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51 hours left to live

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Re: 51 hours left to live

#61

Okey this is ridiculous!!!! First the guy who patches a software with Morse code and then this guy who would rather have a AMA with strange people before he dies. News flash people, there are actual human beings around you who you should talk to rather than computers or an anonymous crowd you do not know.

Everyone handles death and the idea of it differently .. maybe his ideas are short sighted. But down voting is a pretty evil thing to do in this situation, it doesn't make his opinion any; more or less valid than the next mans.

Re: 51 hours left to live

#62
Isn't it a bit odd that everyone takes this at face value? Doesn't it seem like a bit of a fantastic story to appear on Reddit on Saturday? I'm suspicious that people are having their emotions toyed with for someone's entertainment.

Re: 51 hours left to live

#63
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said no such thing and I have no idea where you are getting that idea. Given that cancer has spread to his brain and the hell he has clearly been through, I understand his choice. I've been in a similar situation. However, it just so happens that my efforts to stop the pain -- which conventional drugs were not effectively treating -- began killing the underlying infection. I was really quite annoyed when I realized…

Why doesn't conventional medicine recognize your form of treatment? What exactly is your form of treatment anyway? Just letting the body do its thing?

Why doesn't conventional medicine recognize your form of treatment?

Because it was invented by some former homemaker with credentials like "I gave up my national merit scholarship and dropped out of college to go do the wife and mom thing for two decades. Now I'm a poverty stricken divorcee who has no clue how I am going to pay my electric bill this month before they cut my power off." Not exactly the kind of credentials that get you written up in JAMA.

What exactly is your form of treatment anyway?

There is a little info here about what I've done (though please note the site is woefully out of date as the last 10 months have been extremely intense):

http://healthgazelle.com/

Just letting the body do its thing?

Are you kidding? That leads to a gruesome death of the sort that motivates people to put up with the horrors of conventional medicine. Getting well has involved a great deal of research and work and other resources, mostly to redress 36 years of not getting appropriate treatment because I was diagnosed late in life.

The most succinct explanation I have come up with is on this page:

http://healthgazelle.com/rootsoftheproblem.shtml

Oh and have an upvote for asking good questions.

Re: 51 hours left to live

#64
post #26
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What conventional medicine does is pretty gruesome." What are you talking about? Chances are you would've died a century ago because of the lack of effective treatments for CF. There are people who have dedicated their entire lives to researching the genetic mechanisms that lead to CF, not to mention the efforts being led to better understand those behind cancer. I think you need to give conventional medicine some c…

I do give conventional medicine some credit for keeping me alive. But if I continued pursuing conventional treatments, I would be a life-long legal drug addict and too ill to work. My life would suck in quite a lot of ways. Conventional medicine keeps people alive. But at quite a high cost, a cost that makes many people -- like Lucidending and, at one time, me -- feel that death would be preferable. Anyway, probably…

[deleted]

Re: 51 hours left to live

#65

Okey this is ridiculous!!!! First the guy who patches a software with Morse code and then this guy who would rather have a AMA with strange people before he dies. News flash people, there are actual human beings around you who you should talk to rather than computers or an anonymous crowd you do not know.

You shouldn't really have such strong opinions on something with which you don't have a first hand experience.

Re: 51 hours left to live

#66
post #64
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do give conventional medicine some credit for keeping me alive. But if I continued pursuing conventional treatments, I would be a life-long legal drug addict and too ill to work. My life would suck in quite a lot of ways. Conventional medicine keeps people alive. But at quite a high cost, a cost that makes many people -- like Lucidending and, at one time, me -- feel that death would be preferable. Anyway, probably…

[deleted]

EDIT: The deleted post asked what I thought about assisted suicide. I don't know why it was deleted. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable question to me. So I am leaving my reply, for better or worse.

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It is not anything I have come up with some "position" on. I know I wanted to die ten years ago and saw that as the only hope of an end to my suffering. I know that I continue to routinely feel like "god must hate me" and feel like death is the only way out -- that getting well, paying my bills and all that is just too much for one person to do without real support. It feels really, really unfair. I could get rewarded and supported for not getting well -- I could get free medical care, go on disability as I get too sick to work, etc. But getting well? Up yours, bitch. You're crazy and made this entire thing up anyway. Forget any kind of financial support for the costs involved. There isn't even sympathy in most circles.

