I am allergic to wool, soy, peanuts, and pollen. Only my peanut allergy can kill me.
Appendicitis
There is an organ in your body called the appendix, and sometimes it goes bad and kills you. The only treatment is to cut it out of your body. I don’t recommend trying this. You’ll bleed to death. On the other hand, death from appendicitis is long and excruciatingly painful. So maybe try surgery. There’s something to be said for the quicker death.
Bears
Bears aren’t so bad. They can kill you very easily, but mostly they leave people alone. Also, they keep wolves away. After Lauren died, I settled in Gualala because grizzly bears had been sighted in the area. Most people were afraid of the bears, but those people were idiots. Bears are so much better than wolves.
If you encounter a bear, move away slowly. If that doesn’t work, drop to the ground and play dead. You want the bear to lose interest in you and go away. But if a bear wants to kill you, it’ll kill you. There isn’t much you can do about it. I suppose that’s what scares people about bears. But if you think about it, the same thing is true of everything that can kill you.
Beriberi
This has a lot of names in different places: the shakes, the bone dance, calf legs. It starts with feeling weak and fatigued, then progresses to numbness in the arms and legs, inability to walk, facial tics, and dementia. Sufferers may also have a rapid heartbeat and shortness of breath.
As complex and frightening as these symptoms are—and I’ve seen them enough to know how scary they can be—the cause is a simple vitamin deficiency. Unless it’s progressed too far, a diet of fresh meat, green vegetables, and brown bread (not anything made from the white flour or white rice found in the cities) should take care of the problem. Also, drink fresh clean water instead of beer if possible. If none of this is possible, beriberi can easily kill you.
As we traveled up the coast, back in my traveling days, Lauren and I started to see more and more stick-thin sufferers of beriberi, sometimes even in the larger settlements, and we were told more and more often that our diagnosis was useless. Where was anyone going to get fresh greens, when all the local farmland had turned poisonous and chalky, and even the trees in the woods were whitening? People got angry, they refused to pay. That was one of the things that made us think we ought to give up the traveling medicine work and settle somewhere, if we could find a healthy place that would take us.
Blood Poisoning
There are a lot of ways blood can get poisoned. Stepping on a rusty nail. Getting cut by a sharp piece of old metal. Always wear boots and gloves when foraging in the cities.
If you get an infected cut and start having spasms, especially in the jaw, you have tetanus. Tetanus can easily kill you. The only treatment we have these days is bed rest. Some people try bloodletting to release the poison, but I’ve never seen that work. The sickness isn’t caused by poison, anyway. It’s caused by bacteria that live in dirt.
You can also get blood poisoning through a tooth abscess or other dental problems. That’s what got Lauren. She had a toothache and she let it go, and let it go, and one morning her whole jaw swelled up and her body was on fire. She died a few days later. That was when I had to start looking seriously for a place to settle down, because I can’t travel alone, not with my allergies and my fibromyalgia. (Fibromyalgia is a painful disorder of the muscles. It’s not worth going into here, because it can’t kill you.) It took me three days to dig a grave in a nearby redwood grove, a safe distance from any source of water, and then I cried a little, and then I got the wagon back on the road and headed for the nearest settlement.
Keep your mouth as clean as possible, and pull rotten teeth before the rot spreads.
Botulism
Botulism causes cramps, vomiting, and breathing problems. There is no fever. You usually get it from food that’s been improperly preserved. It happens sometimes with smoked and cured meats, but is most common with canned goods. If you find canned food, check the can carefully for dents or swellings. Do not eat food from damaged cans, no matter how rare and delicious it is.
There used to be a cure for botulism, if treated quickly enough, but we don’t have it anymore.
When I worked at the trading post in Gualala, I threw out dozens of cans that people had salvaged from San Francisco and Berkeley. Most canned food from the old days is no good anymore. A lot of people got angry at me. Fortunately, Evan, who ran the trading post, backed me up. He’d dealt with botulism before, and he knew it can kill you.
A man once threatened to shoot me for destroying ten cans of Vienna sausages he’d found. I should have just let him eat the diseased meat. What kind of person wastes a bullet over spoiled Vienna sausages? I know how hunger grinds at you, especially if you’re coming up to trade out of the dead places, but eating bacteria just makes things worse.
Gualala was a good place, though. Still healthy, but well protected from raiders. Evan gave me acrylic wool the traders brought in and I’d sit on the porch of the trading post and knit. I got a reputation as the person to talk to if you were sick or injured or were planning a big journey. People were always planning trips north, over the mountains, following rumors of healthy cropland and even operational cities up in Oregon. I don’t know why they wanted to talk to me about it, since I always said the same thing: Forget it. So many things in the mountains can kill you. I advised against it every time.
Almost every time.
Childbirth
The best way to avoid dying in childbirth is to not get pregnant. If you do get pregnant, pennyroyal tea is an effective abortifacient. It can be dangerous, but the safer alternatives don’t always work. If pennyroyal fails, find a woman with midwife skills and ask her to help. Do not try to perform an abortion on yourself unless all other options have been exhausted.
When Lauren and I were on the road together selling medical care, abortion was the most common service we were asked to provide. We got to be very good at it. We could usually stop a pregnancy with herbs; surgery was not often needed.
We also oversaw childbirth, of course. That was much more difficult. With the toxins people pick up from the infected areas, a lot of women go into shock during pregnancy. They used to call that eclampsia. It will almost certainly kill you. There are many other ways childbirth can kill you, but that one is the most common right now.
If you do insist on having a baby, get to a large settlement the moment you realize you’re pregnant. So many women die giving birth in the middle of nowhere, without a midwife or even another woman around. What if it’s a breach birth? You and the baby will both die.
People get angry at me for talking this way about childbirth. What about our duty to carry on the human species, they say.
People are idiots.
Cholera
The colony where I grew up was wiped out by cholera. It’s a stupid way to die.
It was an early colony, from before things really fell apart. Some smart people saw the trouble coming and pooled their money and bought an island, a little island off the coast of Mexico. My mother was invited to join because she was a doctor. That was a sign of how stupid these smart people were, that they thought one doctor would be enough when things got bad. One doctor and no medical resources except what she brought with her, which fortunately included a little electronic book with a whole library of books inside it.
The colony did all right for quite a few years, longer than it really should have, but some people just wouldn’t dig proper outhouses. A hundred scientists and businessmen and millionaires all died because they kept using the river as a bathroom, and that’s how cholera spreads. So don’t poo in the river.