I had an experience something like this a year ago. I had thought I might be dying for a week because my burst appendix could not be diagnosed by doctors because my immune system was too strong for me to have either an elevated white cell count or a fever at all. So, I had spent one week wondering if I was dying. Finally, when I went back to the hospital and said, "I need a sonogram to test to see if I have an appendicitis or something" one week later, the doctor on call in the emergency room said, "I think you might need a CT Scan instead." So, that is what I had and an hour later they said, "you need to have emergency laproscopic surgery because you have a burst appendix.
I said to them, "I cannot survive that because I'm too weak from what I went through the last week!"
They said, "If you don't have this surgery now likely you will die!"
So, my wife and I agreed to have this surgery but I didn't expect to live. Living the way I felt then after an operation was beyond my personal belief system. However, this wouldn't be the first time in my life that I survived something I thought would be impossible.
When your experience exceeds your belief system this is always difficult for a person to deal with. And this is no less true for me than for you. Throughout my life my belief system has had to expand and expand and expand exponentially, or else I would be dead just like most people I knew growing up as a child in the 1950s now.
Many of you cannot say this likely because you are much younger than I at present. But, I can say to you that literally everyone I lived with or around in the 1950s has passed on in my life including my mother, my father, my mother's mother, my aunt, my uncle, my cousins (their children) who were 5 and 7 years older than me then and my other Grandfather and Grandmother, and my mother's father.
It is very strange to be the last left alive though being presently 68 this likely is logical because my father would have been 100 years old last January had he lived until now because he was 32 when I was born. And one of my grandmothers was born in 1888 and the rest were born sometime during the previous 10 years or so to 1888. So, when they all grew up there were no cars or planes yet and people still got around just on steamships, trains, and horseback and horse drawn carriages. And there was not even one motorized plane then until Kitty Hawk in 1903.
But, what I'm dealing with now is the aftermath of thinking I couldn't survive that operation 1 year ago now.
My wife asked me whether I wished I had died. My answer was that I was glad to be alive because my children wouldn't have to have a funeral or memorial for me or have to cremate my body and deal with the ashes. So, this was my answer. Did I want to die back then? NO. But I was prepared to die which might be the important question here in the end. Because in being prepared to die you likely could theoretically go on living forever (theoretically speaking) with the quantum jumps in medicine that keep happening ongoing in this technological singularity we are entering right now.
So, I still find my beliefs and the reality of life to be incongruent at times. And likely you will to if you have Medicare or health insurance and are able because of these things to keep alive until 90 or longer which is the present life expectancy of most people who live to 30 here in the United States.
And now with people numbering somewhere between 70,000 to 100,000 or more in the U.S. being over 100 years old things are changing too. And last night I saw a lady 102 jogging in a race, not winning but still jogging in a race at around 102 and realized how much the world has changed from the world I grew up in.
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