So my life is still hard. And has always been hard. Living without a diagnosis and being routinely accused of being a hypochondriac was also hard. And I did attempt suicide at age 17.

But what I believe is this: They now have such an ability to keep you technically "alive" that our definitions have to change and right to die legislation and discussions like this one are inevitably going to be part of the struggle to come up with some meaningful, humane means to decide it is okay for someone to just stop pursuing heroic efforts and, if nothing else, let nature take its course. My "position", if I have one at all in this debate, is to offer information on a more humane alternative that offers better quality of life rather than merely extending life but at the cost of so much suffering that many people would rather die instead. The only possible alternative that makes sense to me is to make it a priority to make medical care more humane so that staying alive doesn't so completely destroy your quality of life as to make one desperately wish for death.

A few years ago, a relative was in the hospital in a critical care unit. A very old, very ill person (like in their 80's) on the same ward coded over and over. They spent two weeks resuscitating this person and performing gruesome invasive procedures -- because the family wasn't ready to let go. This person was not ever going to get better and go home again. Everyone knew that. The family knew that. The staff knew that. They did not prolong her life. They only prolonged her death. And her suffering. We have no choice but to wrestle with such questions given where medical technology has brought us. Otherwise we are in danger of coming to a point where everyone gets put on an iron lung or some such and we just don't bury you.

Re: 51 hours left to live

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardly. They're fudged a bit as you say, but they're quite close to reality. Enough that I'd look at the proportion instead of the exact numbers, which is the meaning I was attempting to drive home. The numbers are fudged by a very small amount in a certain direction, based on my observation. I observed this by refreshing one of my own submissions and watching it gain a vote or lose a vote, and I knew exactly how man…

Fudged a bit ? The numbers are almost completely fictional, and get more so the higher the total. http://i.imgur.com/U8B1X.jpg Displayed numbers: 9498 Up, 6876 Down. Real numbers: 2666 Up, 140 Down. You cannot judge proportion by looking at the numbers Reddit shows.

What I don't get is why they show them in the first place?

Re: 51 hours left to live

#68
post #51
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are interesting statistics, because I would guess that if you asked people about gender-specific cancers, the first thing that would pop into their head would be breast cancer, perhaps testicular cancer, then cervical cancer.

I imagine prostate cancer would be in that list, too.

I'm pretty sure that was his point - I think it's widely known that breast cancer gets a lot of attention despite, as that table shows¹, not being more prevalent in those places than prostate cancer (indeed less risk of developing breast cancer in the table: 1-in-8 vs 1-in-6). Breast cancer does have a marginally higher mortality rate in those figures though (both are listed as 1-in-36 die).

--

1 http://www.cancer.org/Cancer/CancerBasics/lifetime-probabili...

Re: 51 hours left to live

#69
post #9
post #6

> 12,588 up votes 10,018 down votes That's a fascinating look at peoples' reactions to this. A reminder of mortality split right down the middle.

There are many bots that downvote in order to promote other submissions. I'm glad they have that choice, and the ability to share their story. In perspective there are many people in this world who die "unknown" - PBS airs the pictures weekly of teenage American soldiers who died in Iraq or Afghanistan - then there are those who were killed while trying to non-violently protest their unjust government (China, Iran, e…

This isn't true. What evidence do you have that bots downvote on reddit? The reddit guys came by our Cloudkick office late last year and flat denied there are any bots they know of that downvote when I asked them. If you don't have any real reason to know about bots on Reddit you should probably not persist in continuing to pass on this fantasy.

Re: 51 hours left to live

#70

I found this post on reddit uncomfortable, and I'm not sure why. It's not because of death with dignity -- I'm a big fan. It's not because of not wanting to face my own mortality -- I know death awaits us all, and for me or some others it may come very soon indeed. Who knows when we will die? But something about it just didn't ring true as something I would want to make happen over and over again. I think perhaps it…

You are right. But on the other side of the coin, death is something we can can come to terms with, something we sometimes must come to terms with.

The thing that I think you find unsettling roots from the fact you feel you need to prevent discussion of your mortality from being "normal". This man needs his mortality to be a "normal" thing. It is happening to him, and soon, so putting it into a context of "normal" life helps with that.

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