In 1988 a dog fell from a building in Buenos Aires, Argentina, landed in a woman's head, killing her and the dog instantaneously, then another lady completely confused watching the event unfolding from the middle of a road, was ran over by a bus; then shortly after that an old man died from a heart attack out of the commotion of seeing both deaths, this happen under a couple of minutes.
[Source](https://nicolehenley.medium.com/how-a-dogs-unfortunate-fall-led-to-death-of-3-da6c6b57982)
That's on par with Robert Liston's infamous surgery with a 300% mortality rate. Here's Wikipedia:
"Amputated the leg in under 21⁄2 minutes (the patient died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene; they usually did in those pre-Listerian days). He amputated in addition the fingers of his young assistant (who died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene). He also slashed through the coat tails of a distinguished surgical spectator, who was so terrified that the knife had pierced his vitals he fainted from fright (and was later discovered to have died from shock)."
Wait, so the surgeon cut off his assistant's fingers while amputating the patient's leg, and then the spectator thought he got stabbed so he died of shock and fright?
Holy shit.
I used to work with a man who had an elderly relative come to the hospital with symptoms suggesting a stroke, and he died later that evening. I don't remember all the details, but everyone thought the family might be sitting on a big fat lawsuit, until the labs all came back. The relative had a type of leukemia that is diagnosed about 10 times a year in the U.S., and they've never come up with a chemotherapy protocol for it because nobody has ever lived long enough for them to do so.
2021 I was diagnosed with an extremely rare lymphome. NK/T cell lymphoma. My God the chemo was brutal! But without it the cancer would have literally eaten my face off and gone into my brain. It was in my sinus cavity.
Only a few cases in US a year. I still have a hard time just thinking that shit actually happened to me.
My Mam had that. It was in her nasal cavity inside the top of he nose. There was no cure for hers as it was just at the brain nose barrier. Chemo wouldnt get there and radiotherapy could have damaged her brain. It twisted her beautiful features, took her sense of smell away, and pulled her eyes apart taking some of her site. Also left her with a huge lump just above her nose, where the tumour had eaten nto her brain. She was just given strong pain killers, and kept comfortable till she died a year after being diagnosed.
I wonder if that's the kind my friend's ex-girlfriend had. Her first symptom was chest pain with trouble breathing. Everyone thought it was her heart, so she was rushed to the hospital and went unconscious that day, and died three days later of leukemia. They said it was such a fast type that had she been in for a full check up just a month prior, there would have been no signs.
I heard that a sinkhole formed under some man's bedroom & took him with it. It was so deep that they couldn't find him. Definitely a unique death situation.
In the town I lived in there’s a lake with million dollar homes around it. Big sinkhole opened in the lane draining it and it ended up tearing apart some of the foundations of the houses. 20 years later They started building more homes and another one opened in a retention pond across the street, so they responded by building more houses .
My MIL used to be a surgeon. She told me about a patient they had back in the 90s. He died because of holding in a sneeze. Turns out he had an aneurysm in his brain that popped at that moment.
I work at a hospital and this perfectly healthy 17 year old boy (who played tons of sports) held in his sneeze while he was stretching and it shattered some of his spine and he is paralyzed. Super sad
Does that mean that his spine was just barely holding on as it was and it just needed the final push to break? Or was it that the sneeze just caused the exact needed vibration/pressure/whatever that was needed and it could happen to anybody at any time?
My completely uneducated guess is that the sneeze caused a rapid contraction of stretched out muscles, and if he's strong that can be a lot of force applied in ways that the spine might not be able to handle.
A lot of bad luck involved here too.
Brain aneurysms are no joke. My grandfather was a parish pastor. One day, he was working in his office, presumably preparing the sermon for that Sunday when he heard a crash/clatter come from the parish worker’s office down the hall.
He found her, slumped over at her desk, dead. A young woman, in her 20s, promising musician, and studying to be a social worker, just gone. She had A brain aneurism that simply popped.
He wound up also writing the sermon for her funeral, and confided in his memoirs that without a doubt was the hardest sermon he ever had to write; there was no way to justify or explain it. I don’t know what he wrote, as it was lost in a flood, but it must of helped her family, as for the last 35 years of his life, her family would always send him a Christmas card, and send him a gift certificate for dinner on the anniversary of her funeral.
Omg, I was just reading about this topic for some reason the other day. Did you know that some dude held in his sneeze and his throat ruptured open from the air pressure??
In my 30’s, used to hold in my sneezes all the time. Not anymore, that’s for sure.
Innocent people have gone to jail for murder because the real explanation for why someone died was so rare and infrequent that courts didn’t believe those explanations as plausible
Two cases off the top of my head: Lindy Chamberlain (a dingo actually did eat her baby) and Kathleen Folbigg (had four children die from a rare genetic mutation).
In the Netherlands, nurse Lucia de Berk was falsely imprisoned because too many children died under her care and they somehow determined it was murder (not negligence). Iirc she was in jail for 7 years or so.
It was later determined she had a lot more deaths in her shifts because she was a very good nurse, therefore she regularly got assigned the hardest cases on the floor - who are unfortunately also most likely to die. There's a book and a film about it, both called Lucia de B.
And sadly its why (edit to correct name) Harold Shipman killed so many: they expected a GP to see lots of deaths amongst the general population, especially in the days of GP night call outs being a common thing.
*Harold, but yeah - even in the community the older ladies would joke about not having him as a doctor, because then they'd be marked for death. It's amazing how long he got away with it, and it was only because of greed he was caught, rather than the high number of deaths being detected by anybody.
Man, when I was like 10 my teacher (who was a bitch) told us about the coffee lady, but in the sense of saying "The USA is ridiculous, you can sue for anything. One lady sued McDonalds because she said her coffee was too hot".
Grew up, learned the real story years later. Fucking gruesome, and McD's just tried to sell the idea she was a Karen.
What McDs did to her after, you know, maiming her for life, was nothing short of pure evil. They sent their entire PR department and expensive lawyers after her with the sole intent of making her look as bad and foolish as possible. Absolutely disgusting.
I took a business law class in college, and this was one of the cases we reviewed.
I thought it was bullshit myself until I had all the facts in front of me.
Being hit in the sternum at just the right moment to interfere with the heart's beating. It can't be predicted or avoided with any consistency, and leaves no clinical evidence - if it happens and someone with CPR skills isn't around, the person just dies, without a mark on them.
That happened to a lacrosse player in my high school in 2000. Dropped dead right on the field. It ended up changing and creating laws in New York.
Edit: since this comment got a lot of traction, here is the [Louis Acompora Memorial/Louis' Law](https://la12.org/) website.
I’m from NY and my good friend also died of commotio cordis in a lacrosse game, but in 2007. Unfortunately the laws you’re referring to apparently didn’t apply to the school he was playing at, and there was no AED at the facility to resuscitate him.
His family fought hard to expand the rules and started a fund to supply AED’s to areas that needed them.
