On deaths, and not dying
Feb. 25th, 2009 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumOne of these things is not like the others:
Polio
Mumps
Rubella
Smallpox
Human Papilloma Virus
Measles
Whooping Cough
Diptheria
Chicken Pox
Scarlet Fever
The one which is unlike the others: Smallpox. Smallpox, alone among diseases is, so far as we can tell, extinct. No one in the world has caught smallpox in 30 years. It's gone.
Why? Because we killed it. The gov'ts of the world united and vaccinated everyone against it. I have a scar. I was in the tail end of the United States campaign. My sister is 14 months my junior, she has no scar. My younger siblings don't have the scar. No one I have ever met has had it.
The first disease to be wiped out is the one from which we get the word vaccine
It's part of why we vaccinate
Vaccinations save lives. We say, "children bury their parents, parent's shouldn't bury their children." Well burying children used to be part and parcel of having them.
Ben Jonson wrote a poem about the death of his son Benjamin. I've seen the tombstones.
Children died so regularly that in some places they didn't get real names until they'd attained some age at which it was assumed they were likely to live. That might be as high as eight.
There's been a big brouhaha about vaccines in the past ten years or so. Claims that it leads to autism. It doesn't. The data were faked and the author had conflicts of interest.
And, even if it did increase the risk of autism, so what? The world isn't safe. Maybe the vaccination schedule raises the odds of autism. I don't know. What I do know is polio... kills; when it doesn't maim.
Measles kills, when it doesn't blind, or deafen.
Scarlett Fever doesn't kill, unless it leads to Rheumatic Fever, which weakens the heart and leads to early demise, when it doesn't kill.
Chicken pox can disfigure, blind and (yes, you got it) kill.
Whooping cough, can kill.
The list of preventable diseases is longer than the one I provided. Many of them are fatal. They are, in the developed world, rare. Why?
Because we vaccinate. Right now England is having a rash of measles cases? Why? Because people were afraid of autism. Autism is bad. Burying your kids (even if they make it past eight) is worse.
My grandmother buried her second child. He got TB, and he died. He was three. She lived almost seventy more years, and it Johnny's death never left her. Not getting kids vaccinated will inflict that on more people, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters. We don't have to go back to that.
One other of those is not like the others: HPV. HPV is sexually transmitted. This wigs a lot of people out. They think (as with making condoms available to teens) that vaccinating against HPV will tell girls they can have sex anytime they want and they won't be suceptible to strains of genital warts, which reduces the odds of cervical cancer.
HPV is usually silent. Most males don't know they have it, and condoms can't protect against it. Once a woman is exposed, the vaccine is useless.
Twenty years ago I went to a Tuesday evening class (logic and argment). I picked up a copy of the campus paper. The Roundup was a weekly, and I was no longer on the staff. From Managing Editor to just another consumer of the news. Which was as it should be, because working on the paper was a full-time job, and I was actually trying to get a degree.
It came out on Weds, but Tues. afternoon was when it came back from the printer, and it was put in the stands, so the early classes on Weds. would have it ready to hand.
On the front page was a photo of one of the former staffers. She was sitting with a lamb. Something about the photo bothered me. I couldn't quite place it, but something seemed out of place.
I started to read it, and the tense seemed wrong. That's when it hit me. The photo was bordered in a style I'd designed the year before. It had become the obituary edging.
Stacey was dead. The woman who had gone to Canada for the summer two years before and come back engaged. The woman who made the random quotations list because she was overheard saying, "I love you Terry. My thighs hate you, but I love you," after I'd brought some sweets to her and Joy in the newsroom.
Stacy, the lovable, sweet-natured, peacemaking, wonderful woman. A decent writer, a pretty good photograper. A friend (I admit it, I'd had a crush on her, and been to chicken to act on it. It didn't help that there were problems of position, she was a staff photographer, and I was an editor; not quite a sexual harrassment issue, but it colored my thinking, but I digress). A daughter, and a wife.
She was 27 years old, and she was dead. I don't remember much of the evening. I recall telling my instructor something like, "I won't be in class tonight. I just found out a friend of mine died," and dropping the paper on his desk as I walked out.
I think I called my girlfriend Stacey (it was a strange time, I was dating a Stacey, had a class with a different Stacy, and this Stacy died), and got drunk. The next day I went to the city room and sat with friends and we mourned some. There never was a wake. Her husband, and family, were too devastated to have one, and the rest of us weren't really old enough to have a handle on hosting one. Drinks at The Scotland Yard and stories and not quite crying in the pitchers was how we did it.
