"Regular people don't think like that" (health issues)

In My Humble Opinion
1

I don’t even know how we got on the subject but I think it was about some woman that was known to my wife’s old coworker that died because she developed diabetes that needed insulin and she ignored it because she didn’t want to inject herself with a needle, and I said how silly that was. Then my wife was talking about her mom who had a mild stroke(unknown at the time) which made her unable to swallow and she lost weight and got to the point a cascading amount of health problems eventually took her life. I mentioned my own mom who let similar issues cause her death early(not eating or drinking because it caused diarrhea, and she did not want to take anti-diarrheals because she didn’t want to be a “pill popper”.) We realized we both knew of a LOT of people that had died this way.

We were talking about how many people we have known who let health problems cascade to a fatality instead of doing something.

I said why didn’t she make a sort of home made feeding tube “like a beer bong”, you can get soft latex tubing at hardware stores. I said if it was me I would have rigged something up because you can’t go forever on under 600 calories, so to me the problem is can’t swallow but have to get nutrition so bypass the problem period.

She said regular people just don’t think like that, like you do. They don’t want to take pills or use a needle or make devices even if they know it will kill them. She wouldn’t have done that, she would just go to the hospital and then she was depressed because of it and she would be stuck there and the emotions of it all got to her and made her ignore it and everything got worse. She didn’t even like the thought of using Ensure because it was vaguely associated with sick people I think.

I guess to me I just look at it as a problem, that MUST be solved period and cannot be ignored. I wouldn’t be depressed at squeezing liquid meals into my stomach if it let me live, or injecting insulin. I mean I’ve had to use asthma inhalers to stay alive my entire life, it has never depressed me. It is just incidental to my life.

I was just curious why people would let themselves die over seemingly simple issues that could be taken care of seemingly easily.

2

Oh yea she had a podcast on where the interviewee said he had a medical test done and he did the worst thing you can do, he googled terms on the results and test values and went crazy. And the interviewer laughed and said yes that is a really dumb move, never ever google medical stuff.

And I said what a stupid way to approach life, especially something as serious as health issues. I want all available information on much more frivolous things, I’d be going crazy if I could not get information because I’d be flying blind. Which lead into the discussion in my OP.

3

A lot of times old people break a bone and then don’t do the rehab or physical therapy because “reasons”. They stay in bed or don’t move around enough and develop blood clots and get a stroke. Or if they do heal, they have less strength and mobility and end up breaking something else and repeat the cycle and get even weaker. I’ve seen it first hand. If I break something when I get old, I’m doing the PT even if it kills me. I’d rather die trying to get healthy than be trapped in bed because I can’t even walk to the bathroom.

4

I myself don’t work out anymore, because I have a fear that exercising will cause me to die suddenly. I’ve feared this ever since I was a teenager, but it got really bad a few years ago, when a man I knew had a fatal heart attack while jogging.

I know that in reality, not exercising is much more likely to kill me, but somehow the knowledge that I’m being crazy doesn’t help.

5

That’s weird. A strange life you live, grude. I don’t think I know one person who’s died that way. Not one.

6

I’ve known of people who let their condition worsen for a time, but they end up having a doctor tell them that they’re going to die if they continue, so they (grudgingly) comply. The exception for me would be someone, like the person in the OP, who had a slight stroke (it was later conjectured), and that seemed to have led to a kind of dementia, but that didn’t kill her in the end. She just deteriorated physically and then fell and hit her head.

7

Add +1 to the ‘that’s incredible’ crowd. In the literal sense of ‘incredible’.

My SIL was diagnosed with stage 5 breast cancer in 1999. In 2013, she had to be fed by tube.
She recovered and was still going when her kidneys shut down. That one she couldn’t fight. She died last spring.

In my world, people have a strong enough will to live that they will do some really incredible (in normal sense) things.

8

I think it sounds pretty normal!! It explains why so many people have their health get so far downhill - eating unhealthy food, not exercising, choosing risky options (bull running in Italy!). We aren’t rational people when it comes to changing our behaviours towards ourselves.

