I'm going to be a bit morbid here, but of all the diseases or mechanical ways to die, which would be your LAST CHOICE if given a preference. Dead last, so to speak.
Mine would probably be Rabies.
There are a few prion diseases that are absolutely horrible. I believe one of them causes you to be unable to sleep until you go mad.
Fatal Familial Insomnia
Mothetfuu that is scary
Edit: or the non hereditary version transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, TSE).
Fucking hell why did I read up about that. Okay this easily wins this post. Fuck that shit.
Literally my worst waking nightmare. Every now and then I have insomnia and 100% of the time I think, "Fuck...this is the beginning of the end..."
I remember reading that it gets so bad that, even after doctors put you into a coma, you'll eventually resist that treatment and nothing at all will work.
Rabies. Where you become convinced that water is poison.
@Thavron yeah I came in to say Fatal Familial Insomnia but then I saw how painful some of the other stuff in here is and changed my mind.
You should listen to that book at bedtime. Surprisingly effective, and its not in the least boring
Alzheimer's. The thing I fear most is that I will die surrounded by a bunch of people I don't know, feeling scared and alone. I'm terrified of forgetting who my loved ones and my family are. I don't want to go like that.
This is where physician assisted suicide has a really strong case.
This gets my vote. Runs in my family and I've seen it first hand a ton of times by now. It is absolutely heart wrenchingly terrible. Not looking forward to that one bit.
Yeah, my dad made a living will and made sure I was comfortable with making him die(right wording?) If he gets that way. Already have a state and legal process, just enjoying time why we have it.
Anything that makes you aware that you're slowly losing touch with reality and control of your body or causes you to mistreat the people who love you.
This. Dementia and other progressive neuro conditions are fucking scary.
What’s more sad is that people won’t give those people a way out. I would rather go in a moment of peace and surrounded by family. Not wasting away and forgetting the world.
causes you to mistreat the people who love you
I’ve told my wife that she doesn’t have to spend time with me if I end up with dementia and I start behaving that way. Both of my parents were more or less all there well into their 90s, but you never know.
There are so many things that would be fighting for last place honestly. Idk, being stuck deep in a cave Nutty Putty style for days, barely able to breathe, arms pinned totally by my side, legs all twisted, total darkness. Slowly suffocating as the blood pools in my head and I become delirous.
That terrifies me so much. But idk, there are so many horrific ways to die. There are many cases of people being tortured to death over weeks or even months if they somehow survive that long.
There are also a bunch of diseases that are all around awful and terrifying. That syndrome where you are trapped inside your own body, total unable to move anything but you are aware of everything around you, maybe would be the most horrific.
Idk, too many horrible ways to suffer and die in this world...
Fuck, I forgot Nutty Putty cave. Switch my answer to that.
Every time I watch a video or read about that incident I feel myself start to almost panic. And I'm not prone to panic attacks or anything, but that scenario just makes me freak out.
Imagining the feeling of trying to move and feeling literal hundreds of feet of totally immovable rock encasing your limbs, not a milimeter of give or flex.
Ugg, literally making my heart rate go up as I type this :S
I think I may be an outlier here. I really don't want to die in a sudden 'didn't-see-it-coming' kind of way, like getting hit by a semi or a freak accident with heavy machinery kind of way. The idea of going from living, thinking, feeling, person to chunk(s) of meat in an instant terrifies the shit out of me. Especially if it's caught on video and people watch it for laughs or whatever possesses them to watch that kind of thing.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want to die in some slow, painful way either, but something I had some agency in would be worlds better. Like taking a bullet to save a loved one, or punching my own ticket after getting a terminal diagnosis, or even just taking a deliberate, calculated risk.
I'm alright with anything that will kill me instantly. My fear is having something so sudden that will keep me bedridden and helpless to finish it all. I won't wish it on an enemy.
I had family members that needed care and I was happy to provide it. But to see them like that was hard and I know it was harder for them to go through that not just it felt like that to me but they told me so as well. They were too religious to end it. I'm not so I hope I'll never experience this fear of mine.
Dying at work.
These people have already taken damn near everything they can from me. I'd rather kill myself right now than find out I die at work.
Well if we exclude the slow and painful ways to die I'd say that drowning by diving under ice and not finding the way back. The panic on your last minutes must be something else.
My biggest fear, given mental health issues, wondering through out life if I'm going insane, seeing things, hallucinating, etc...
I'm terrified that the moment of death, I won't be able to tell if it's real or not. So it will be an infinitely protracted moment, and right now, I may already be in that moment.
Where the F are serious mental health conditions? When your appearance seems intact from the outside, but inside your reality slowly yet steadily derodes, and there's no way to help it. Going insane. That's for me the last one. Prefer physical pain over losing touch with reality.
Idk, but bone cancer looks like a bad way to go.
My mom died from that one. Horrible. Morphine couldn't touch the pain
I'm sorry to hear that. Wouldn't wish it on anyone.
For me, it's any situation where you know you're fucked but can't do anything to stop the inevitable.
Give me instantaneous death where idk what happened or a slow progression of disease where death would eventually be a welcome relief. It's the in between that freaks me out.
There’s a horror movie called The Sacrament and in it one of the characters while totally conscious is injected with a slow acting poison against their will and had no options to counteract it or whatever. I don’t get freaked by much but that really fucked with me. Knowing that you had 30 minutes left and there was nothing that could be done is horrifying
I mean, doesn't just "living" fit that definition?
Lathe accident.
I've seen a video and heard some stories. I work in a CNC shop, but I'm not a machinist. I think it would be terrifying for a moment, painful for a moment, then nothing. Gruesome for sure, but I think they're are certainly worse ways to go. I believe the 'popular' video is called, pink mist, or something like that, if that's any indication of the outcome.
