Measles Outbreak at Vaccine-Denying Church

[Drich]

I don't doubt that you have, as I have as well. Usually, one gets prescribed ten days worth of amoxicillin or another antibiotic and it clears up. You are aware, are you not, that pneumonia kills a great many people every year?

I almost died when I was a boy. so yes i am aware.

My case was not typical. The day after Christmas, I started getting sick. I thought it was the flu. A week later, I went to the emergency room, they told me, yes, it's influenza, they gave me a couple of bags of IV fluids (I was badly dehydrated), and they sent me home a few hours later. There's not much they can do for influenza except let it run it's course (unless they can administer an antiviral within 48 hours of the first symptoms. It was too late for that.). They told me it would probably get worse before it got better, and that I might be sick for another couple of weeks.

I got progressively worse. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I had trouble breathing, I was delirious. About the 12th day, I begged my best friend to kill me (no, I am not joking). On the 14th day, I was taken back to the emergency room. Shortly after arriving, I had to be intubated and put on a ventilator so that I could breathe as my blood oxygen levels were dangerously low and if they didn't do it, it would be a race between drowning in my own fluid and systemic organ failure. When they intubate, it's common practice to put the patient into an induced coma to prevent them from attempting to remove the breathing tube, which is what they did. I had no expectation that I would ever awaken - as far as I knew, the moments before I drifted off were the last moments of consciousness that I would ever experience. Obviously, I did wake up, nearly a week later.

Close enough for you? Rhetorical question, really, I couldn't care less.

Now where would you be if there was no hospital to go to, and your condition was to drag out for weeks months or even years of slow deliberate suffering??

There is a big difference between dying relitivly quickly, than being made to sit and think about it for years all the while your whole life and relationships change.

after I tested positive I was treated as a leper, by not only my friends but my family as well. I was corden off and seperated from everything that made my life worth living. It's not only the physical death that taunts you. It the death of every aspect of your life. who you were all that you are is also dead/dying. So you get to spend a great deal of time mourning that as well. If you die quickly of a socially acceptable disease your legacy, lives on. Your people still stand behind and support you. If you died of Aids (20 years ago at least) You died, long before your body surcuumbs to whatever infection that winds up killing you. It is not just death that has people cry out to God. It is this slow agnoizing death of everything you are/were, and then adding insult to injury you have your physical death (probably by something like pneumonia) to look forward to.

When I went through this AIDS was a soul crushing way to die. There was no hope, at least for poor people.