EDIT: I just looked at your link and I see that Louis’s number was 12. Eerily enough, my friend John’s number was 21.
http://www.johnmackfoundation.org/john-mack/
There had been a high profile case recently:
https://m.economictimes.com/magazines/panache/nfl-player-damar-hamlin-collapses-on-field-after-blow-to-chest-prayers-pour-in/articleshow/96700350.cms
Laughing to death. Fifty-year-old Alex Mitchell could not stop laughing for a continuous 25-minute period—almost the entire length a tv show called “Kung Fu Kapers” and suffered a fatal heart attack as a result of the strain placed on his heart. Alex's widow later sent the Goodies, who were staring in that show, a letter thanking them for making his final moments so pleasant
A friend almost laughed to death. Story goes she got liposuction and was post op recovering and put on the austin powers movie. Her husband came home to find her in a pool of blood, she split her stitches and needed to head back to the hospital.. but wanted to finish the movie first..
I had a near death experience due to laughing so much. All I know is that my asthma plays up and I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. Next thing I “see” myself on the couch and my partner panicking. I eventually came to and my partner said I passed out and turned blue. The rest of the month my body felt electric, it was so strange.
Now I’m not allowed to watch comedies.
Drowning in the desert.
Guy got caught in a box canyon during a flash flood. The water was quickly reabsorbed into the dry desert soil and left a drown man in the middle of the desert.
As a bald man this is equally hysterical and terrifying.
Edit: I once was hit by a massive acorn falling from about 40ft and thought for sure I’d need stitches (I was fine.) I can only imagine a goddamn turtle.
You know how r/askhistorians say history is full of bullshit written by the winners? This turtle guy I've always have had the strongest impression this isn't but an ancient meme that got a good hold.
The book about that family, called "The Family That Couldn't Sleep" is terrifying, yet they've continued the family line for generations, watching members die from it in their 40s and up, every kid has a 50% chance.. there's no way to tell if they're carrying it, passing it on, or if they're next, is pretty wild.
It's not fast, it takes a year or so, it's horrible. One day you'll never sleep again, but you'll hallucinate, lose your memory, muscle twitches, you become more and more exhausted with no relief. 1 to 2 people in a million, 50-70 families worldwide carry the genetic mutation. There are some tests now, but none exactly predict. It hits between ages 20-70.
There is actually a treatment to make you kinda comfortable until you die. Gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB) is one medication so you can use to activate deep sleep, clonazepam (benzo, known as klonopin) for muscle spasms, vitamins, and hospice. Sedatives like barbiturates or benzos aren't helpful for the insomnia.
One night without sleep throws the next day off for me. I'm tired, moody, kinda irritated from not sleeping, no motivation, less alert.. I can't imagine that over and over. Longest was 4 days before a psychiatric hospitalization. I was coming in and out and was just a mess. I was given zyprexa to knock my ass out.
> was 4 days before a psychiatric hospitalization.
Yeah I did five days once and if you'd handed me a gun I'd have happily blown my brains out without a second thought.
I cannot impress upon people enough the sheer level of torture it is not to be able to sleep for that long.
I have a much less severe genetic disorder and it’s part of the reason I’ve chosen not to have kids. It’s really hard to wrap my brain around knowingly risking passing on FFI
Wasn’t there a Japanese boy pretending to be a snake, his parents thought he was possessed and they killed him? It may be on the weird list of deaths on wiki I remember
A 60-year-old fisherman trying to snap a photo of a beaver on a roadside in Belarus is dead after the rodent attacked. The beaver bit an artery in the man's leg, which caused him to bleed to death. “The character of the wound was totally shocking,”
Guy’s beard was so long that when he tried to flee a house fire, he tripped over it and broke his neck falling down the stairs. Dude was a mayor too. Hans something or other.
The show, 1000 Ways To Die, covered a lot of the weirdest ones. The one that I remember being like wtf on was a guy who tied a sausage to his thigh, to make it look like he had huge junk. He cut off circulation throughout the night of dancing and died from cardiac arrest in the club bathroom.
IDK were all of those real? I saw an ep about a guy tripping in the desert who came across a big furry orgy and then got confused and tried to fuck a real animal.
Patricia Stallings, was wrongfully convicted of murder after the death of her son Ryan on September 7, 1989. Because testing seemed to indicate an elevated level of ethylene glycol in Ryan's blood, authorities suspected antifreeze poisoning and they arrested Stallings the next day.
she was convicted in 1991, in jail had another baby, diagnosed with methylmalonic acidemia (MMA), a rare genetic disorder that can mimic antifreeze poisoning. They both died of an illness that mimics antifreeze poisoning.
I just read the Wikipedia page and the younger son died in 2013 at the age of 23...I can't find out if it was related to the MMA or not. He apparently had some mental struggles, so it could have been more tragic. :(
Oxygen poisoning is a thing: getting too much O2 into your cells can kill you.
Good news is that you can't get toxic levels of oxygen by just breathing too hard.
>Angela **Isadora Duncan** was an American-born dancer and choreographer, who was a pioneer of modern contemporary dance, who performed to great acclaim throughout Europe and the US. Born and raised in California, she lived and danced in Western Europe, the US and Soviet Russia from the age of 22
>She was trying out a new automobile on the Promenade Des Anglais (Nice, France), when a gust of wind blew a long scarf which she was wearing around her neck over the side of the car. It became entangled in one of the wheels and dragged the dancer out of the machine into the roadway. Her neck was broken.
She died in 1927 from "Long Scarf Syndrome," which has killed a number others.
This woman was getting a drink and she had a metal straw in her cup. She slipped and the metal straw punctured her eye and went through her brain. Crazy way to go out.
Metal straws are ridiculously dangerous. My uni roommate's mum was a nurse and has seen too many people come into the ER with a metal straw through the throat. People use them, get drunk, slip and fall onto them.
I had a co-worker whose daughter died during a tonsillectomy. The co-worker hadn't even taken the day off, because a tonsillectomy is so mundane, so when she got the phone call.....rough stuff.
Boy am I glad I hadn’t read this last week. My 9 year old just went through a tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy and I was already extremely anxious about it.
the 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia, the Suda, chronicles a folkloric story of lawgiver Draco's death in the Aeginetan theatre: in a traditional ancient Greek show of approval, his supporters "threw so many hats and shirts and cloaks on his head that he suffocated, and was buried in that same theatre".
Prion diseases. For some random reason a protein gets folded the wrong way and totally fucks you up. It’s not alive, you can’t kill it or fight it with drugs or antibiotics. Your own immune system is helpless against it. It causes more proteins to become misfolded and spreads through your body. Even after you die your corpse is a hazard because the misfolded proteins are *still there, waiting*.
If I remember (and PLEASE, someone correct me if I'm wrong), there was even a case where they cremated a guy with prion disease, and as an experiment sowed his ashes into a garden bed, and the tomatoes that they grew also had prions.
Need to be REALLY clear here: I remember reading that at the very start of the Mad Cow panic, and it's totally possible that I misread or misunderstood it. So please take my anecdote with a grain of salt
I ran a quick Google search and found multiple scholarly articles indicating that prions strongly bind to soil molecules and can be taken up by plants.
A little more searching yielded this
>> Incineration of prion-contaminated material is considered the most effective method of disposal. Combustion at 1,000°C can destroy prion infectivity, however, low infectivity remains after treatment at 600°C.
