whenever I see archeological remains of a human who suffered from a terrible disease that couldn’t be treated in their lifetime but could be fixed now, this wave of sorrow and mourning washes over me. a woman in the 14th century who spent her 35 years of life bent at the waist because of congenital scoliosis. a man from the 18th century who died because of a non cancerous mass on his jaw that made eating progressively more difficult. remains of a woman from the Neolithic who died in childbirth having evidence of peri-mortem trepanation on her skull.
and yet she survived to 35. and yet the physicians in his time tried to strengthen his jaw. and yet someone 4,000 years ago tried to save someone they loved from dying of preeclampsia/increased cranial pressure. we tried. we tried and we tried and we tried. we failed and we learned but we tried. that’s what makes humans so beautiful.
My mom sometimes talks about a child in her neighborhood who was born with hydrocephaly and died of it. His parents strove to keep him alive for years, but he ultimately passed after a long decline. No treatment available. No hope at all, and the parents knew it from his birth.
Several decades later my sister had an MRI, as a long shot, to try to figure out why she was sick and deteriorating with a number of symptoms that were close to being written off as anxiety. She was sent straight to the hospital for adult onset hydrocephaly. Two days later she had brain surgery to put a shunt down her neck into her stomach and drain the fluid out. (No, you cannot usually get brain surgery that fast. Yes, it was that urgent.) Recovery was long and squiggly but it happened.
I think of that boy every once in a while. The one who died. I have no doubt that treatments developed for people like him, and tested on people like him, saved my sister's life.
He never knew he made the world better. His condition was severe, he never knew much of anything, I don't think. I think if I ever track down a God or something like one, that'll be somewhere on my List of Wishes. To make sure people like him know that they helped.
I think about this a lot.
I've been type 1 diabetic since I was about one and a half, and was incredibly sick. If my mother hadn't also been type 1 and recognized the signs I likely would have died.
I was born in 1982. Insulin was first given to a patient in 1922, and he survived. Before that, type 1 meant death, often very slow and agonizing. Before insulin, doctors advised a super strict "keto" diet to prolong life, and it could work for awhile - up to a year, I believe. But it was a miserable existence as the body was literally eating itself as the blood turned acidic until the patient eventually died.
60 years. Only 60 years before my birth did that procedure work for the first time. That's absolutely nothing given the span of human history and I think a lot about the people who died from it throughout time.
But yes, people tried. Healers and doctors of all sorts tried all manner of things to allow these (mostly!) kids to live. The fact that it was accomplished at all is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that I've been alive 42 years is fucking insane considering my body doesn't produce a hormone necessary for survival. If you think that doesn't blow me away on a regular basis you have another think coming. It's nothing short of a miracle.
Every medical advancement is. The amount of work that goes into it and the vast amount of luck necessary to get it right even when all the research and information is sound is just astonishing.
Thank you, humanity. Thank you ingenuity and determination to save lives and make them better. Thank you to every medical practitioner and medical researcher in existence now and through all of time. Thank you to all the people who died so I could live.