She had cervical cancer.
Add that to the list of things we don't have to put up with. We have the means to stop it. All we need is the will.
Polio
Mumps
Rubella
Smallpox
Human Papilloma Virus
Measles
Whooping Cough
Diptheria
Chicken Pox
Scarlet Fever
The one which is unlike the others: Smallpox. Smallpox, alone among diseases is, so far as we can tell, extinct. No one in the world has caught smallpox in 30 years. It's gone.
Why? Because we killed it. The gov'ts of the world united and vaccinated everyone against it. I have a scar. I was in the tail end of the United States campaign. My sister is 14 months my junior, she has no scar. My younger siblings don't have the scar. No one I have ever met has had it.
The first disease to be wiped out is the one from which we get the word vaccine
It's part of why we vaccinate
Vaccinations save lives. We say, "children bury their parents, parent's shouldn't bury their children." Well burying children used to be part and parcel of having them.
Ben Jonson wrote a poem about the death of his son Benjamin. I've seen the tombstones.
Children died so regularly that in some places they didn't get real names until they'd attained some age at which it was assumed they were likely to live. That might be as high as eight.
There's been a big brouhaha about vaccines in the past ten years or so. Claims that it leads to autism. It doesn't. The data were faked and the author had conflicts of interest.
And, even if it did increase the risk of autism, so what? The world isn't safe. Maybe the vaccination schedule raises the odds of autism. I don't know. What I do know is polio... kills; when it doesn't maim.
Measles kills, when it doesn't blind, or deafen.
Scarlett Fever doesn't kill, unless it leads to Rheumatic Fever, which weakens the heart and leads to early demise, when it doesn't kill.
Chicken pox can disfigure, blind and (yes, you got it) kill.
Whooping cough, can kill.
The list of preventable diseases is longer than the one I provided. Many of them are fatal. They are, in the developed world, rare. Why?
Because we vaccinate. Right now England is having a rash of measles cases? Why? Because people were afraid of autism. Autism is bad. Burying your kids (even if they make it past eight) is worse.
My grandmother buried her second child. He got TB, and he died. He was three. She lived almost seventy more years, and it Johnny's death never left her. Not getting kids vaccinated will inflict that on more people, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters. We don't have to go back to that.
One other of those is not like the others: HPV. HPV is sexually transmitted. This wigs a lot of people out. They think (as with making condoms available to teens) that vaccinating against HPV will tell girls they can have sex anytime they want and they won't be suceptible to strains of genital warts, which reduces the odds of cervical cancer.
HPV is usually silent. Most males don't know they have it, and condoms can't protect against it. Once a woman is exposed, the vaccine is useless.
Twenty years ago I went to a Tuesday evening class (logic and argment). I picked up a copy of the campus paper. The Roundup was a weekly, and I was no longer on the staff. From Managing Editor to just another consumer of the news. Which was as it should be, because working on the paper was a full-time job, and I was actually trying to get a degree.
It came out on Weds, but Tues. afternoon was when it came back from the printer, and it was put in the stands, so the early classes on Weds. would have it ready to hand.
On the front page was a photo of one of the former staffers. She was sitting with a lamb. Something about the photo bothered me. I couldn't quite place it, but something seemed out of place.
I started to read it, and the tense seemed wrong. That's when it hit me. The photo was bordered in a style I'd designed the year before. It had become the obituary edging.
Stacey was dead. The woman who had gone to Canada for the summer two years before and come back engaged. The woman who made the random quotations list because she was overheard saying, "I love you Terry. My thighs hate you, but I love you," after I'd brought some sweets to her and Joy in the newsroom.
Stacy, the lovable, sweet-natured, peacemaking, wonderful woman. A decent writer, a pretty good photograper. A friend (I admit it, I'd had a crush on her, and been to chicken to act on it. It didn't help that there were problems of position, she was a staff photographer, and I was an editor; not quite a sexual harrassment issue, but it colored my thinking, but I digress). A daughter, and a wife.
She was 27 years old, and she was dead. I don't remember much of the evening. I recall telling my instructor something like, "I won't be in class tonight. I just found out a friend of mine died," and dropping the paper on his desk as I walked out.