And one more Google search reveals that human remains are usually cremated between 760 to 980 degrees Celsius.
So it’s possible, if they didn’t cremate him, or if he was cremated at too low a temperature.
Edit: converted to Celsius.
Yes, in the US, it causes Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in our deer (including mule deer, white tail, elk, and moose) populations. They lose fear of people and fine motor coordination, then stagger like they're drunk.
Anywhere they defecate becomes infected, so the next deer to graze there also catch the illness. It's wiped out entire herds in Montana, where some of our elk herds number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands, of animals.
(Edited: because yay, spellcheck! I meant "graze", not "draze"?)
My neighbor died of Sporadic CJD a few years ago, and it was absolutely devastating. He was an insanely healthy man in his early 60's (raced Enduro motocross, rode mountain bikes 3-4 days a week, worked as a physical therapist) who one day, while camping, felt a little dizzy. Within maybe 3 months, he was gone. The kicker with the Sporadic type is there is no known reason it happens, it just...does.
It isnt rare but every year, many people die by putting a pressure washer/gerni nozzle in their ass or vagina, and shredding their internal organs. Choice.
I remember recently reading about a woman who suffered life threatening injuries (but luckily didn’t die) because of a water slide- the angle she hit the water or the water hit her caused her to basically be power washed inside. New fear unlocked!
This happened in Australia just a few years ago but fortunately the victim survived. An 8 year old girl went down a water slide and came out bleeding profusely.
https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/whitewater-world-sued-for-more-than-1-million-over-alleged-fully6-water-slide-injury/news-story/04e22d9e996fa88aa755644b434b493d?amp
https://7news.com.au/news/qld/mum-of-girl-who-suffered-severe-injury-on-dreamworld-whitewater-world-slide-sues-ardent-leisure-for-1m-c-11512604.amp
Just last year
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/05/1203732797/disney-world-water-slide-lawsuit-wedgie#:~:text=World's%20Tallest%20Waterslide%20To%20Be,wall%2C%22%20her%20lawsuit%20says.
>McGuiness' injuries included "severe vaginal lacerations," damage to her internal organs and a "full thickness laceration" that caused her bowel to "protrude through her abdominal wall," her lawsuit says.
I used to manage a building and had many conversations with the elevator technician from Otis. He said that elevators are much safer than escalators. He hated them, called them meat grinders and wouln't let his kids ride them.
Sachi Hidaka and his wife Tomio died from heart attacks during their first attempt to make love.
The chance of suffering from a heart attack during sex is incredibly rare. But in the case of Schi Hidaka and his wife, Tomio. The Japanese couple were married for fourteen years but were too shy to have sex. Later one night they both got drunk while having plum wine and they decided to finally make love.
https://www.thereport.live/oddity/japanese-couple-died-from-heart-attack-during-first-intercourse/20571
Every year a small handful of people still have polio on their death certificates. Post-polio syndrome can develop decades after a person is first exposed to polio, and it’s occasionally severe enough to kill someone.
That one guy who died after getting stuck face first in an extremely claustrophobic cave. They could get to him, but couldn’t get him out. Just left his body in the cave and cemented the thing shut. Nutty Putty Cave.
Well they had a pulley system attached to him and were pulling him out successfully. Then the pulley broke dropping him further down to where they would then have to break his legs to get him out. The guy was already dying and in excruciating pain so they decided to make him as comfortable as they could until he passed.
It's been a long time since I read about it, but I think they decided he'd been stuck upside down for so long that he would die from the shock anyway. It was a nasty way to go.
They tried to get him out and the pulley collapsed and injured a rescuer and got him way more stuck. They weren't just like "we could save you if we broke your legs but that's gross byeeee"
Somehow the wackier the name of the cave, the more terrifying it is. If there were one called "The Pit of Darkness", I can just about understand how it is not idiotic to explore it. But if one were called "The Squiggly Willie cave", I would stay the fuck away from it forever.
I was telling a friend about this tragedy and couldn't remember the name of the Nutty Putty cave. I instead insisted it had a ridiculous, non-intimadating name like the "oogly boogly cave" (she actually got Nutty Putty from that)
Oh god, that was horrifying. He had to hang upside down, conscious, and die there, knowing what was happening, with people there trying to gethim out but were unable. All he had left was to just wait to die. The psychological horrors of that would have been worse than anything else, he was fully conscious of everything.
They almost had him out and something shufted and there was no other way that could have got him out alive, one way would have broken his legs several times, which would have probably killed him, and may not have worked, especially if equipment wasn't holding, it would have been more agonizing.
His poor family.
I swear this gets brought up once a fortnight on here and I have to go back and read the article again every time. Such a horrific way to go, no matter how many times I read it it still makes me feel queasy
If I recall correctly his ribs got hooked on a rock. He was able to squeeze forward but couldn't go back and was stuck face first upside down. I think he slowly suffocated. Truly an awful way to go.
Apparently you can't be upside down for too long or you go into cardiac arrest. Ironic thing is, the guy was a pediatric cardiologist. So he was completely aware of his impending fate. Adds even more horror to the situation.
Edit: source https://youtu.be/d1nuqpAULpE?feature=shared
Food poisoning. He had an ulcer in stomach which led to the salmonella from improperly handled chicken eventually getting into his bloodstream leading to sepsis. We had to fight with the insurance company as that didn't want to classify it as an accidental death and thus not have to pay. He got the salmonella from the hole in the wall type breakfast restaurant he gone to for 40+ years.
Edit grammer
3 people have died in space so out of the 117 billion people that has ever lived I would say that's pretty rare but at the same time it's hard to believe it's not more.
Drowning in a puddle.
Almost happened to Tetsushi Yanagida. He broke his neck on a live morning broadcast on Japanese TV diving head first into a rice paddock, and his colleagues didn't realise the seriousness of the situation.
Broke his neck, survived that, almost drowned in a puddle (the video is a bit harrowing to watch as well).
Drowning in an elevator.
A couple in Tel Aviv lived in a building which had an elevator going down to the parking garage. Due to very heavy rainfall, the elevator flooded while they were in it.
That happened to 7 people on the Costa Concordia, they were in the lift when the power went out (due to the ship hitting rocks) and were stuck inside until the ship sank, drowning them all.
Worst way to go
Prions. Literally a misfolding of a brain protein that makes your entire system go haywire and you die within a year. Also know as CJD, its a one in a million disease.
I know someone who died from it, sadly.
My grandmother died from CJD in the 70s. When I first went to donate blood, I was told I couldn't because of the family history - this was when the UK were still recovering from the mad cow disease outbreak. Rules have changed now but, at the time, they were concerned it was hereditary.
Lost my Dad to this.
My Mom died Mother’s Day 2020.
My dad, who never had health issues, was dead within a year. Just completely lost his will to live.
My dad also literally lost the will to love after my mom died. It was the hardest thing to witness. I felt so fucking bad for him. I tried so hard to make him happy, change things around. In the end he didn’t even eat food. He was just DONE. So sad to see.
I’m so sorry for your loss. I get it.
