Having been sick over the past eight days has made me realize a sobering fact: If it were two hundred years ago, I’d probably be dead.
Whoa, you say. That’s heavy. Dead? Are you sure?
I won’t get into statistical probabilities, though my husband would probably collapse into a puddle of ecstasy if I did, but the chances I would not be around to whittle, churn, or embroider are pretty darned high. I have allergies. They’re pretty bad. Without central air conditioning and my weekly allergy shots, I’d be suffering continuously. Without my allergy shots, and the intermittent interjection of antibiotics and/or steroids, I’d probably by now have developed a blood infection and died. Because, my friends, two hundred years ago, antibiotics hadn’t been discovered yet. So there’s that.
I took the thought even further and considered the fact that being pregnant with breech twins and going into labor prematurely, which was stopped, in a hospital, with steroids, may not have ultimately worked out in our favor. The cesarean section, though, as you may have inferred, has been happening for quite some. Still? I wouldn’t have called that modern medicine. And I’m not terribly fond of leeches.
Besides the fact that I’d either be a leper by now or would have ceased to exist altogether, I also considered a myriad of events I would not have had the pleasure of experiencing had I been alive two hundred years ago. In 1813, the Titanic hadn’t yet been built, hadn’t yet taken its maiden voyage. Had I been born on the other side of that event, I would not have gone to the theater to see it three times (did they put crack in that movie or what?), crying the entire way through the last two viewings, blasting the soundtrack in my boyfriend’s Cougar, and then buying a Titanic poster and putting it above the toilet in my dorm suite as a joke.
Moreover, had it been two hundred years ago, I’d probably not be sharing a dorm suite with five other girls attempting to obtain their undergraduate degrees.
And so on and so forth.
My point is, I’m grateful. As cantankerous as we all can be about convenience foods and media constantly blaring in our faces, and the ever-present desire to escape from it all, if we didn’t have these annoyances, we would also not have modern medicine, drive-thrus, peel-and-stick envelopes, or the Internet.
And without you (yes, you!), fine folks of the Internet, I would not have nearly as successfully gotten through the past two years, wouldn’t have made many of the friends I have today, and would have no platform on which to share my hopes and dreams. So I’m glad you’re here. And I’m glad I’m here. And I’m glad it’s not 1813.
Now get back to your game of Candy Crush.