I’m pretty sure most people know something they could change in their life that would possibly have a better health outcome … yet we don’t.

As for the ‘old people get injured and don’t do rehab’ … some of this comes from the people who treat you. I am not old in any real sense of the word (late 30’s) and I injured my knee in an accident. I was told by a doctor that it was a normal part of aging, I should just rest and it might take a couple of months to get better or it might not. I disagreed, got another opinion, had surgery, did massive rehab … I refused to believe that having a knee that doesn’t work was an acceptable way to live.

The impact on my health if I had followed the doctor’s advice would have been horrendous (lose fitness, lose muscle, lose flexibility, permanent damage leading to further arthritis, weight gain, depression and more).

9

People (especially older people) are only marginally rational and logical.
For a current example, take my Mother, who has trouble walking (she needs to touch every wall and table as she walks by), and who fell and broke her collarbone just over a week ago. I went and got an emergency alert pendant installed for her, so that she could summon help if she fell - and she threw it in the trash. I asked her why she won’t wear it, as she simply said she will NOT wear that “piece of crap.” She honestly would rather fall and lie in her own filth (I’ve described it to her that way) than admit to herself that she isn’t in 100% perfect condition.

10

Perfectly healthy people (physically) commit suicide, so if you are already feeling that life is barely worth living, having to stab yourself with a needle daily could easily be enough to tip the scale the other way.

People who let themselves get into a physically unhealthy state by not exercising or eating properly are more common than not, but many do rally and take their medications, insulin, quit smoking, etc. after things get really bad. It seems natural that many would continue on as they always had though, regardless of how obvious it is that they could cling to life a bit longer by doing a seemingly-simple thing. Maybe it’s like smoking: to the observer, the smoker could simply stop lighting up cigarettes, but the smoker always has “reasons” why it is more complicated than that.

11

(By the fourth paragraph I’m unsure anymore which “she” is being referenced, from one sentence to the next. “She wouldn’t have done that…” Which she? Wife’s coworker? Dead mother? Wife?)

Aside from that I have a friend who very likely died, unnecessarily early, from undiagnosed/untreated high blood pressure. An easily treatable condition, that requires no more discomfort than swallowing a pill each day! His parents had both passed early and he refused to see a doctor. Period. Said he didn’t want to know!

Truth is you cannot push a rope.

When he passed I was very, VERY, angry with him!

12

It’s like the old saying goes: “The Nile River is not in Egypt.”

13

This seems different because this is something with vague future possible negatives and positives, it is easy to blow off. Or saying something has a small but vague chance of possibly increasing cancer risk, like charred meat etc.

But I mean things like not intaking calories, where it isn’t vague or any possible outcome but bad.

14

Most of these people were old, not talking about high school kids. Some weren’t though, one was 18(sickle cell anemia).

I wonder too if they were used to blowing off medical stuff when younger and came out fine.

15

I work in a position where I do reasonable accommodations in the workplace for employees with disabilities. I have run into some people who handled their illnesses the way the OP described. However, all of the people who did that were at an extreme disadvantage for getting good care.

–They are often minorities.
–They all have low-paying jobs with unusual, long, inflexible, and/or unpredictable hours.
–Their employer historically did not offer them health insurance, or they could not afford to purchase the employer plan, or they would (now) qualify for Medicaid under the original ACA plan but live in a state that refused to expand Medicaid.
–They mostly come from low SES backgrounds. For example, when I called one woman the other day, her MIL answered the phone and she was so borderline literate that it was a struggle just to give her my call-back number.
–They live somewhere with medical provider shortages.

I have two conditions that place me on the “virtually always disabled” list under the ADAAA. I live in a town with a quaternary care center, and my husband is an employee there. We have Cadillac health insurance. Yet even I have struggled to get appropriate care for these conditions, despite being privileged and upper-middle class. Most specialists here are not taking new patients, and the primary care doctors who must treat me don’t really have an expert grasp of these conditions. Worse, many of the doctors I’ve seen take the approach of castigating the patient, rather than educating and supporting. It is a constant battle to get the correct care.