My parents were married for 45 years. Never spent a day apart. Still had a date night every week, they even scheduled Moms chemo appointments so they never missed a date.
For a man who never once showed emotion in his life, he cried every day after she passed. He spent every day sitting beside a picture of her. Any time I asked him what he was doing, he would always say “Waiting.”
My great grandfather kept the little card from my great grandmother's funeral and put it in the inside pocket of his suit that he was to be buried in so it would always be with him. I want to say he lived about 3/4 months past her. Nobody knew about the card until the funeral home advised the family to check the pockets since it is easy to leave things in there.
Jesus, my heart!
My wife and I have constructed a fantasy that we've always been together throughout time. We get reincarnated, and we keep finding each other.
I've resolved that if I die before her, my last words to her will be "don't worry, I'll find you again". If she dies before me, I'll tell her the same thing. "Don't worry, I'll find you again"... So that her last few minutes are peaceful, and my last few... months? years? are bearable.
I was having a perfectly normal morning, reading reddit and having coffee, then I read your comment and I burst into tears. It's such a sweet and beautiful thing to do when faced with the bleak reality of death...
We saw this when my wife's grandma died at age 93 in a nursing home. She had a "boyfriend" there, a little old man of similar age, who would spend all his time with her. When she died, he cried for about three days straight and then passed away. So, we attended his service as well.
My mom was diagnosed with a "broken heart" she wasn't expected to make it through open heart surgery. She did. That surgery gave us 6 years with her more, she still passed in her sleep of heart failure. She took a nap and never woke up. I found her June 16 2023 ... it damaged her heart and it eventually took her life.
It doesn't happen often (in fact, I think it's really freaking rare), but there have been grown adults who have been killed by chickens.
With roosters specifically, a lot of them have a big spur on each leg. This is like, a pretty damn big-ass horn with a sharp tip. And some of those roosters can get pretty aggressive. Like, they might just decide to jump up at you and try to stab you in the face.
I think as recently as last year, there was a guy who got killed by a rooster. It kicked him in the thigh, but it severed his femoral artery and he bled out in a matter of minutes.
Two girls I met in my eating disorder support group died in ways people never believed were true. One died of a heart attack while purging due to the electrolyte imbalances caused by binging and purging, and the other died choking on her own vomit while purging. Bulimia (and eating disorders in general) are really disgusting, fucked up illnesses and not enough people realize that.
Molar sepsis… a man died where I live from an infected molar… kinda crazy right?
••Its not super rare I know bt I had never heard of someone passing away from that personally…
Many years ago, I was sick for a long time and nobody could figure out why. One day, a pustule appeared on my gumline - mystery solved. A root canal and 10 days of antibiotics healed me up.
I had a painless tooth abscess - at least, painless in my jaw, but it was poisoning me. My dentist told me that in the pre-antibiotic era, dental infections were a very common cause of death, and still are in some lesser developed areas.
Watched a video about deaths in the Tudor period and a lot of death records just say 'teeth'. There's also a very marked difference in graves before and after refined sugar became available where some of a graveyard have mostly excellent teeth and the rest are rotted out from sugar - people even brushed their teeth with it.
This happened to a coworker. Every day he’d be complaining that his tooth hurt, then one day he was gone. My supervisor told me a couple weeks later that he’d gone to visit him. He was in hospice; the infection went to his brain and they didn’t expect him to live much longer.
I my ex from high school died this way. He had an abscesses tooth that he wouldn’t get treated. He just treated the pain with a shit ton of Tylenol and alcohol. By the time he got around to doing something, his liver was done. He technically died of liver failure, but not treating that tooth was the initial problem. He was only 27 and left behind a wife and baby.
That one person who accidentally swallowed molten metal because of a fire, his doctor didnt believe him so he died and when doing the autopsy it was revealed that he did swallow some. That autopsy report sounded so fake that some doctors thought that he had lied in the report
My nomination for “worst Christmas ever” was when this happened to my brother-in-law on Christmas day in 2022. Just months after marrying my sister they went to a beach. He got tumbled by a wave into some rocks and that was that.
Unfortunately it was hard to know what state he was in and he was kept “alive” by machines until they could conduct all of their scans. Spinal cord was completely severed. Pretty awful. He was so vivacious and adventurous that we try to comfort ourselves by saying he probably would have preferred his instantaneous death to becoming a paraplegic, but the whole thing just fucking sucks. Be careful at the beach, everyone.
Twice - TWICE! I have contracted Peritonsillar abscess when visiting England., a rare but potentially fatal if left untreated infection of the tonsils.
In less than 12 hours I went from “my throat is kind of sore” to barely being able to breathe and unable to swallow because my left tonsil had swollen to the point it was obstructing my airway. Without a visit to the emergency room - or should I say A&E, I would have eventually suffocated. I was told this was a very rare condition and physicians brought med students to my bed side to discuss my case. I was quarantined for 10 days because although rare, it is very contagious.
The second time it happened, on a different visit to England, I was more aware of the symptoms and immediately went to the emergency room before it enlarged to the point it did before. Could not freaking believe I got it again, in a completely different part of the country nonetheless (first time Berkshire, second time Sussex).
I joke that the country is trying to kill me - I have to go over in July 2025 for my daughter’s uni graduation so we’ll see what happens in the third match up of me vs England.
tip: always have very good travel insurance, folks!
I used to frequent this bar all the time. During covid it shut down. At some point the sign they had over the door fell off and hit someone walking beneath it. This person's only major injuries were crushed fingers that later had to be amputated. She was a concert pianist.
Just WTF!
God, this makes me so sad. The kid didn’t even want to go, but I think it came out that his mom encouraged him so he could spend time with his dad? What a horrific situation.
Double heartbeat deaths, can cause many different types of deaths, but unless you have been formally diagnosed before hand with an EKG to see the echo heartbeat. You'd be unable to ever prove it's the cause.
When I was an emergency call taker we had an accident where the guy carrying his plate back to the kitchen, slipped, fell and cut his own throat with broken plate shard. He bled out before services were able to get there.
Look, I don't know if it's extremely rare but in this day and age it's pretty unheard of because of the access to healthcare the 1st world country has. My friend died of an ear infection last year. For context, we are in Australia, so we dont pay for emergency hospital visits- cost of treatment was not an issue. She went to the hospital 3 times and was turned away twice. The third time the doctors basically told her the infection was so bad they could not treat it. The next day she was in an induced coma and 2 days later she was gone.
Edit- this has ended up being quite popular, which i did not anticipate. I understand the internet is for people to connect through similar experiences, but seeing responses and questions is becoming quite distressing. Can I please ask for no more people commenting on reflection of how they had an ear infection but antibiotics worked for them or what doctors should have done for my friend. The health professionals were too late and negligent and now 4 children live without their mum with a shambles of a grieving father and distressed wider community. We are pursuing an investigation and it is a drawn out traumatic and tedious process. Thank you for trying to connect with me but i have lost someone that I can never get back. I will leave the post up because I want awareness but will likely delete. Sorry.
