# Sick Child



## mbianka (Sep 19, 2014)

I spent the heat spell last weekend on a mooring at the Port Jeff. Yacht Club on Long Island. After the weekend cruises had departed on Sunday evening there came a call over the VHF Channel 68 from a sailboat requesting a mooring from The Yacht Club. It seems the couple had a child on board who came down with the fever and they came to Port Jefferson to bring the child to a hospital for evaluation. The yacht club personnel on duty went into action and gave them a mooring close to the launch dock and advised on a local Taxi to call to take them to one of the two Hospitals located within two miles of the Yacht Club.
It got me thinking about the Rebel Heart situation from a few years ago. Which instead of a quick Taxi ride to help a sick child required a mid sea rescue of four people the scuttling of their boat and the dream of cruising the world.


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## SanderO (Jul 12, 2007)

If the child had heat stroke or maybe had it... and ambulance should have been at the dock and the boat should have come along side to evacuate the child. Hard to tell from the description.


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## Minnewaska (Feb 21, 2010)

While heartbreaking to hear of the sick child, it's heartwarming to hear of the Yacht Clubs reaction. I hope the child is doing well. 

Raising a child on a boat, or taking one for a very long cruise, is a clear risk. Many talk of their successful experience, which is terrific. There is still a risk that transcends the anecdotal successes. I'm guessing the odds are on one's favor, but the risk may be higher than some parents with wanderlust would like to admit. 

The only ones that can decide are the parents.


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## RegisteredUser (Aug 16, 2010)

If i had a child onboard i would want a healthy credit in an iridium account...and a mini pharmacy


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## hasher (Aug 12, 2011)

Minnewaska said:


> While heartbreaking to hear of the sick child, it's heartwarming to hear of the Yacht Clubs reaction. I hope the child is doing well.
> 
> Raising a child on a boat, or taking one for a very long cruise, is a clear risk. Many talk of their successful experience, which is terrific. There is still a risk that transcends the anecdotal successes. I'm guessing the odds are on one's favor, but the risk may be higher than some parents with wanderlust would like to admit.
> 
> The only ones that can decide are the parents.


My children survived camping in the forest, bicycling across a big city on a regular basis, motorcycling in the wild and many other risky behaviors including boats and water.

Read this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/world/europe/netherlands-dropping-children.html


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## chef2sail (Nov 27, 2007)

hasher said:


> My children survived camping in the forest, bicycling across a big city on a regular basis, motorcycling in the wild and many other risky behaviors including boats and water.
> 
> Read this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/world/europe/netherlands-dropping-children.html


I am glad to hear your child survived what YOU choose to put them through.

How ever it has no relevance toward other children surviving other experiences

As was said it is a personal and individual parents choice and shaming their choices by innuendo is counter productive .


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## MarkofSeaLife (Nov 7, 2010)

100 years ago most parents expected to lose one or 2 children so had larger families and less cottonwood.

Kids were part of the world's exploration.


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## Minnewaska (Feb 21, 2010)

MarkofSeaLife said:


> 100 years ago most parents expected to lose one or 2 children so had larger families and less cottonwood.
> 
> Kids were part of the world's exploration.


This is exactly correct. The average number of children in a society is directly correlated to standard of living and mortality rates. Not religion, as some think. Religion is sometimes, not always, correlated to societies with large average family sizes, but is not causal. Families needed children to survive. Once you don't expect as many to perish and don't need them to be self sufficient (tend the farm), you have fewer.

There was a great Swedish (maybe Dane, I'm not certain) professor who studied the heck out of this. He was an excellent speaker and can be found on YouTube. He showed, as world wide standard of living increases and mortality rates improve (which are quantifiably happening, despite political rhetoric) the planet's population will cap off at around 10 billion. At that point, births will simply be replacing deaths. The silly science fiction movies about a crowded planet are fiction.


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## Minnewaska (Feb 21, 2010)

hasher said:


> My children survived camping in the forest, bicycling across a big city on a regular basis, motorcycling in the wild and many other risky behaviors including boats and water.
> 
> Read this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/world/europe/netherlands-dropping-children.html


Didn't read the article, but your examples are a far cry from being outside helicopter range. My point was the risk of being unable to reach help for the sick or injured child. The parents gets to decide whether to take this risk, however, success stories do not define the risk.


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## Luisa Hilburn (Jul 27, 2019)

mini pharmacy is important in this case, I hope the child doing well.


