with new eyes. I was in the hospital with seriously ill children. There were children crying all night, children coughing endlessly like me, children with terminal illnesses with their faces drawn down with exhaustion and the effort of fighting the illness. Fortunately I was a fairly stoic boy and pretty much just kept going. That’s how the males on my Dad’s side of the family roll and I followed suit. That could be the period when I developed my extreme independence of personality, spending all those days alone in a multi-bed pediatric unit at 9 years old, but maybe that is reading too much into it.

    Years later I worked in a couple of public hospitals and could barely stand visiting the Children’s Hospital. It was like post-traumatic stress disorder. Pediatric units are where children go to die. Is there anything worse? Some of the saddest moments in my life occurred in pediatric units, both as a patient and as an adult. Once, when I was working at Erlanger Medical Center in Chattanooga, a code blue was announced for the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (cardiac arrest). I can’t think of anything more horrible. It waters my eyes even now. Walking into a pediatric nursing unit as an adult is like traveling through a time machine back to December 1982. Those were the bad old days.

    I was in the hospital for a long 10 days. I slowly recovered and eventually got well enough to be bored. I wanted to go home very badly. I saw fresh snowfall out the window and wished I could go out and play in it but I was too weak. I remember taking walks down the hallway with my parents or with a nurse, arm linked to an IV pole with plastic tubing. I was so weak that I was shaky by the time I got back to my bed. After a week I started begging to go home. I missed a field trip with the school. Homework piled up. Christmas break began. In truth many of the days were lost in deep sleep and suffering and I could not have worked on homework or played, or done much of anything. The doctor finally sent me home after 10 days, not because she thought I was ready to go home, but because she did not want to keep me in the hospital over Christmas.

    The point of the story is that I had an illness that in any of the previous dozens of centuries of human existence would have been fatal. Double pneumonia was frequently fatal for 99% of human history and still kills millions of people each year⁴. If I had been born at any point in the other 99% of the history of the species, I would likely have died. Although pneumonia was not 100% lethal historically, I was not a particularly strong child and my case was unusually severe. Pneumonia of the severity I had was likely fatal in the era before good treatments to reduce fever were available, to say nothing of antibiotics. In the middle ages I likely would have been bled to reduce fever. Obviously that treatment can only work for a limited time. Bleeding for 10 days continuously would have done me in if the pneumonia didn’t get me first. I was small for my age and therefore had limited blood to lose.

    I do not know exactly at what point I realized that my pneumonia was potentially life-threatening but I was a fairly precocious youngster and by the time I got out of the hospital, I knew that I could have been dead. I was not mature enough to take that in stride. The feeling followed me like an albatross. I have never completely escaped the thought that I am living on borrowed time. The only reason I survived is because antibiotics had been invented; intravenous therapy had been invented; spirometry and radiology had been invented; analgesics had been invented. All of those things were invented or discovered through the scientific method. I should be dead. I’m alive because of science.

    I turned 40 last year [this was mostly written in 2013], and it didn’t bother me much. After all, I should have died when I was 9 years old. The last 31 years have been gravy⁵.

Footnotes:

1 Regarding the use of the word “sissified”: We are taking things in context here and in the historical context of 1982, I believed that a proper male had a disdain for safety. Trying to be safe all the time would have constituted acting like a girl (a “sissy”). Keep in mind that I was 9 years old. As it happened, I learned otherwise during the events that followed. Although I try not to use the word nowadays, I will not sanitize history to preserve feelings. Feeling offended does not mean your rights have been violated.

2 I think nowadays the advice is usually only to get out of a wrecked car if it is safely out of traffic or if the car is literally on fire.

3 The lack of response to the horn honking (the neighbor in the woods later admitted they were home at the time but claimed they didn’t hear it) and the several minutes of beating on the door of very close friends of the family does not reflect well on my grandparents’ neighbors. I do not believe that they did not hear the honking or the knocking on the door. I think they were either fearful, suspicious, or did not want to get involved, not realizing that it was someone they knew. Even though I grew up in a rural environment and generally prefer country culture to urban culture, to me this episode reveals a false veneer of righteousness in rural values. No matter where you go, people never fail to disappoint.

4 Including, horrifyingly, about 1.5 million children a year, mostly in countries that do not have widespread availability of advanced healthcare. http://www.news-medical.net/health/Pneumonia-History.aspx

5 There have been a few other times when I was in pretty serious danger but I still think the double pneumonia is the closest I have come to death. Other incidents include being inside industrial machinery when it was started up, narrowly avoiding a car that ran full speed through a stop sign, receiving a spider bite that got seriously infected (again defeated by antibiotic drugs), a confrontation with a home intruder during which he had possession of a firearm, and getting lost on a trail while hiking in a remote area without proper clothing and shelter to spend the night.