If I'd been born twenty years before I was I'd have been dead at 22

My appendix burst and I had peritonitis and septicaemia. Routinely treated when it happened and I wasn't in real danger (the blood thing was bad for a time but they dealt with it). Routinely fatal not that many years before that though.

My eldest and possibly her Mum would have died at the time of her birth not that long ago. Again when it happened, no real danger, all quite routine (it was a very complex delivery).

Me and my second and probably my sixth would have been locked up in a mental asylum not that long ago too. My condition (severe depression) is very routinely managed by drugs - took a while to find the right ones but they work just fine and I'm not depressed now and haven't been for some time - no reason to suppose that's going to change any time soon. Some of my kids are somewhere on the spectrum, one fairly acutely but some of the others too.

I'm entirely sure that fifty years from now there'll be a pill for cancer and another for Alzheimers and so on, but I've always been grateful I wasn't born a few decades before I was.

Posted By: Old Man, Jan 21, 22:56:02