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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.
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.
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.
causes you to mistreat the people who love you
Iβve told my wife that she doesnβt 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.
Whatever's finishing me off now is good enough. Maybe they'll even bother figuring out what it was afterword.
Fingers crossed I land on my head during one of the falls or my heart just glitches out like the rest of me. Maybe a good spasm on the way to work and I can just become a flaming pile of car wreck.
Be a lot better than suffocating during one of the breathing issues or just being stuck in one of the headache/fog days.
Edit for anyone that read the rest:
Well, I woke up this morning, oh well.
Looks like today is right shoulder and left tricep doing a tap dance while right calf muscle and foot attempt a ballerina toe stand. A little elf has grabbed the back of both eyeballs and is pulling on them like an overstretched rubber band. Needed a shower and new clothes at 4:30a.m. because I thought I could use a sip of juice to clear my throat. Both hands feel like they're stuffed in a tub of Play-Doh.
Looks like it'll be a good day because that's pretty minor. Got the fireplace going and the warmth is just soaking in like heaven. π₯΄
Are you having seizures?
Yes, no, sort of, er, let's just go down the list. Warning, this is probably morbid and disturbing.
At any random point either leg might just say, "nah I don't feel like it" and down I go.
Or maybe it feels like it but only a little so it won't move all the way or I'm limping.
Maybe today I can reach behind my back, or maybe I'm going to feel like I'm tearing an arm off just to finish using the bathroom.
Maybe I can stand up straight, or reach for something, maybe not.
Maybe if I try to lay comfortably I won't end up with limbs that won't quite settle all the way because the muscles don't want to relax.
Any muscle anywhere can decide it wants to start doing it's own little Morse code impersonation, including ones controlling things like vision, ear pressure, or random areas you don't really consciously control.
Maybe I can see clearly, maybe it's double vision, maybe one eye won't follow the other eye, maybe it's severe tunnel vision.
Maybe I can take a full breath, maybe the muscles over my ribs decided they want to cramp up if I take more than a small one.
Maybe I can hold onto something, and my hand will decide wether it wants to randomly open or just close itself up and have to be pried back open.
Maybe I feel mostly normal, or maybe someone is beating my head and multiple other areas with crowbars and ice picks while I go about my day.
Maybe I can eat something right now, or maybe one mini pretzel will trigger several hours of severe cramping and diarrhea.
Maybe when I blink an eyelid will get stuck in the down position.
Maybe I'll yawn and my tongue and jaw muscles will all cramp and lock.
Maybe an eye will have a muscle cramp that feels like a fish hook tearing the eye out of your skull while the eye points in a random direction.
Maybe when something touches my skin I'll feel like it's still there for minutes.
Maybe I know which way is up but mostly likely I don't have a clue.
Maybe a bit too much ambient noise starts causing severe headaches trying to sort out the stuff I need to hear.
Maybe I can talk well or maybe I take it easy and use small words that don't require much vocal, uh, dexterity?
Maybe I heard what you said but there's a 5-10 second delay before I actually know what the words mean.
Maybe I've forgotten how clocks work for a few seconds.
But mostly I work and move about slowly while random things twitch, glitch, ache, cramp, sting, stab...
And meanwhile I smile and look happy and give the kids a good day and lots of places to go so I can just sit for a bit and do some breathing and positive meditation until everyone's tucked into bed for the night.
Then I can relax on the recliner with a good strong drink and cry about whatever hurt today while I think about how nice not waking up tomorrow would be and worry about the kids needing me.
Then I get up the next day and do it all over again.
Dang that sounds rough to deal with. I feel that way sometimes about the kids needing me and finding it hard to keep going, and thatβs with just your typical middle age aches and hormone stuff. This is like next level body betrayal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alzheimer's.
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.
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.
Rabies is my first thought as well, by the time symptoms show up and you go to the hospital, there is nothing you can do other than die in horrifying confusion, fear, and panic as your brain melts into mush.
Itβs easy to become desensitized to, since many of us see crosses frequently, but death by crucifixion is absolutely horrible.
Being wrapped tightly in untreated canvas, soaked in hot water, and then the canvas begins to shrink.
Dying from poisoning with Dimethylmercury, which happened to one scientist and itβs like an Alzheimerβs speed run but you donβt see it coming.
Rats and a heated bucket against your stomach
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
Fatal Insomnia.
Easy: drowned in spiders
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.