You know what? If I had been born 50 years sooner I would probably be dead by now.
What do you mean, ‘probably’? You’re 93. You would be 143 years old. Nobody lives that long. You’d be dead, all right.
That’s not what I mean. I mean that my chances of reaching the age of 93 would have been slim to zero. Look at how many life-threatening things I have avoided just by being born in 1923 instead of 1873.
I don’t see what you’re driving at. Life-threatening?
Well, for one thing, my life expectancy in 1873 would have been 43 years instead of the 53 it was in 1923. That’s a 10-year gain right there.
Averages don’t apply to specific cases. There is no such thing as the law of averages. It’s only in hindsight that averages mean anything.
Well then, consider just my medical escapes. I had pneumonia when I was 21. In 1894 sulfonamide and penicillin were still three or four decades away. Statistics say one person out of three who got pneumonia in 1894 died of it. Fifty years later the cure was almost routine. A few shots and a little rest and you were okay. No need to spend months in the Alps. trying to understand Thomas Mann.
OK. I get your point.
And what about the influenza epidemic in 1918 that killed 25 million Americans who hadn’t yet heard of flu shots? True, I might not have caught it, but by being born after that I avoided it altogether. And what about surgery? In 1987 when I was 64 years old I developed a double inguinal hernia. The surgeon just tucked it back in behind some plastic mesh, a routine procedure then. That operation hadn’t yet been heard of in 1937, when the mortality rate from hernia operations was also about one out of three. And even if I had survived in the OR, there would have been no Medicare to pay for it — I would have been stuck with a bill that would probably have bankrupted me.
Now I see where you’re going.
My hearing went south in 2006. In 1956 I would have been carrying an ear trumpet, if I had had the courage to advertise my problem. As it actually happened the Geek world gave me a little peanut inside my ear, and by that time nobody would have considered that embarrassing, even if they had noticed. But my narrowest escape was four years ago when my small intestine somehow got twisted into a knot. My wife called 911 and an ambulance with EMTs and all kinds of testing equipment was at our apartment within ten minutes. Three hours later I was on an operating table and four and a half feet of my gut was in a bucket on the floor, beating fatal gangrene (the surgeon later told me) by no more than a few hours. In 1962 there would have been no 911 to call. The hospital would have been many more hours away and I wouldn’t have made it.
All right. I agree you’ve had some close shaves. But…
Wait. Last year I was hit by something called CRVO — a Central Retinal Vein Occlusion. It occurs inside your eyeball. No warning. Suddenly your retina swells up and your vision becomes just hazy light and shadow. There is no cure, but luckily for me two drugs had just come on the market that could stop the swelling and restore sight and stop further deterioration. My ability to read and write is now back again. (You don’t really want to hear about the procedure for the monthly injections in the eyeball unless you are a fan of Buñuel movies, but so far it’s working.)
All right. I hear you. If you had been born 50 years sooner none of these treatments would have been available.
Right. And I would be dead instead of sitting here asking you to consider whether the much-bemoaned economic stagnation in their standard of living that the American middle classes have supposedly suffered over the past half-century is really as ruinous of the quality of life as the critics say. Maybe GNP is not the full measure of our well-being. Other things need to be counted. I am surely lucky to have been born when I was instead of fifty years earlier. I’d be dead by now. Economic inequality is still a major problem to be sure, but at the same time maybe it’s true that in some respects a rising tide does really lift all boats. My doctors and my insurance broker and my pharmacist and the president of my local hospital may all have gotten rich while I haven’t, but I’m still here. My boat hasn’t sunk. Yet.
Vance Weaver 