The strange places

The strange places a person's mind goes.

More news about the Dallas Ebola case: apparently the family members of the patient are now in "enforced quarantine." A quick Google search suggests this is the first thing of this sort since 1963. (That could be wrong, but....the only "quarantine" I ever heard about were like in the 1930s because of diphtheria or in the late nineteen-teens because of flu).

But anyway, the biggest issue is that there's a treatment that's apparently fairly effective....but there are almost no doses of it. Certainly not enough to ship over to Africa and give to everyone afflicted, or even give to the people most likely to pull through.

And it got me thinking about the whole "lifeboat question" aspect of the thing. (From the old discussion-generating exercise; I remember doing it in, I think it was Freshman biology?). And I realized - if there were some severe disease that had limited doses of a treatment, and I became infected? I'd probably be on the "expendable" list. And even if I weren't, the honorable thing would probably be to put myself on there. Because I have no one depending on me to care for them, and I don't have a job that's important to national security or is like a medical doctor or anything like that. And that makes me a little sad. (And I would hope that if it came to that, I would have the intestinal fortitude to say, "No, give my dose of the treatment to this woman who has three children depending on her" or "No, give it to this nurse who can help treat others who are infected" or "No, give it to the military strategist who can help plan how better to deal with the situation.")

In kind of a related vein: the so-called "Fukushima 50," the people who volunteered to stay behind and stabilize the reactors after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Even though it probably meant a very high risk of cancer or radiation poisoning.

I don't know. It's a strange and perhaps numinous thing to contemplate, going into a situation where you know you face fairly certain death but going anyway, because what you are doing will help others. (In a way, it's a complete opposite of the person who, for example, does a mass shooting as a way to commit "suicide by cop" (or even just commit suicide - by their own hand). The people involved die, but the motivation is so different.)

And yeah, I know firefighters and police and military face this every day (a friend of mine has a son who's a sheriff's deputy, and she talks about how they hate and dread "domestic" cases, because they are such unstable situations that can turn deadly for anyone involved very fast). But somehow that seems different to me - maybe that there's a more random aspect, that yeah, that burning building might collapse on you but it most likely won't, whereas going in to stabilize a compromised reactor means with certainty you will get a big dose of radiation.

This kind of thing is part of why I don't like dystopian novels. While I'd argue there's great honor in choosing to lay down your life to make sure others were safer, it's still not something I particularly like to contemplate.