Friday, November 8, 2013

Math Sucks

In a fit of stupidity, I decided to play a bit of a numbers game with myself. I had made the joke that my medical smorgshiboard made me 1 in a million. Then I realized that while I knew how rare some of the weirder things were, I didn't know all the stats. This is where the stupid came into play- I decided to not only look everything up, but to also do the math.

....Math, how you have betrayed me.


CRPS/RSD- about 1 in 5,000 (this is an average of 3 or 4 different studies)

CRPS type II is additionally only 1 in 10 CRPS patients

I'm now up to 1 in 50,000.


Monostotic Fibrous Dysplasia- about 1 in 30,000 (it could be as high as 1 in 15,000, no one's really sure as many cases go undiagnosed- we're going to go with diagnosed cases for fun here)


Doing the math? We're at 1 in 1.5 million.


Autoimmune disease- as my AI issues don't come with a true, firm dx yet, I looked up the general incidence of autoimmune issues in the general population, so- 1 in 12


Acid reflux- this one was tough to nail down, but the most logical stat I found was 1 in 22 for daily reflux. I saw stats saying cases as severe as mine are far less common, but I'm going with the smaller numbers here.


Gastroparesis- about 1 in 15


IBS-C- I chose to go with the incidence of IBS in general, as it was an easier stat to obtain, so about 1 in 10.


Still doing the math? We're now up to 1 in 59.4 trillion. Trillion. And sadly, this is mostly conservative estimates. Very conservative. Redoing the math using the less conservative ends of the ranges put me well into the quadrillions. I also have not included all the weird little issues I have, like tachycardia, thoracic outlet syndrome, overactive bladder, and more, as these are all considered symptoms of bigger syndromes. (Heck, half the time we can't figure out if things belong to the CRPS or the autoimmune issues.) I now feel an urge to boycott math. Sadly, the world doesn't much allow for that particular boycott. Nor would my mother, the mathematician. Instead, I'll be petting some silk yarn and looking through pattern books. I might even bust out the bag of angora fiber that's waiting for me to have the skills to spin it. Petting angora fluff always makes the world a better place.


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