Meantime the hospital and Colan home were flooded with messages from Americans who have survived similar ailments.
But many mustard gas victims survived, developing ailments that worsened over time and often led to death.
In 1997 and again in 1999, the pope's visits to Poland touched off speculation and commentary about the possibility that he was bidding a final farewell, that he could not survive his ailments for long.
The 37-year-old has been in and out of hospital since arriving in Majuro, suffering from dehydration and a range of ailments linked to surviving by eating raw fish and bird flesh and drinking turtle blood and his own urine.
Professor Holloway, who teaches at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, deftly weaves surviving fragments of Randel's life (his lawsuits and ailments are the most heavily documented) with a 21st century scavenger hunt by modern geographers to find the physical markers of his work.
You need to eke out a living while surviving environmental hazards, rival human groups, dangerous fauna, the needs, desires, and ailments of your team, and the ever-present possibility of quasi-random catastrophic misfortune.
While it has even been observed that the presence of G6PD deficiency could provide "an evolutionary advantage" in malarial endemic environments, it of course remains the case that one must first survive and surmount the ailment itself (and its attendant complications) in order to realize any of its ancillary immunological benefits.
For instance, Mr. Qadir claims that Bin Laden's fifth and youngest wife, Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, told Pakistani interrogators that her husband underwent a kidney transplant operation in 2002 — a claim that, if proven, could help explain how the ailing Saudi militant was able to survive with a known kidney ailment, but raises questions about who was helping him.
Returning to our patient analogy, if they're suffering from multiple illnesses, the chances are they won't make it - but if you can treat some ailments, they may be able to survive the rest.
