The human condition is a fragile thing. In the blink of an eye our lives can be over just like that.
And some of those ways that our lives can simply disappear are just plain awful. While death itself is already scary enough, there are some ways of dying that sound so painful and terrible to experience.
u/sydthef*ckdown asked:
Here were some of those answers.
Terminator 2 Style
There was a comment on here about a worker at a steel works who committed suicide by jumping in the molten steel crucible. Because it was liquid he expected to drown in it, unaware that the density of molten metal is the same as solid metal, so he just skittered across the surface and fried to death. Brutal.
IF
Strychnine Poisoning. It can be inhaled, consumed, or absorbed through wet tissue (like the nose, mouth, or eyes).
It causes your voluntary nervous system to go into overdrive, which makes every muscle in your body contract and spasm uncontrollably. These spasms can be strong enough to rip the muscles off your bones.
If untreated, death usually comes within 2-3 hours either from asphyxiation (your chest muscles spasm so hard your ribs cannot expand), or from sheer exhaustion.
There is no antidote to strychnine, although if caught immediately you can be put in sensory deprivation on massive doses of muscle relaxers. If you survive the first 24 hours, you usually live. IF.
Insult To Injury
Severe radiation poisoning is pretty horrifying. It can take up to two weeks to kill you, during which time your body will fall apart at the molecular level while you're still alive. In some cases they can't even give you effective pain killers because your veins become so fragile they can't handle an injection. Oh, and just to mess with you, you'll start to feel better after a couple days, but that's just the calm before your skin starts to die.
Horribly Baked
A friend of mine used to be a crime-scene cleanup guy.
He was once called in to clean up a car where an infant had been forgotten in a car during the summer in Kansas, where it was well over a hundred degrees outside. Cars turn into ovens.
He quit after that.
Too Long Alone
Knew an old guy who lived alone, he had been walking around confused one day asking for someone to help him get an inhaler. They got him figured out and took him back home. The next thing we knew, he had died in the shower with the hot water still running days later. It was assumed he was having difficulty breathing and the hot moist air did not help him any, and he passed out and hit his head. He was found... with some parts of him floating in this sludgy mix which had accumulated over the days he was left under the water.
Slowly Poisoned
My friend worked on the liver ward at the hospital. If you are suicidal and overdose on Panadol /Tylenol it takes 3 days to die in extreme pain. She said they would have people in weekly who had taken a panadol/ Tylenol overdose and by the time they got to the ward they had changed their mind, so this person who now wanted to live died an agonising death filled with shame in front of their friends and relatives.
Rats On Rats On Rats
I read a story about a man trying to rob a place by crawling through a sewer-pipe. He became lodged in it with his hands around his waist trying to squirm through a narrow part.
The rats found him. Actually, just his face. They used his face as a buffet for days. There were a few dead rats around that he'd bitten to death because he couldn't use his hands. Other rats arrived to partake of the feast.
He did not make it.
Below Surface
Not the most horrible way I know or have seen but still one that I hate to think about.
At my local water park a kid who was 10 same age as me at the time, Drowned. Now the way he drowned is when he went down the water slide and at the end when you slide into a pool there was the pipeline that sucks water back up to the top. Now this pipeline had a grate on it but it sucked with great force. It use to pull kids towards it as you tried to swim out and it was kinda a fun game to out swim it. Until one day a kid went under and got held onto the grate of the pipe and could not swim away. He drowned and was only found 20 min later when his mom went looking for him. This pipe was probably about 6 meters away from where you slide into the pool. Just the thought of being so small and helpless as you get held under and drown and just watching other kids land in the pool and swim to safety, all having fun. I don't know it just gets to me not even being able to call for help when it is so close.
Rome Said "No"
There was a Roman execution technique known as the Body of Death. (For anyone interested, this is actually the allusion that the Apostle Paul makes in his letter to the Romans by saying "Who shall free me from this body of death?")
The punishment was often given to murderers, and it consisted of the body of the murdered victim being sewn onto the back of the murderer. Over time, the rot (disease, maggots, etc.) would move from the corpse into the living persons body, slowly killing them. Furthermore, anyone caught trying to help the person being punished would be subject to the same punishment.
This is why Rome was truly the most metal empire to exist.
No Way To Travel
The lady that was on a Southwest plane when something blew up and broke the window and sucked her halfway out of the 10x14 window hole.
That one.
@GregAbbott_TX/X
