Nrdsb4, men tend to use a more effective if more violent and gruesome means. Female suicides tend to use pills, alcohol, etc.
I just went through training on teen suicides and the means really correlates with the death rate.
Back to our discussion of adult problems.
Those are probably two of the worst disease processes I saw in hospice, along with LBD. Of course I never saw everything, so I can’t say which terminal disease processes are worst, but of the people with ALS or Huntington’s, it’s torture.
Honestly, as terrified as many people are of Alzheimers, I saw enough people who were really just pleasantly confused and not all that physically uncomfortable that I thought I’d choose it over many other ways to go. Of course a lot depends on the individual… a few people developed personality issues, but eventually were medicated to manage those. Really, Alzheimers is worse on the loved ones than the patient in many, many cases. And really, the patients don’t know how much their loved ones are suffering because eventually they don’t recognize them. As long as they’re being cared for by a very attentive staff/loved ones, any suffering is easily managed. Again, this doesn’t fit every case, but the majority that I saw.
sistersunnie, I am so sorry about your husband. I remember when he died, but I thought it was an accident. I didn’t realize that he had that awful disease. My neighbor developed it and I saw the awful progression.
“The terrorist inside my husband’s brain” - such a sadly appropriate title of Robin’s wife’s article published in Neurology:
@BunsenBurner - I made the stupid mistake of reading some of the comments after one of the articles I read about his wife’s comments - people accused her of all kinds of things for using that phrase. I absolutely can’t imagine having something like this happen to a spouse and watching them very, very painfully withdraw from life, knowing there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. Heck, at least with terrorism, there is no anticipation of the act, and it’s over quickly.
My friend’s mom has Lewey body dementia, seemingly a cruel amalgam of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s with hallucinations thrown in. It’s so hard for both of them, although my friend sometimes just has to laugh at the crazy hallucinations her mom describes and believes really happened.
The only mildly saving grace with the hallucinations of Lewy body patients is that the hallucinations aren’t disturbing or bothersome to them. Often they think that little children were visiting them or something similar.