We’ve been talking a bit about disaster preparedness and end-of-the-world fantasies, so here’s something I never really see discussed:
How would a significant interruption in access to modern pharmaceuticals effect medical transition?
The only thing I can think of is I find a veterinarian (because every zombie survival team needs a veterinarian) to cut my balls off and then I start drinking pregnant horse peepee, as our foremothers once did upon the steppes of Scythia.
And I really don’t think I can find words to adequately describe how badly I want that to Not Happen.
This is a good point. I mean, you can only raid pharmacies so long.
A lot of chronic illnesses, or people using hormones, or elderly folk and disabled folk who need regular medicine are gonna have a really hard time during a larger scale disaster or transportation shutdown, it is true. It’s something to account for when one plans for “apocalypse” natural disasters or transport/power shutdowns.
For one very, er, strong medication I am on, I have a stash of the few extra pills I have ever gotten and I’d probably spend the first few weeks of a transportation shutdown using them to nurse other people and myself through the withdrawal process of this particular drug. I have a lot of experience with this.. and enough other basic medical knowledge to become a support for the doctors and actual nurses and caregivers who will be run off their feet during such a time. I’ve learned a lot of general triage and field trauma medicine.
Also try the fantasy webcomic White Noise. TW, It’s got a lot of mature themes and a major disruption of government, but it also features several trans characters and handles how being refugees makes their lives especially complicated.
An interesting dichotomy you run into with this sort of specfic: I definitely want to read that but I also definitely don’t want to read that
I’m pretty much prepared to just die. My mom keeps talking about fixes but without insulin it’s just delaying the inevitable. It’s fun to be confronted with that.
Well, the reason we’re asking these questions now is so that we can be sure that doesn’t happen. Despite all the stuff about zombies and the end of the world and whatnot, this is not just idle chatter, but something that a lot of people are actually trying to find a solution to.
Like, as for me, I mostly know soils and wood, not medicine, but I definitely know my way around a laboratory. That bit I said about drinking horse peepee was a poetic flourish; given an adequate laboratory space and a supply of pregnant mare urine, I’m confident that I could figure out homebrewed premarin. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjugated_estrogens).
I am absolutely sure that something can be done about insulin.
Like it says in the the preamble to the IWW constitution, “…we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”
I want to believe that, but at the same time it’s very hard for me to feel like it’s worth the effort on my end. It’s kind of why my plan for like, inevitable collapse is to just make sure I’m not a burden. But I’m just a bit bleak when I think about that kind of thing in general.
You would NOT be a burden.
A person is NEVER a burden.
Insulin can be extracted from pig and cow pancreas. You’d better believe that we’d figure out a way to keep you alive and kicking.
And there’s people with a list of a lot harder to get medication, @mirronx, me for example given I had to be reanimated last year and am still recovering from that, yet I know that @systlin Would Not let me die young without dragging me back kicking and screaming.
You’re goddamn right I wouldn’t.
I’ve talked a lot about this in the past—usually with regards to fiction and how ableism affects the “survivor narrative” cause y’know, editor and disabled—but y’know what the biggest take away from all those discussions were? The lengths to which random people on the internet, people I’m not even friends with, who spoke up and said “you’re not a burden we wouldn’t let you die.”
I still remember the one time I referred to myself as a burden and how, in the event of a zombie apocalypse I should just be left behind with a shotgun to try and buy everyone else some time, and @undead-tealeaves response was “fuck that, if you can’t run we’ll carry you” and honestly it might have been a throw away remark, it might have just been a friend reflexively knee jerking against the idea of letting me die, but it meant so much. Because it’s hard to think of your life having value when you’ve been trained to think of yourself as a burden, it’s hard to envision your survival in such circumstances when all the narratives tell you you should just die to let other people thrive. But if running this blog has taught me anything over the years, it’s to never underestimate the human capacity for kindness and sheer dogged determination to survive against the odds. We may be capable of limited survival on our own, but it’s together that we thrive.