I think I called my girlfriend Stacey (it was a strange time, I was dating a Stacey, had a class with a different Stacy, and this Stacy died), and got drunk. The next day I went to the city room and sat with friends and we mourned some. There never was a wake. Her husband, and family, were too devastated to have one, and the rest of us weren't really old enough to have a handle on hosting one. Drinks at The Scotland Yard and stories and not quite crying in the pitchers was how we did it.
She had cervical cancer.
Add that to the list of things we don't have to put up with. We have the means to stop it. All we need is the will.
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-26 05:55 am (UTC)A lot of the rhetoric comes very, very close to saying that an autistic child is a "lost" child (actually, literally have had someone say "I've already lost one child to this disease" - no, you haven't. You have a living, breathing, loving, thinking child and he can hear you say that, so stop it, please), or that the risk of death is infinitely preferrable.
Autism is hard and autism causes problems, but we live through it, and we're still people, and it's a hell of a lot better than being dead. We grow up and we contribute and we do jobs and we love people and we're here. And it's kind of nasty to be relegated to the horror stories or the worst-case scenario; it kind of sucks to have your entire experience reduced to a cautionary tale or a horror story, and autism is a filter on your entire experience.
Sure, I wish my sister, especially, didn't have it. And I'm sorry if expressing just that sentiment has gotten you shredded in the past; it shouldn't, and that's unreasonable (I've never encountered that myself, but that doesn't mean it's not out there). But it makes me twitchy when the rhetoric used implies that because she does, everything is over and she's less of a person, and her life is lessened - not made more difficult, but lessened - because of it. And that is what I feel a lot of the rhetoric used does - as sufferer, and as kin to sufferers. And it definitely makes me cranky when it's held on equal-par to death - which, again, a lot of the rhetoric and behaviour makes the connection fairly clear.
(edit: reading comment above, re: your scenario, I get a bit clearer - our family runs to high-to-mid functioning, as the spectrum goes, so my seethe is coloured by that, as well. My apologies if I upset you.)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-26 06:24 am (UTC)There is a risk of death for my son. Or abuse. He can't communicate. I'd say some of the risks to his health are greater than the risk of getting measles. He's on medication with side effects that can get pretty bad, and out of nowhere. He'll be poor, unless we make sure that we leave him enough, without too much that he loses any benefits he gets. I think that if the choice were measles or autism, that is, if we knew that the shot would give it to him, I'd want to take my chance with measles. The fatality rate for measles is a few per thousand. Death for mumps? Even less. Rubella, too. I'd rather a child have that, and have it go away (because let's be honest here, they most likely WILL NOT DIE from MM or R) than have a child go through the hell my son goes through. The terror he goes through when he doesn't understand something, or is afraid. The screaming because no one understands him. The likelihood of never gaining independence as it stands now, always vulnerable to abuse or harm, because he can't speak for himself.
Now, since those shots don't cause autism, it really is not an issue. But if they did, well, they'd have to stop giving them until they could reformulate it, because it can be a very serious condition, and even from a public standpoint, an economically devastating one, for both family and community. It's why my husband works 1000 miles away. It's the best way we found to get everything he needs. It literally tears my family apart, if you think about it.
And if you could tell me, well, if you don't give your kid this shot, it won't happen, I wouldn't be in the same ROOM as it. My child deserves better than that. I feel that way not because I don't love and accept him, but because I do.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 04:50 am (UTC)I've got a genetic connective tissue disorder, and aiya, the number of people who say shit like 'wheelchair bound' - no, I'm sorry, most of us are VERY MUCH liberated by our wheelchairs. Or they look at mobility aids and handicapped placards with this terrible, terrible...ugh. I don't even know how to explain it.
Certainly, we get told - by perfectly well-meaning people, even our friends - that they don't know what they'd do in our position, or that they'd 'give up'. Give up - what does that mean? I mean, really, the only 'give up' you have is offing yourself. Otherwise, you kind of have to figure out a way to make dinner and feed it to yourself, get yourself to the doctor, so on and so forth.
And oh yes, people act like we're less of a person, or that our lives are lessened.
I don't mean to belittle what you're feeling at ALL, just...noting that it is wider than just spectrum disorders.
(and my god do I ever wish I didn't have it, and I fear that my baby nephew may, and the idea of him struggling with the kind of pain I have every day just cuts me to the core, but....that just means if he has it, we'll have to be careful with him, because his life should never, ever be less because of anything)