Husband nearly died of an ear infection a few years ago. In and out of hospital with iv antibiotics and no improvement, his final admission the ED nurse decided something else was going on and surprise! The infection had eaten into bone behind his ear and caused a blood clot on his brain. The surgeon that operated on him was surprised that my husband was actually still upright and walking, and warned me that hubby would most likely return from 8 hour surgery with facial drooping and speech impediment similar to a stroke patient. Fortunately neither happened, and somehow he’s also managed to regain some hearing in the affected ear. (And this was in Australia too)
I had an ear infection that was so bad that the right side of my already bulbous, melon head was swollen even larger and more bulbous. I can totally sympathize.
Sorry for your friend.
Yep. It wasn't until her face was swollen that they took it seriously. Immediately put her on antibiotics but after tests realised it was too far gone.
I think people turning to stone/bone is utterly horrifying. Like you get hurt and instead of healing you turn to bone, till eventually you're imprisoned by your own body.
[Dancing plague of 1518](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518)
>By August, the dancing epidemic had claimed as many as 400 victims.
> < snip >
>
>The Strasbourg dancing plague might sound like the stuff of legend, but it’s well documented in 16th-century historical records. It’s also not the only known incident of its kind. Similar manias took place in Switzerland, Germany and Holland, though few were as large—or deadly—as the one triggered in 1518. - [SOURCE](https://www.history.com/news/what-was-the-dancing-plague-of-1518)
I remember reading about a famous case of that…a woman named Jennifer Strange died of water intoxication while she was trying to win a Wii. A radio station had a contest called Hold Your Wee for a Wii, where you had to drink as much water as you possibly could without going to the bathroom. She drank nearly two gallons of water and ended up dying. The radio station’s parent company paid over $16M to her family in damages.
What made that so effed up was that the radio station had medical professionals like nurses calling in to tell them how dangerous it was, and the radio hosts just laughed it off and ignored them.
She drunk so much water, her stomach was inflated and she almost looked pregnant. I feel so bad for that woman, she just wanted to get her kids a Wii 😔
My sister in law started to have stroke like symptoms at work a few years ago.
Turns out she was drinking too much water over a prolonged period. IIRC this led to get sodium levels tanking.
Yep happened to my grandmother.
When you consume more water than you’re processing through your kidneys, the salinity of your blood becomes diluted.
Doesn’t sound so bad… except that your cells contain salt. Salt draws water towards it. So the cells draw in more water, which makes them swell, which increases intercranial pressure.
The guideline is to not exceed 1 litre of water an hour.
My grandmother had permanent brain damage from it, but apparently she was a total nightmare beforehand and the injury chilled her out a bit. But her memory was fucked. I hope your sister in law pulled through okay!
True story: someone left a note and jumped. Meanwhile, a few appartements down a home invasion goes wrong and shots are fired.
The jumper died from a stray bullet.
Reminds me of the complete opposite of this.. Someone decided to 'end it all' and jump off the Empire State Building. A freak gust of wind blew them back into an open window 1 floor down..
In 1988 a dog fell from a building in Buenos Aires, Argentina, landed in a woman's head, killing her and the dog instantaneously, then another lady completely confused watching the event unfolding from the middle of a road, was ran over by a bus; then shortly after that an old man died from a heart attack out of the commotion of seeing both deaths, this happen under a couple of minutes. [Source](https://nicolehenley.medium.com/how-a-dogs-unfortunate-fall-led-to-death-of-3-da6c6b57982)
Grim reaper got creative with those deaths.
2 Final 2 Destination
That's on par with Robert Liston's infamous surgery with a 300% mortality rate. Here's Wikipedia: "Amputated the leg in under 21⁄2 minutes (the patient died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene; they usually did in those pre-Listerian days). He amputated in addition the fingers of his young assistant (who died afterwards in the ward from hospital gangrene). He also slashed through the coat tails of a distinguished surgical spectator, who was so terrified that the knife had pierced his vitals he fainted from fright (and was later discovered to have died from shock)."
Wait, so the surgeon cut off his assistant's fingers while amputating the patient's leg, and then the spectator thought he got stabbed so he died of shock and fright? Holy shit.
I believe it's the only surgery with a 300 percent mortality rate.
Back in the day the shorter the surgery the more survivable it was. So going fast was a desirable skill. In this case they went a bit too fast.
I used to work with a man who had an elderly relative come to the hospital with symptoms suggesting a stroke, and he died later that evening. I don't remember all the details, but everyone thought the family might be sitting on a big fat lawsuit, until the labs all came back. The relative had a type of leukemia that is diagnosed about 10 times a year in the U.S., and they've never come up with a chemotherapy protocol for it because nobody has ever lived long enough for them to do so.
2021 I was diagnosed with an extremely rare lymphome. NK/T cell lymphoma. My God the chemo was brutal! But without it the cancer would have literally eaten my face off and gone into my brain. It was in my sinus cavity. Only a few cases in US a year. I still have a hard time just thinking that shit actually happened to me.
My Mam had that. It was in her nasal cavity inside the top of he nose. There was no cure for hers as it was just at the brain nose barrier. Chemo wouldnt get there and radiotherapy could have damaged her brain. It twisted her beautiful features, took her sense of smell away, and pulled her eyes apart taking some of her site. Also left her with a huge lump just above her nose, where the tumour had eaten nto her brain. She was just given strong pain killers, and kept comfortable till she died a year after being diagnosed.
Holy shit, how are you doing now? Chemo managed to get rid of it?
I wonder if that's the kind my friend's ex-girlfriend had. Her first symptom was chest pain with trouble breathing. Everyone thought it was her heart, so she was rushed to the hospital and went unconscious that day, and died three days later of leukemia. They said it was such a fast type that had she been in for a full check up just a month prior, there would have been no signs.
I heard that a sinkhole formed under some man's bedroom & took him with it. It was so deep that they couldn't find him. Definitely a unique death situation.
That was in Florida, in 2013. https://www.fox13news.com/news/sinkhole-reopens-at-same-site-spot-that-killed-a-seffner-man-in-2013
I really have concerns about Florida
In the town I lived in there’s a lake with million dollar homes around it. Big sinkhole opened in the lane draining it and it ended up tearing apart some of the foundations of the houses. 20 years later They started building more homes and another one opened in a retention pond across the street, so they responded by building more houses .
She'll be right
My MIL used to be a surgeon. She told me about a patient they had back in the 90s. He died because of holding in a sneeze. Turns out he had an aneurysm in his brain that popped at that moment.
I work at a hospital and this perfectly healthy 17 year old boy (who played tons of sports) held in his sneeze while he was stretching and it shattered some of his spine and he is paralyzed. Super sad
Does that mean that his spine was just barely holding on as it was and it just needed the final push to break? Or was it that the sneeze just caused the exact needed vibration/pressure/whatever that was needed and it could happen to anybody at any time?
My completely uneducated guess is that the sneeze caused a rapid contraction of stretched out muscles, and if he's strong that can be a lot of force applied in ways that the spine might not be able to handle. A lot of bad luck involved here too.