I can only imagine how defeating it must feel to have a chronic condition that can lead to severe complications and death if not well-controlled if you start out at a great disadvantage with regard to accessing and affording care.

Furthermore, there is a completely understandable emotional component. Many people with a severe, chronic illness also experience depression at some point–particularly after diagnosis, because this news triggers (for many) a grief process.

And just IMHO–I also believe that there is some part of our “lizard brain” that still tells us, like wild animals, to run away and hide/die when we are hurt/injured. I have had some acquaintances get a serious/terminal diagnosis and their reaction was very out of the norm for their usual personality, in that they wanted to refuse all treatment, withdraw from their social circle and family, and die alone. It is hard to overcome animal instinct.

16

Pride goeth before the fall.

17

I think Q.N.Jones’ response was very eloquent and accurate. Speaking for myself, I don’t know if I could tolerate having a feeding tube down my throat while conscious. I’ve been told by doctors that my nasal/sinus/throat anatomy is small, so they can barely intubate me for surgery. I can only imagine my panic if I had to shove a tube down there to get nutrition, so in that position I would likely starve to death also.

I think living with a chronic condition is more complex than normally healthy people realize. I’ve had rheumatoid arthritis all my life, managed fairly well, and these are the problems that I’ve had to deal with:

As Jones mentioned, over my life I’ve had the gamut of good doctor care and abysmal doctor care. It gets to a point where you don’t know who you can trust, and cynicism sets in. I respect the education and training that doctors have, but I also realize they’re only human and there are many things they simply cannot solve. I’ve come to realize that if I complain to the doctor, he will feel compelled to give me a pill for it, whether it works or not and regardless of the side effects. So, to my husband’s annoyance, I often refuse to see the doctor for things I know they won’t be able to help with. I do see my doctor’s for regular, routine care and for anything out of my personal norm. But if I know the only possible solutions are “get more exercise” then it’s a waste of money to have the doctor tell me that.

Speaking of exercise, it’s common knowledge that exercise delays the damage that arthritis does to your body. Use it or lose it. However it’s harder than that. Active arthritis causes chronic pain. It can feel like fine sand in your joints, or it can feel like small pebbles in there. It can feel like someone placed your elbow (or whatever) into a vise and is twisting down hard on the handle. It can feel like earth’s gravity has increased 2 or 3 times for no known reason and nobody but you can feel the pressure. So, go out and ride a bike during these times? No flippin way. From past experience, if I try to exercise through this stuff, I always come out feeling even worse. So exercise is intermittent at best.

And then for medications, you get into a vicious cycle of needing to take one medication to counter the side effects of another. And then a third to counter the side effects of the first two, etc. That’s extremely frustrating.

18

Probably the single most HUMAN flaw we have is our incredible ability to lie to ourselves and refuse to look at reality.

Humans are masters of self-deception and willful ignorance.

19

In diabetes care one of *the *major obstacles to self management is needle phobia.

A good sized fraction of patients can’t even bring themselves to use a blood glucose meter. With modern devices at worst it feels like getting a static electric shock from a door knob and far more often it’s completely imperceptible. But that’s still too hard for some people. Or it takes them hours to work up the courage to take a reading that’s only meaningful if taken within a half-hour window.

Once a person decides they can’t; not won’t, but can’t, then there’s a very long uphill fight to move them off that position. Some care providers & family members are willing to make that fight. Others let the patient wallow in the results of their irrationality.
At the other extreme, there is a legitimate place for someone in very dire straits to recognize that their best-case remaining quality and quantity of life is so limited that giving up or giving in is smarter than continued desperate side-effect-heavy but result-light treatments. The rapidly growing hospice movement is an explicit recognition of this reality.
The OP’s scenarios are IMO much more the former than the latter though.

20

How many people get slowly whittled away or get fed by tubes that live forever?

The fact is, the end result is always the same. You are going to die eventually.

Personally, I would rather go out naturally in comfort in 4 years than spend 15 with tubes coming in and out of me and constantly getting little chunks of me cut off. Not the mention the expense (wasted, in my opinion).

In the grand scheme of the universe, a couple years give or take is meaningless.