It’s come to my attention how easy it is to take good health for granted when, like me, you’re lucky enough to have it as your baseline. Several of my friends and family members have recently experienced serious medical scares, and it’s making me realise how unexpectedly these can occur.
For example, my personal trainer – a model of health and fitness aged not a day over 40 – just had to have an emergency heart op. If she’s prone to that happening, then I can’t help but wonder what chances the rest of us have. Granted, in her case it involved an attack of a rare virus while on an overseas hiking holiday, but still – it just popped up out of nowhere. Fortunately, it looks like she’s going to be okay. What an ordeal, though.
Then there’s my housemate’s brother, a scuba diving enthusiast, who was just rushed to hospital with a case of decompression sickness. It looks like he’ll be okay following some rounds of a thing called hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Melbourne hospitals, luckily, are some of the most accessible in the world, so even a rudderless fellow like him with no savings or health insurance can be treated quickly and to a high standard. I hate to think of how situations like this must play out in, say, the US. I just hope the hospital system here doesn’t end up like theirs.
Who else? Oh, that’s right – Marge down the road was telling me that her daughter is having an acute autoimmune issue, which is something that I’ve heard a lot about lately, although I can’t say I really understand it. I remember someone on a podcast saying that see it as ‘the health crisis of our times’, which made me kind of interested in knowing more. But everything I read about it just confuses me more.
Anyway, I don’t know if there are more health issues going around now than before, or if it’s just that I’m no longer in my twenties… and, uh, this is what happens when you leave your twenties. If that’s the case, someone should probably have said something about it in PD/H/PE class.