Ugh. This is why I’ve stopped clicking on everything.
Being eaten alive by animals
Especially if already injuresd or weak such that you can't fight back and it's just a few smaller animals. You can feel every little bite, rip and agonizing tear and your death is greatly prolonged.
Nightmare fuel
Some kind of dementia. It's a cancer of the soul which arbitrarily removes parts of you that you can't even perceive the loss of. I had an MS patient whose vocal processing was reduced to the point that he could only say variations of "you fucking bitch". He was totally bed-bound and dependent on a mostly female nursing staff for every single need. Most of those employees were burned out and he could only communicate to them using a wildly misogynistic slur. I've seen it reduce a famous AIDS researcher and a WW2 pilot to toddlers, others to cornered raccoons, for some it's a nightmare they can never wake up from and they just spend all day/night reliving their worst memories. For a good 10% on the ward it just takes away their executive function and they can no longer control their worst impulses or recognise that they should.
Cancer and strokes are a close second for more or less the same reason, but dementia is so existentially terrifying to me.
Milk and honeyed to death, if you know it, you know that shits barbaric.
If we talking in the realm of realistic and probable, probably Alzheimer's, or maybe being trapped in a vegetative state but concious and lucid.
Alzheimer's.
It’s easy to become desensitized to, since many of us see crosses frequently, but death by crucifixion is absolutely horrible.
The viking wings thing.
Yeah. The “blood eagle”. Nasty.
Least preferred way in the disease category would be any disease that slowly erodes the mind and body. Being unable to move or know where I am, who are those around me sounds terrifying, not to mention the burden (financial and emotional) it would be on my family. No thanks.
Now for "mechanical" I'm not totally sure what this means but a similar logic applies. Of the classic methods of execution I think getting burned alive would be probably the last choice, but I'd take that before slow torture that's for sure
Radiation illness is one of them, there are certain yields that make it rather nasty. Rabies is also pretty high up the list.
Mechanically wise I remember the OSHA case of the worker getting trapped in a walk-in autoclave and literally steamed to death. because that actually takes a long time.
Prion diseases and locked-in-syndrome are also pure horror.
Dying from poisoning with Dimethylmercury, which happened to one scientist and it’s like an Alzheimer’s speed run but you don’t see it coming.
Being wrapped tightly in untreated canvas, soaked in hot water, and then the canvas begins to shrink.
Fire in the Sky Alien Fabric experiment scene...
Water
Chandler didn't mind...oh well he can't say he did if he did. Yeah ok, water.
Blood eagle, iron maiden, rat torture (method where rats were placed in a container and heated, forcing them to gnaw through the victim's body to escape), brazen bull, lingchi.
Or anything from the spaniah inquisition
Wood chipper, feet first, slow setting.
The little turtle setting.
Easy: drowned in spiders
fire or drowning probably
I think fire is by far worse. Every single nerve ending is sending pain signals until your nerves eventually burn away. You'll be suffocating at the same time in the smoke of your own burning flesh. Fucking awful way to die..
Rats and a heated bucket against your stomach
Fatal Insomnia.
Bob! Did you forget to set the steam roller on park? My leg is kind of stuck, help me off will you? Ok we'll need a grinder, go turn that steam roller off dude it's rolling this way. The keys? Joe had the keys last? He's off today? Call Joe dude! C'mon!
There are probably worse ways but the Brazen Bull is the scariest for me. You're throwin in a bronze bull and slow-cooked to death while being cramped and not able to see anything. Just terrible.
I guess the sandpaper room would be pretty far down on the list.
Brain eating amoebas
Being slowly crushed from the feet up by a machine that no one has the ability to stop, while everyone looks on in horror.
Or, more realistically, anything that involves mental deterioration.
Rated from most painless to most painful - most painful comes in dead last, so to speak.
Well that's one thing that's becoming clear. It depends on what you fear, not what is objectively "worst".
Is pain worse than the isolation and hopelessness of dying unreachable, upside-down and alone in Nutty Putty cave? Or is pain worse than dying with no emotions but fear and horror, like with rabies? Or is pain worse than the slow, inevitable fading of the self that comes with Alzheimer's, dementia, or prion disease? Or how about being in the hands of hostile enemies whose joy is to give you a slow, gruesome death?
Where we die is irrelevant - we all die alone. Upside down in a ravine... as long as it doesn't hurt. Death comes for all of us - I simply don't want it to hurt.
Cordyceps infection
It's pretty fast though, and doesn't seem to entail much suffering.
There is a certain cruel and unusual method of execution that I have some knowledge of. I remember it involving being force-fed honey and cream and then being left to rot in your own excrement.
Scaphism, thats what I came here to say.
Also known as the boats, is an alleged ancient Persian method of execution mentioned by Plutarch in his Life of Artaxerxes. It ostensibly entailed trapping the victim between two boats, feeding and covering them with milk and honey, and allowing them to fester and be devoured by insects and other vermin over time. (Copied from Wikipedia)
Alzheimer's, Dementia, anything neurological I think.
Scaphism. Hand's down:
I don’t think it would work this way to be honest. You’d probably die from a heat stroke or something like that long before any animal will do you much harm.
Oh. Then I guess scaphism is fine!
Bobbit worm swarm
Hopefully not asphyxiation.
I've seen enough people die of diseases to know that I don't want that. I'd rather be crushed to death or hit by a car or break my neck falling then having to suffer for months or years and know that death is coming.
Any way whatsoever after my kids, including with the knowledge that they will expire shortly after me.
Fire.
Killed by family
Yeah no
Watching your friends and family go through it before you do would be the worst.
Fire.
@TheAnonymouseJoker we're supposed to call that Hansen's disease now, I think.