I mean that it scared you either personally or in a more general way?
My mother in law had a long mysterious illness, she just strangely had no appetite or thirst and had enormous weight loss with no other symptoms at first. A lot of time was wasted with chasing diagnosis, she has several HIV tests all negative .Then she got shingles due to the weight loss, and after that had horrible pain even after the shingles was not active. She was hospitalized several times and put on a feeding tube and IV drips and would make a miraculous recovery but then she would remove the tube and drips and get worse. She eventually died.
What haunts me is that she had an MRI shortly before her death that showed she had a stroke or strokes and small parts of her brain were basically dead, including a neurologist said the part of her brain that controlled swallowing. The funny thing was she had no symptoms of a stroke, and never complained she couldn’t swallow just that she wasn’t thirsty or hungry
.
It was terrifying to realize she basically starved to death over a year, and she may not have even known what was going on. That anyone could have a stroke and show no symptoms and not even realize it, and basically waste away.
My wife was terrified by my flu. It was Christmas morning and I woke up feeling a little fuzzy. 9:00 I was a little off my breakfast. 12:00 I couldn’t eat any Christmas lunch, 13:30 I was in bed with a monstrous fever.
She’d never seen anyone so hot, sweaty, feverish and sick before. I couldn’t walk for several days and she was changing my bed clothes 3 times a day.
" Luckily" :dubious: I’d had flu once before and was familiar with the symptoms so could stop her from calling an ambulance (she thought I was dying).
They put SJS patients into burn centers because burn centers have the most experience with people missing large areas of skin who are in excruciating pain. It’s not a burn, but the damage is similar to what a burn does to a person. Hence, putting them in the burn unit.
I’m assuming she recovered? That must have been a terrible experience.
My uncle is schizophrenic and the idea of being schizophrenic scares the everloving shit out of me. He genuinely believes there is a conspiracy against him, he has been evicted from apartments and banned from stores for losing his shit and destroying property. He’s been in and out of hospitals for decades - was forcibly medicated via injection because he assaulted a cop he thought was trying to harm him. The walls of his apartment are yellow with smoke residue, since all he ever does is smoke cigarettes and drink coffee and write poetry and letters to the people who are after him. He’s pushing 50 and looks 65. I don’t know why he’s not already dead. He once left 19 messages on my college answering machine telling me that he loved me so much he refused to molest me when I was a little girl (yeah, we don’t talk much.) His life just seems miserable. The idea that some people are born just to be endlessly tormented by their own minds is just horrifying to me.
As a child, I had been somewhat close to my grandmother. But when I was a teenager she had a series of strokes, and was hospitalized for the rest of her life. She became bedridden and unable to control her bodily functions. And her speech sounded like sounds an infant might make. She seemed to think she was speaking normally, but only babbling came out. This totally freaked me out, and I was very reluctant to visit her and pretend I understood what she was saying. I guess it freaked out her 3rd husband as well . . . the bastard skipped town, and was never heard from again.
Probably the closest I came was going to a sick person call and being exposed to someone I was sure had tuberculosis. Scared me because my wife was pregnant at the time and I didn’t want to bring it home.
I was in SE Asia when Sars came, flew home from Singapore to Toronto, yikes! I was quarantined once home, but still scared I’d infect my city. It was still early days and I was scared for sure. My next door neighbour had had a baby and wanted me to come over and see. I waited a full two weeks before doing so.
I second the schizophrenia one too, it’s definitely terrifying when it’s someone you love, a young person. I’m still scared.
I also recently learned a close friend’s wife was just diagnosed with Stage 3 Melanoma, when I heard, it nearly took my legs out from under me.
(I was a long time caregiver for a bedridden stroke survivor, so that one doesn’t really hit my button, though I’m still scared it could happen to any of us!)
I spent a couple of years helping care for a great-aunt (my grandfather’s sister) who had Alzheimer’s. Watching her steadily lose all human mental capacity, and seeing that she knew something was wrong, gave me a fear of developing dementia. I honestly think that I would very seriously consider suicide if I were diagnosed with a non-curable dementia such as Alzheimer’s.
In the 70’s, I had a friend at Sunday School who went to a different elementary than the one I attended. One Sunday he told us about a 9 year old boy in his school who had just died of Reye’s Syndrome. Though I never met the poor kid, to this day, that name scares the shit out of me. It’s still not understood to this day, other than a link with aspirin being given to children when they have fever.
Alzheimer’s. I’ve seen both of my grandmothers succumb to it. Every time I can’t remember the plot of a movie or a book I know I’ve seen/watched, I think, “this is it.”
A friend, a beautiful woman in her late fourties, started having memory loss issues that became progressivly worse over the course of a year or two. Then she started having hallucinations. Then she basically became vegative. Then she died. The whole process took three or four years and was so sad and scary. I don’t remember what the diagnoses was, but basically her brain turned to mush. Scared the crap out of me that something like that can just happen.
Another disease. Old age. Seeing my grandparents as their bodies slowly degenerate. My grandfather who had gone for 10 mile jogs everyday for 70 years, being bedridden, unable to control his bodily functions. He and I were very similar in one way, we are both very private individuals who love self reliance, I know that indignity haunted him. My grandmother (his wife) these days. On a walker. Hard of hearing. Seeing many her loved one die in the last 5 years, including people she had known all her life. Old ages strips nearly everything from you. Independence, health, dignity, friends and family.
My daughter’s mother-in-law supposedly has TB, but her “numbers” are low enough that she doesn’t need to be quarantined. I say “supposedly” because she has a number of issues and apparently doctors don’t know what the deal is. It makes me nervous whenever the kids and my grandson visit her. TB is scary, and what if they got it and had to be quarantined? How would they live and pay bills? How would I see my daughter and the baby? Aauugh!
It has stolen my father from me. I question every memory I have of him since I was 14, when he had the first trans-ischemic attack that set the stage for vascular dementia. I wonder what he would have been like in my twenties and thirties if his brain hadn’t started to falter under the damage of multiple, tiny strokes and decades of hypertension.
This man was the first in his family to get a college degree, let alone graduate from high school. He recited poetry. He mustanged from seaman recruit to lieutenant commander before retiring. He wrote, he argued, he quipped, he told stories. He taught me to think for myself and question everything.
And I’ve watched as he loses words and memories, gropes for faculties that are no longer there, and strikes out emotionally and physically at us because, on some level, he knows what’s going on, and he’s terrified.
I swear to God, if I start showing symptoms of dementia, I will kill myself before I’ll go through what my father has and will.
I do want to recognize that sometimes people get great treatment for severe mental illness and lead fulfilling lives despite the hardship. My uncle is just not one of those people. I look at him, and it seems like all hardship. At any rate, my therapists have told me it’s very common for people who have a mental illness in the family to be terrified of losing their minds.
I second old age. I used to work at a nursing home. People always say they want to live to a ripe old age, but from what I can tell, it just sucks. I never saw a population with so much depression in my life.
