Need a good fatal illness

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m planning on participating in nanowrimo this November and need a good fatal illness for the protagonist. It needs to be something that doesn’t prevent him or her from traveling and doing physical things. It does need to be fatal within a year or two and have no cure. Something kind of like DOA where the protagonist discovers he is poisoned and sets out to discover why before he dies.

I’ve tried googling and haven’t found anything that really fits what I am looking for. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

2

A brain aneurysm, they can know you have it, non-operable, and it could kill you anytime, just saying.

3

any reason you couldn’t make up your own?

Here: Asystic Collapse. Asymptomatic System Collapse Syndrome.

You have this virus, you get a bad body-wide rash and a very runny nose for about a week (this being how they know you’ve caught this thing) then you’re fine -as fine as current medical science can tell- for about a year (your first plot-convenient length of time) until you suddenly are NOT FINE, and then you die in about (insert second “being sick/dying” plot-convenient length of time here).

4

Is koro fatal?

5

What you do not smell is iocane powder.

6

Also aneurysm in a major vessel. My dad’s aortic aneurysm wasn’t operable due to other conditions: cancer in his case, but it could have been something like “heart problems and bad cirrosis from Hep” (or from drinking or drugs or medication, if you prefer); it could be being a transplant recipient; it could be “complications”. You don’t need to be precise since it’s a story and not a medical book, plus if the only one who mentions it is the patient/protagonist he won’t necessarily have remembered the technical terms.

There’s always the options of “inoperable cancer” and “inoperable heart condition”. Again, it’s an adventures novel, not House: you don’t need to indicate the specific grecolatin name. While people with certain heart conditions are told not to practice sports etc., it’s not “you’ll never be able to do it”, it’s “you’re more likely than other people to drop dead suddenly if you do it”. And several of my relatives have had inoperable cancers for which they got chemo in the form of a daily little pill and a scrip for painkillers, but there wasn’t much of an effect in energy levels (radio still seems to be more agressive, the day or two after having it you feel like shit).

I was in the US last month and there was an ad on TV that made me want to puke, preferably atop whomever had comissoned it before making whomever wrote it clean it up. A woman explaining that she was afraid she was going to need chemo but no! Instead of chemo, the doctor gave her this marvelous pill that’s been just great! Chemo has gotten to the point where, for many patients, it’s not more agressive than an Aleve.

7

Anaplastic astrocytoma (brain tumor). Depending on the location in the brain, it can have a wide variety of effects. For example, when located in the frontal lobe, it may cause increasing apathy and impair cognitive function without having any immediately detectable effect on motor functions. (In this case, it can literally create a situation where someone is capable of injuring other people and doesn’t give a hoot.) The median survival after diagnosis is about 18 months, but varies depending on the aggressiveness of the tumor and the location.

Towards the end of the disease’s progression, physical impairment is significant and the patient will often go into seizures and fail rapidly. It is almost invariably terminal, even with chemo and radiation treatment.

8

Fatal Familial Insomnia or Sporadic Fatal Insomnia.

9

You could conciser dimethyl mercury poisoning.

Koro: “…. a culture-specific syndrome delusional disorder in which an individual has an overpowering belief that one’s genitalia[ are retracting and will disappear, despite the lack of any true longstanding changes to the genitals.”

While that would make an interesting character, maybe you mean [URL=“Kuru (disease) - Wikipedia”]kuru](Sex organ - Wikipedia)?

10

Lupus.

11

It’s never Lupus.

12

Dammit!

13

Which, while it would make for an interesting plot point if someone were deliberately infected with it, may take decades to kill someone and would decidedly interfere with travel and action in its later stages.

What about primary (AL) amyloidosis? It causes buildup of insoluble proteins in body tissues, and its symptoms can be pretty vague (fatigue, shortness of breath, weight loss, and a bunch of other stuff) depending on which tissues are most affected. There are treatments for it, which I think involve aggressive chemotherapy and bone marrow or stem cell transplants, and one-year survival rates are improving. However, the improved rates are still in the 20-30% area.

(IANAD, this is just what Google-fu led me to.)

14

There are a number of conditions associated with risk of sudden cardiac death which can be asymptomatic up until the end.

Examples: Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (often afflicting young athletic people) and Chagas disease in its chronic stages.

It’s tougher if the OP wants a disease that’s invariably fatal within a year or two but the protagonist is just fine until the end.

15

Brain cloud!

16

I came in to say this.

17

Life, for certain definitions of “a year or 2”.

18

My mother had cancer, had surgery, they thought they got it all, but weren’t sure, then she went through chemo, and she was fine, and in extremely good health with lots of energy (she even made a trip to Greece, a trip to Hawaii, and a trip to California from Maine), for four years, but she suffered a recurrence, and was told that it was doubtful chemo would help this time; it was scheduled anyway. She went into a steep decline, and could not eat. She essentially starved to death. Her decline lasted only about nine weeks.

So, taking a little license, and making the protagonist younger than my 77 year old mother, you could make the character a cancer survivor, but mention that recurrence was a risk. Have him go in for periodic tests, which would come out clear, until about 3/4 of the way through your story, then show, some “inflammation,” which “could be an infection,” and it was “wait and see,” because “chemo wouldn’t help a second time.” The tests could get more and more ominous, then, when it was convenient for him to weaken just a little, you could have him vomit a couple of times, but have the other characters reassure him that something they ate the night before was a little off, and they all felt kind of queasy. Then, he’d stop eating, but hide it from the other characters, and he could keep going for a few days-- say, through a trial, if this were some kind of story where he helped capture a bad guy, and the “fourth act” is the bad guy’s trial. The trial ends, and the protagonist collapses. He goes to the hospital, where it’s revealed that he has cancer which is metastatic, and is preventing him from eating, so he has weeks, at the most, if they keep him hydrated through an IV. He chooses not to be hydrated, so as not to prolong things, and dies in days.

The end.

Would that work?

19

Too late. Asleep at the switch, I see. Probably come from a family of drowsers.

20

Thanks for the replies. Some good suggestions here. I’ll have to play around and see what fits best with the story.