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## Telesail (Dec 28, 2011)

Perhaps, briefly off topic.....



Minnewaska said:


> .....There was a great Swedish (maybe Dane, I'm not certain) professor who studied the heck out of this. He was an excellent speaker and can be found on YouTube. He showed, as world wide standard of living increases and mortality rates improve (which are quantifiably happening, despite political rhetoric) the planet's population will cap off at around 10 billion. At that point, births will simply be replacing deaths. The silly science fiction movies about a crowded planet are fiction.


I guess you are thinking of Hans Rosling (sadly, now dead). He was long a proponent of pointing out how things were improving and had a way of self correcting. An interesting demographer that I would recommend is Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. He talks about the population explosion arose: "not because people started breeding like rabbits but because they stopped dying like flies". It takes a couple of generations for the new reality to set in. Interestingly, he points out that the Muslim world - often cited as an example of how religion will get in the way of the move to smaller families - has seen a drop in fertility rates to match France in only a generation. He also describes the "flight from marriage" and the consequences of Africa, the Middle East and South Asia adjusting like the rest of the world in terms of reducing population growth when economic growth reduces poverty.

Back to the topic at hand, I did not see anyone was shaming anyone else's risk tolerance for their children - As far as I can tell, the parents were taking their child sailing and when they got sick, seeking medical attention. Even the NYT article did not seem to say that parenting is a competition as to who can expose their kids to the most risk.


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## capta (Jun 27, 2011)

I'm sorry but I just can't agree that going cruising is more dangerous for a child than growing up in modern society, even long before help was available should there be a problem. 
Not to say one shouldn't take precautions. One rule we had that we *NEVER* broke was a sort of quarantine after our kid spent time playing with other children ashore before we set off for an ocean crossing. A friendship with an NZ couple was completely destroyed after they exposed our daughter to a communicable children's disease a few days before departure even though we had discussed this subject. We delayed our departure to cover a reasonable incubation period. Preventative medicine is also a must when sailing, especially for a child. We never once missed our dose of chloroquine, the anti-malarial medication of the time, and our daughter received fluoride pills as we weren't drinking fluoridated water. 
A practical medical kit, passing on silly things like sutures, is also a must, not going overboard with all sorts of perishable medications or items only a trained medical professional should be using. I found local medical care quite satisfactory, even in the Orient and the Middle East, while coastal cruising. I'm sure our kid contracted many fewer illnesses than the average American school child.
And best of all, _boat kids *rock!*_


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## Minnewaska (Feb 21, 2010)

Sure, boat kids rock. While most kids will do just fine, kids do get cancer. They get unidentifiable bacterial diseases their immune systems can’t handle, or they may have congenital heart maladies. Theses are not all known at birth and can go from zero to 60 pretty quickly. Each has happened in my near family. Only the one with cancer (a niece) didn’t survive and thrive. The others wouldn’t have either, without high end medical care.

As I said, odds are in ones favor, but coming up craps would suck.


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## Nushka (Sep 4, 2019)

sorry to hear that, this is always a risk even for adult.


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## mbianka (Sep 19, 2014)

Nushka said:


> sorry to hear that, this is always a risk even for adult.


Quite right. This past Labor Day weekend I was in the same location and followed the communications of the Suffolk County Police and a boat that had a fellow suffering a heart attack. There were also at least one Doctor and Nurse on their boats who were able to assist.


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## outbound (Dec 3, 2012)

We carry a full pharmacy and can take care of just about anything from sepsis to a M.I. But it’s not that that’s the limiting factor. It’s diagnostic skill set and treatment.
I’m a doc. Wife’s a RN but even we aren’t at decreased risk. You need services you can’t get on a boat. An OR, imaging, cultures, life support and specialty care among others. 
This June I had a soft tissue infection. I put myself on antibiotics. It didn’t respond. Treatment in Grenada was dismal and went septic. Wife had to do my chores and fell 10’ off the boat breaking her foot in three places. We got on a plane and got treatment in a tertiary hospital. Saved my life. Made it possible for her to be ambulatory without deficit.
No cruising carries risk. Risk is manageable. It’s not inappropriate to home school on a cruising boat. It is without basic skills, supplies and a evacuation plan.


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## Scandium (Mar 27, 2018)

hasher said:


> My children survived camping in the forest, bicycling across a big city on a regular basis, motorcycling in the wild and many other risky behaviors including boats and water.
> 
> Read this: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/21/world/europe/netherlands-dropping-children.html


read this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias


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