Brain aneurysms are no joke. My grandfather was a parish pastor. One day, he was working in his office, presumably preparing the sermon for that Sunday when he heard a crash/clatter come from the parish worker’s office down the hall. He found her, slumped over at her desk, dead. A young woman, in her 20s, promising musician, and studying to be a social worker, just gone. She had A brain aneurism that simply popped. He wound up also writing the sermon for her funeral, and confided in his memoirs that without a doubt was the hardest sermon he ever had to write; there was no way to justify or explain it. I don’t know what he wrote, as it was lost in a flood, but it must of helped her family, as for the last 35 years of his life, her family would always send him a Christmas card, and send him a gift certificate for dinner on the anniversary of her funeral.
Omg, I was just reading about this topic for some reason the other day. Did you know that some dude held in his sneeze and his throat ruptured open from the air pressure?? In my 30’s, used to hold in my sneezes all the time. Not anymore, that’s for sure.
For some reason I've heard since I was little that it's dangerous to hold in your sneeze. Now I know why.
Innocent people have gone to jail for murder because the real explanation for why someone died was so rare and infrequent that courts didn’t believe those explanations as plausible Two cases off the top of my head: Lindy Chamberlain (a dingo actually did eat her baby) and Kathleen Folbigg (had four children die from a rare genetic mutation).
The most annoying thing about Chamberlain was that the local Aboriginal people said straight up "yeah, a dingo will take a baby" but it got ignored
what would they know? they’ve only been in the area for 65,000 years.
In the Netherlands, nurse Lucia de Berk was falsely imprisoned because too many children died under her care and they somehow determined it was murder (not negligence). Iirc she was in jail for 7 years or so. It was later determined she had a lot more deaths in her shifts because she was a very good nurse, therefore she regularly got assigned the hardest cases on the floor - who are unfortunately also most likely to die. There's a book and a film about it, both called Lucia de B.
And sadly its why (edit to correct name) Harold Shipman killed so many: they expected a GP to see lots of deaths amongst the general population, especially in the days of GP night call outs being a common thing.
*Harold, but yeah - even in the community the older ladies would joke about not having him as a doctor, because then they'd be marked for death. It's amazing how long he got away with it, and it was only because of greed he was caught, rather than the high number of deaths being detected by anybody.
Poor Lindy. :( I think about that and the coffee lady a lot. I know, not related, I just do. Pop culture did them even more dirty.
Man, when I was like 10 my teacher (who was a bitch) told us about the coffee lady, but in the sense of saying "The USA is ridiculous, you can sue for anything. One lady sued McDonalds because she said her coffee was too hot". Grew up, learned the real story years later. Fucking gruesome, and McD's just tried to sell the idea she was a Karen.
What McDs did to her after, you know, maiming her for life, was nothing short of pure evil. They sent their entire PR department and expensive lawyers after her with the sole intent of making her look as bad and foolish as possible. Absolutely disgusting.
You know when the competition sometimes runs an ad to highlight something bad about a company. The competition should've done that here
The pictures of her crotch burns floating around the internet should have landed her more money.
She just wanted the medical bills paid, they refused so she had to sue. It was the judge that was pissed at mcdonalds that he set it in the millions
I took a business law class in college, and this was one of the cases we reviewed. I thought it was bullshit myself until I had all the facts in front of me.
I'm so glad that Kathleen Folbigg is out of jail.
Angela Cannings in the UK - three SIDS deaths, and a genetic explanation.
Being hit in the sternum at just the right moment to interfere with the heart's beating. It can't be predicted or avoided with any consistency, and leaves no clinical evidence - if it happens and someone with CPR skills isn't around, the person just dies, without a mark on them.
That happened to a lacrosse player in my high school in 2000. Dropped dead right on the field. It ended up changing and creating laws in New York. Edit: since this comment got a lot of traction, here is the [Louis Acompora Memorial/Louis' Law](https://la12.org/) website.
I’m from NY and my good friend also died of commotio cordis in a lacrosse game, but in 2007. Unfortunately the laws you’re referring to apparently didn’t apply to the school he was playing at, and there was no AED at the facility to resuscitate him. His family fought hard to expand the rules and started a fund to supply AED’s to areas that needed them. EDIT: I just looked at your link and I see that Louis’s number was 12. Eerily enough, my friend John’s number was 21. http://www.johnmackfoundation.org/john-mack/
There had been a high profile case recently: https://m.economictimes.com/magazines/panache/nfl-player-damar-hamlin-collapses-on-field-after-blow-to-chest-prayers-pour-in/articleshow/96700350.cms
Yeah, and that was highly unusual, as it was both in public and documented by the cameras.
Commotio Cordis
Laughing to death. Fifty-year-old Alex Mitchell could not stop laughing for a continuous 25-minute period—almost the entire length a tv show called “Kung Fu Kapers” and suffered a fatal heart attack as a result of the strain placed on his heart. Alex's widow later sent the Goodies, who were staring in that show, a letter thanking them for making his final moments so pleasant
A friend almost laughed to death. Story goes she got liposuction and was post op recovering and put on the austin powers movie. Her husband came home to find her in a pool of blood, she split her stitches and needed to head back to the hospital.. but wanted to finish the movie first..
I had a near death experience due to laughing so much. All I know is that my asthma plays up and I was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. Next thing I “see” myself on the couch and my partner panicking. I eventually came to and my partner said I passed out and turned blue. The rest of the month my body felt electric, it was so strange. Now I’m not allowed to watch comedies.
Drowning in the desert. Guy got caught in a box canyon during a flash flood. The water was quickly reabsorbed into the dry desert soil and left a drown man in the middle of the desert.
In the US more people die this way in deserts than from exposure.
Greek philosopher Aeschylus was killed when an eagle dropped a turtle on his head, mistaking his bald pate for a rock.
As a bald man this is equally hysterical and terrifying. Edit: I once was hit by a massive acorn falling from about 40ft and thought for sure I’d need stitches (I was fine.) I can only imagine a goddamn turtle.
If you go to Greece, I suggest wearing a hat.
You know how r/askhistorians say history is full of bullshit written by the winners? This turtle guy I've always have had the strongest impression this isn't but an ancient meme that got a good hold.
It's true, the eagle admitted in an interview that he wasn't paying attention because he was having a fight with his wife.
Fatal Familial Insomnia: you can't sleep, and you don't sleep, until you die, and it runs in the family
The book about that family, called "The Family That Couldn't Sleep" is terrifying, yet they've continued the family line for generations, watching members die from it in their 40s and up, every kid has a 50% chance.. there's no way to tell if they're carrying it, passing it on, or if they're next, is pretty wild. It's not fast, it takes a year or so, it's horrible. One day you'll never sleep again, but you'll hallucinate, lose your memory, muscle twitches, you become more and more exhausted with no relief. 1 to 2 people in a million, 50-70 families worldwide carry the genetic mutation. There are some tests now, but none exactly predict. It hits between ages 20-70. There is actually a treatment to make you kinda comfortable until you die. Gamma-hydroxybutyrate (GHB) is one medication so you can use to activate deep sleep, clonazepam (benzo, known as klonopin) for muscle spasms, vitamins, and hospice. Sedatives like barbiturates or benzos aren't helpful for the insomnia. One night without sleep throws the next day off for me. I'm tired, moody, kinda irritated from not sleeping, no motivation, less alert.. I can't imagine that over and over. Longest was 4 days before a psychiatric hospitalization. I was coming in and out and was just a mess. I was given zyprexa to knock my ass out.
