Pancreatic cancer comes to mind as well - tends to be asymptomatic, is generally inoperable and fatal rather quickly. Not two days quickly, but not a whole lot is that fast. Besides infection of course. Infections can kill you in two days, easy-peasy.
Anaplastic tumors in general are bad news - doesn’t matter where they are, but poorly differentiated anything does not bode well. Sometimes ‘benign’ is a misnomer too; I saw a little girl die within months of being diagnosed with a supposedly ‘benign’ tumor. Thing was enormous and wrapped all around her abdominal vasculature.
This guy died of pancreatic cancer 4 days after diagnosis.
I personally know a lady whose husband died of the same thing. I forget the exact timing, but it was damned fast. Physical fitness guy, too. He ran a marathon, and month or so later was dead.
My mother had small cell carcinoma. It is a relatively rare lung cancer that is essentially undetectable. The tumors it produces are visible but so small they don’t appear as tumors in X Rays or scans and are only id’ed as tumors after the fact. You generally get diagnosed once the cancer has spread to other organs (which is what happened in my Mother’s case).
She was officially diagnosed with it on a Wednesday and passed away from it early the next Monday (this was after she had gotten a clean bill of health from her doctor not long before and had made a trip to the ER because she wasn’t feeling well a few days earlier but they sent her home). They estimated she had initially got it between four a and six weeks before the diagnosis.
Was just coming in to add that infections can definitely kill you that fast. I saw a healthy 29 year old go from walking into an ER with flu-like symptoms to brain dead in a couple of hours from meningococcal meningitis. Never underestimate gram negative bacteria.
Sure - there are many infections that can be rapidly deadly. Viral hemorrhagic fevers, bacterial sepsis, necrotizing fasciitis, primary amebic meningoencephalitis, bacterial meningitis, rabies once it becomes symptomatic. There’s plenty of weird infections out there, or infections that present atypically, that can be deadly.
Isn’t microbiology grand?
Edit: I forgot pulmonary anthrax, some of the Clostridums…okay, I should stop. Sorry
My guess is he died from a combination of Cancer, other health problems, and decades of booze, speed and bad food. There’s no evidence that it was suicide, and there was at least one witness when he passed.
Well, my dad never even knew he had cancer. He went in for surgery to remove some fluid around his heart. When they got in, they found the mass was cancer, not fluid. They tried to get a sample for biopsy, but the cancer tissue tore when they took a sample, and he was never able to come off life support before he died.
Many hospice patients stay at home, and in fact most hospice programs encourage this if it’s what the patient wants. “Home” can be defined as nursing home, jail, hobo camp, etc.
The hospital where I used to work filled prescriptions for hospice patients, and one day, we were told that we would get a new one and then never got any additional paperwork, etc. We found out later that the patient died within a couple hours of being admitted to hospice! :eek:
Both my parents died in hospice, and died at home as they wished. Ideally, you try to arrange for what the patient and/or family want and can cope with. If death is inevitable there’s no reason not to go home if there’s nothing else to be done medically.
I won’t argue that more experienced surgeons tend to have better outcomes than less experienced ones. But your statement that “top surgeons” could have removed the tumor is quite misleading and actually unfounded. Indeed, surgery is not the issue in this type of situation (and I mean no disrespect to scabpicker).
As I noted in post#22 above, under point#4, one way for a cancer to kill someone quickly is to spread to the lining of the heart (i.e. to the pericardium) or, more precisely, to the space between the heart and its lining (i.e. pericardial effusion). Once there are malignant cells in the pericardial space, the prognosis is poor. Surgery is irrelevant in such situations for two reasons:
Once you’ve got spread beyond the primary site of a tumor (i.e. metastases), removal of the primary tumor, generally speaking, cannot be curative. So, “top surgeon” or not, the outcome is unlikely to be good.
Removal of fluid around the heart is not really “surgery”. It can be done at the bedside, and even by internists. The success rate for this form fluid removal is 99 percent suggesting that ‘surgical skill’ doesn’t make much of a difference. What’s involved is inserting a needle through the skin until it enters the fluid-filled space and then simply aspirating (sucking out) the tumor-cell-containing fluid. Surgical skill is not really relevant; ‘anyone’ can do it.
Why is that the case? Is the surgery to hard on your body? They would have to really open you up if the tumor is that big or the tumor spread?
That most surgeons are not comfortable to do surgery on a large tumor because they would have to really open you up and it would be hard on your body to really open you up?
What about just removing part of the tumor? Than next month do surgery again and remove other part? If removing all of it would requiring major surgery that could kill you?
I think some forms of bacterial pneumonia can blow up over the course of a few hours. The sufferer just cannot get warm, and if they make it to a hospital they end up packed in ice to bring the fever down.
