Where do you go to get infected with a communicable disease? For Ebola, Congo, For Zika, Brazil and the Caribbean. For Polio, Iran and Asia. For drug-resistant Typhoid, Pakistan. For Dengue, Africa and the Middle East.
One doesn’t need to travel to be infected, however. Not only are air travel and global warning bringing exotic diseases home to us, but antivaxers from conservative religious sects and from purist liberal enclaves have given measles a new lease on death from New York to California.
Still, the surest way to take your life into your own hands appears to be a visit to the waiting room at your doctor’s office or a brief stay in the hospital near you. In my not large acquaintance, several people have encountered horror at the hands of the medical-industrial complex.
An aggressive hospital-acquired infection is credited with killed a gentleman in our neighborhood — possible MRSA or one of those flesh-eating sci-fi germs. Another acquaintance had oral surgery after a joint replacement. His dentist neglected to have him take precautionary antibiotics which led to a life-threatening infection of the artificial joint apparatus, and the need to redo the joint operation. A third found himself with an infected replacement heart valve leading to a long ordeal.
And then there’s the case of a urinary tract infection acquired during surgery from the catheter, which surely qualifies as adding insult to injury. Especially when the antibiotics that are prescribed to kill the infection are powerful enough to also kill all the good gut bacteria, They protect one from extremely unpleasant bugs like C. Diff. The result is a forlorn longing for a return to the status quo ante — intestinal health and painful joints. All of this comes atop the recent finding that medical errors are now the third leading cause of death killing 250,000 of us a year.
All of which make me think of my grandmother with renewed appreciation. She was born in 1890 and lost her mother to tuberculosis when she was just four. Eventually, her sister, brother and son would also die of the white plague. Somehow she survived for another 92 years.
In her teens, working in a hospital as a nurse trainee (a course she was never able to finish because the uniforms she was required to wear cost more than she was paid) she got an infection in her hand. A doctor told her she could die if he didn’t operate which gave her the willies. A friend persuaded her to try Christian Science. She did and recovered.
In her eighties, she went out on a snowy front porch to collect the mail, a daily ritual. She slipped, fell and damaged her wrist. She waited for it to heal miraculously until my mother saw it turning black, put her in the car, and drove her to the emergency room.
A young intern taking her history asked her to list her previous hospital stays. None. He found that impossible to fathom. I mean visits like this, to emergency rooms, or surgeries or other treatment. None. What about childbirth? At home. His faith in the necessity for frequent recourse to the medical profession was shaken.
Despite this vote of no confidence, the medical folks managed to fix her wrist, but she never darkened the door of a hospital again. She died of a stroke one morning at 96 putting a pot of morning coffee on the stove. She might have been preparing to eat the usual greasy eggs and bacon or a treat familiar from her penniless youth — a crust of toast slathered with black molasses. So much for health food or the Mediterranean diet.
For eighty years, friends and family, myself include rolled their eyes at Gram’s allegiance to Mary Baker Eddy. However, in a world of drug-resistant disease, a paucity of new antibiotics in the pipeline, jet propelled risk of pandemic spread, emerging diseases, and a geographic shifting of perils due to climate change, avoiding the petri dish of a hospital or doctor’s office may not be crazy.
Indeed, thanks to the ability to stream information and telecommute, avoiding all other humans and animals may be the surest route to continued survival. With luck, robot delivery of all necessities may even eliminate the fear of germs from literal carriers — the guys from the USPS or FedEx. Recluses of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but close encounters of the germ kind.