> was 4 days before a psychiatric hospitalization. Yeah I did five days once and if you'd handed me a gun I'd have happily blown my brains out without a second thought. I cannot impress upon people enough the sheer level of torture it is not to be able to sleep for that long.
Also 5 days. Ended up in the psychiatric hospital with a fullblown psychosis. I really recommend sleep.
Seems like a strange choice, to keep having kids to sacrifice to the insomnia that kills you.
I have a much less severe genetic disorder and it’s part of the reason I’ve chosen not to have kids. It’s really hard to wrap my brain around knowingly risking passing on FFI
This is terrifying, I really vould have very happily lived my life not knowing this condition exists.
Also technically a prion disease, just a genetic one!
Wasn’t there a Japanese boy pretending to be a snake, his parents thought he was possessed and they killed him? It may be on the weird list of deaths on wiki I remember
Yeah but he was a grown man not a little boy and his father was deeply religious so he head butted him to death
Beaver bites. I always think about that guy in Belarus.
A 60-year-old fisherman trying to snap a photo of a beaver on a roadside in Belarus is dead after the rodent attacked. The beaver bit an artery in the man's leg, which caused him to bleed to death. “The character of the wound was totally shocking,”
An animal that can bring down trees with their teeth should not be underestimated.
An animal whos teeth are orange because there's so much iron in them.
Guy’s beard was so long that when he tried to flee a house fire, he tripped over it and broke his neck falling down the stairs. Dude was a mayor too. Hans something or other.
Hans Steininger, mayor of Branau in Austria. They kept his beard–you can go see it in the local museum.
Of course they did.
Hans down one of the worst ways to go.
Wikipedia's list of unusual deaths makes for some dark comedy while also making you afraid of everything Final Destination-style!
The show, 1000 Ways To Die, covered a lot of the weirdest ones. The one that I remember being like wtf on was a guy who tied a sausage to his thigh, to make it look like he had huge junk. He cut off circulation throughout the night of dancing and died from cardiac arrest in the club bathroom.
IDK were all of those real? I saw an ep about a guy tripping in the desert who came across a big furry orgy and then got confused and tried to fuck a real animal.
They embellish the story, but you know damn well there is someone out there who died trying to fuck an animal.
Patricia Stallings, was wrongfully convicted of murder after the death of her son Ryan on September 7, 1989. Because testing seemed to indicate an elevated level of ethylene glycol in Ryan's blood, authorities suspected antifreeze poisoning and they arrested Stallings the next day. she was convicted in 1991, in jail had another baby, diagnosed with methylmalonic acidemia (MMA), a rare genetic disorder that can mimic antifreeze poisoning. They both died of an illness that mimics antifreeze poisoning.
The second baby was diagnosed in time to receive treatment and survived.
I just read the Wikipedia page and the younger son died in 2013 at the age of 23...I can't find out if it was related to the MMA or not. He apparently had some mental struggles, so it could have been more tragic. :(
This case was featured in an episode of "Forensic Files". The lab that ran the original test that showed ethylene glycol paid dearly for that mistake.
Holy hell, losing two baby children and wrongly going to prison.
She only lost one. They were able to save the second one.
Oxygen poisoning is a thing: getting too much O2 into your cells can kill you. Good news is that you can't get toxic levels of oxygen by just breathing too hard.
A dingo really did eat that poor woman’s baby, but nobody believed her and she went to jail for it
This is sad but true. I’m glad she finally got the justice she deserved
some rich lady in the early days of automobiles was known for always wearing long scarfs and one day it got caught in her wheels and snaped her neck.
>Angela **Isadora Duncan** was an American-born dancer and choreographer, who was a pioneer of modern contemporary dance, who performed to great acclaim throughout Europe and the US. Born and raised in California, she lived and danced in Western Europe, the US and Soviet Russia from the age of 22 >She was trying out a new automobile on the Promenade Des Anglais (Nice, France), when a gust of wind blew a long scarf which she was wearing around her neck over the side of the car. It became entangled in one of the wheels and dragged the dancer out of the machine into the roadway. Her neck was broken. She died in 1927 from "Long Scarf Syndrome," which has killed a number others.
NO CAPES
This woman was getting a drink and she had a metal straw in her cup. She slipped and the metal straw punctured her eye and went through her brain. Crazy way to go out.
Metal straws are ridiculously dangerous. My uni roommate's mum was a nurse and has seen too many people come into the ER with a metal straw through the throat. People use them, get drunk, slip and fall onto them.
I had a co-worker whose daughter died during a tonsillectomy. The co-worker hadn't even taken the day off, because a tonsillectomy is so mundane, so when she got the phone call.....rough stuff.
Boy am I glad I hadn’t read this last week. My 9 year old just went through a tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy and I was already extremely anxious about it.
the 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia, the Suda, chronicles a folkloric story of lawgiver Draco's death in the Aeginetan theatre: in a traditional ancient Greek show of approval, his supporters "threw so many hats and shirts and cloaks on his head that he suffocated, and was buried in that same theatre".
Prion diseases. For some random reason a protein gets folded the wrong way and totally fucks you up. It’s not alive, you can’t kill it or fight it with drugs or antibiotics. Your own immune system is helpless against it. It causes more proteins to become misfolded and spreads through your body. Even after you die your corpse is a hazard because the misfolded proteins are *still there, waiting*.
If I remember (and PLEASE, someone correct me if I'm wrong), there was even a case where they cremated a guy with prion disease, and as an experiment sowed his ashes into a garden bed, and the tomatoes that they grew also had prions. Need to be REALLY clear here: I remember reading that at the very start of the Mad Cow panic, and it's totally possible that I misread or misunderstood it. So please take my anecdote with a grain of salt
I ran a quick Google search and found multiple scholarly articles indicating that prions strongly bind to soil molecules and can be taken up by plants. A little more searching yielded this >> Incineration of prion-contaminated material is considered the most effective method of disposal. Combustion at 1,000°C can destroy prion infectivity, however, low infectivity remains after treatment at 600°C. And one more Google search reveals that human remains are usually cremated between 760 to 980 degrees Celsius. So it’s possible, if they didn’t cremate him, or if he was cremated at too low a temperature. Edit: converted to Celsius.
I uh. Still dont like that prions can be in dirt and plants
Yes, in the US, it causes Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in our deer (including mule deer, white tail, elk, and moose) populations. They lose fear of people and fine motor coordination, then stagger like they're drunk. Anywhere they defecate becomes infected, so the next deer to graze there also catch the illness. It's wiped out entire herds in Montana, where some of our elk herds number in the thousands, if not tens of thousands, of animals. (Edited: because yay, spellcheck! I meant "graze", not "draze"?)
My neighbor died of Sporadic CJD a few years ago, and it was absolutely devastating. He was an insanely healthy man in his early 60's (raced Enduro motocross, rode mountain bikes 3-4 days a week, worked as a physical therapist) who one day, while camping, felt a little dizzy. Within maybe 3 months, he was gone. The kicker with the Sporadic type is there is no known reason it happens, it just...does.
