I honestly can't believe this is a serious question.
Perhaps we need to rephrase it, a bit, to make it more obviously ludicrous. I don't think the question is <i>"Would you take your old, comfortably familiar life with CF, or a new, hypothetical one which you don't know anything about?"</i> Rather, the question should be <i>"If you were given a chance to lead a <b>new life altogether</b>, and knew nothing else about what would happen, would you pick CF or no-CF?"</i> There can only be one answer to that, unless you're a masochist, or your idea of CF is taking a digestive enzyme with meals until 30, at which point your FEV score declines to a "horrible" 75%.
<blockquote>Quote
<hr> <i>Originally posted by me in another thread</i>
It's very hard to consider counterfactuals (situations that didn't happen) when we're emotionally invested in what did happen. But, I believe, if we try to divorce our reasoning from our emotion, it can be done, and can lead to some startling conclusions.
If you have CF, it's true that, had you never existed, all the joy and good times you experienced would not have happened. But what other good things would have happened? Would you be a different person, without CF, who would shine as much in the world? Would your hypothetical, alternate-universe self be as happy as you are (or more so, without needing to consider IVs, potential early deaths and the like)?
If the Ice Age hadn't made our world largely uninhabitable... if the Aztecs hadn't been slaughtered by the Spanish... if the medieval Plague epidemics hadn't killed millions... All events without which, most likely, none of us would be here today. (They affected so much of history that, per Chaos Theory, every single person alive today wouldn't exist, in lieu of another person who was born under vastly different circumstances.) But before the crop of people alive today was born, did those events deserve to happen more--with the subsequent people they helped create--than the Warming Periods, invasion fleet-wrecking storms, and other diseases that would have given rise to an altogether different world?
I find it hard to contemplate not having Jessica... but, imagine I was born without this illness. Would we find different "soul mates"? Get jobs and work on our careers, perhaps helping those with some horrible illness by developing a new drug, or creating a much-needed charitable organization? Run into each other anyway, fall in love and be considering our first house right now, instead of wondering how to pay the same amount of money for a transplant?
I would not give her up, even if it meant I could never face the ravages of CF again. But, the rational part of me simply MUST acknowledge that this is the "me" of this timeline, universe--call it what you will--who'd make that decision. Until our romance blossomed, it was only a hypothetical, like trillions of other potential romances that will never see the light of day for the most pithy reasons (a cold that kept someone in bed, instead of bumping into a potential mate; a sliding door that prevented a young woman from breaking up with her philandering boyfriend, and meeting the true love of her life...). <hr></blockquote>
The "me" of another universe, who never experienced CF (and, say, encountered me in the hospital) would have every reason to be horrified and consider me nuts. I wouldn't, on the other hand, have any grounds to consider <i>him</i> irrational.