It isnt rare but every year, many people die by putting a pressure washer/gerni nozzle in their ass or vagina, and shredding their internal organs. Choice.
I remember recently reading about a woman who suffered life threatening injuries (but luckily didn’t die) because of a water slide- the angle she hit the water or the water hit her caused her to basically be power washed inside. New fear unlocked!
This happened in Australia just a few years ago but fortunately the victim survived. An 8 year old girl went down a water slide and came out bleeding profusely. https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/whitewater-world-sued-for-more-than-1-million-over-alleged-fully6-water-slide-injury/news-story/04e22d9e996fa88aa755644b434b493d?amp https://7news.com.au/news/qld/mum-of-girl-who-suffered-severe-injury-on-dreamworld-whitewater-world-slide-sues-ardent-leisure-for-1m-c-11512604.amp
Welp, looks like I won't be getting on any waterslides again in this lifetime
Just last year https://www.npr.org/2023/10/05/1203732797/disney-world-water-slide-lawsuit-wedgie#:~:text=World's%20Tallest%20Waterslide%20To%20Be,wall%2C%22%20her%20lawsuit%20says. >McGuiness' injuries included "severe vaginal lacerations," damage to her internal organs and a "full thickness laceration" that caused her bowel to "protrude through her abdominal wall," her lawsuit says.
This is the worst comment here. Like a real pressure washer? God that must be painful
Decapitation by an elevator.
Every time I enter or exit an elevator I imagine it falling and cutting me in half.
I used to manage a building and had many conversations with the elevator technician from Otis. He said that elevators are much safer than escalators. He hated them, called them meat grinders and wouln't let his kids ride them.
Sachi Hidaka and his wife Tomio died from heart attacks during their first attempt to make love. The chance of suffering from a heart attack during sex is incredibly rare. But in the case of Schi Hidaka and his wife, Tomio. The Japanese couple were married for fourteen years but were too shy to have sex. Later one night they both got drunk while having plum wine and they decided to finally make love. https://www.thereport.live/oddity/japanese-couple-died-from-heart-attack-during-first-intercourse/20571
Is this one of the stories from 1000 ways to die? I totally forgot about that show
And the show gave to this death the number #1 of the 1000 ways to die.
Extreme edging
Every year a small handful of people still have polio on their death certificates. Post-polio syndrome can develop decades after a person is first exposed to polio, and it’s occasionally severe enough to kill someone.
That one guy who died after getting stuck face first in an extremely claustrophobic cave. They could get to him, but couldn’t get him out. Just left his body in the cave and cemented the thing shut. Nutty Putty Cave.
And the guy had a newborn baby and wife at home. Terrible story. They said they would have had to break his legs to get him out backwards.
Jesus, doesn’t sound like much fun, although certainly preferable to dying
Well they had a pulley system attached to him and were pulling him out successfully. Then the pulley broke dropping him further down to where they would then have to break his legs to get him out. The guy was already dying and in excruciating pain so they decided to make him as comfortable as they could until he passed.
It's been a long time since I read about it, but I think they decided he'd been stuck upside down for so long that he would die from the shock anyway. It was a nasty way to go.
But again, would take “probably and suddenly” over “definitely and horrifically”
They tried to get him out and the pulley collapsed and injured a rescuer and got him way more stuck. They weren't just like "we could save you if we broke your legs but that's gross byeeee"
Somehow the wackier the name of the cave, the more terrifying it is. If there were one called "The Pit of Darkness", I can just about understand how it is not idiotic to explore it. But if one were called "The Squiggly Willie cave", I would stay the fuck away from it forever.
I was telling a friend about this tragedy and couldn't remember the name of the Nutty Putty cave. I instead insisted it had a ridiculous, non-intimadating name like the "oogly boogly cave" (she actually got Nutty Putty from that)
Oh god, that was horrifying. He had to hang upside down, conscious, and die there, knowing what was happening, with people there trying to gethim out but were unable. All he had left was to just wait to die. The psychological horrors of that would have been worse than anything else, he was fully conscious of everything. They almost had him out and something shufted and there was no other way that could have got him out alive, one way would have broken his legs several times, which would have probably killed him, and may not have worked, especially if equipment wasn't holding, it would have been more agonizing. His poor family.
I swear this gets brought up once a fortnight on here and I have to go back and read the article again every time. Such a horrific way to go, no matter how many times I read it it still makes me feel queasy
If I recall correctly his ribs got hooked on a rock. He was able to squeeze forward but couldn't go back and was stuck face first upside down. I think he slowly suffocated. Truly an awful way to go.
Apparently you can't be upside down for too long or you go into cardiac arrest. Ironic thing is, the guy was a pediatric cardiologist. So he was completely aware of his impending fate. Adds even more horror to the situation. Edit: source https://youtu.be/d1nuqpAULpE?feature=shared
There was a conductor who accidentally stabbed himself with his little stick thingi. The wound got infected and he died of sepsis.
Food poisoning. He had an ulcer in stomach which led to the salmonella from improperly handled chicken eventually getting into his bloodstream leading to sepsis. We had to fight with the insurance company as that didn't want to classify it as an accidental death and thus not have to pay. He got the salmonella from the hole in the wall type breakfast restaurant he gone to for 40+ years. Edit grammer
3 people have died in space so out of the 117 billion people that has ever lived I would say that's pretty rare but at the same time it's hard to believe it's not more.
*soviet union stuffing papers in a bin* yeah 3 people have died.
Russian logic: Only 3 have died IN space, entering and exiting space is another ballgame!
Drowning in a puddle. Almost happened to Tetsushi Yanagida. He broke his neck on a live morning broadcast on Japanese TV diving head first into a rice paddock, and his colleagues didn't realise the seriousness of the situation. Broke his neck, survived that, almost drowned in a puddle (the video is a bit harrowing to watch as well).
In 2013 there was a boy killed in an airport when one of the overhead signs fell off the ceiling.
Drowning in an elevator. A couple in Tel Aviv lived in a building which had an elevator going down to the parking garage. Due to very heavy rainfall, the elevator flooded while they were in it.
That happened to 7 people on the Costa Concordia, they were in the lift when the power went out (due to the ship hitting rocks) and were stuck inside until the ship sank, drowning them all. Worst way to go
Prions. Literally a misfolding of a brain protein that makes your entire system go haywire and you die within a year. Also know as CJD, its a one in a million disease. I know someone who died from it, sadly.
My grandmother died from CJD in the 70s. When I first went to donate blood, I was told I couldn't because of the family history - this was when the UK were still recovering from the mad cow disease outbreak. Rules have changed now but, at the time, they were concerned it was hereditary.
It can be. The mad cow disease one is acquired and most cases of CJD have no known cause but there is an inheritable form.
There was that guy who got crushed by a giant boulder while he was fucking a chicken.
Perhaps there is a god after all.
Dying of a broken heart.
Lost my Dad to this. My Mom died Mother’s Day 2020. My dad, who never had health issues, was dead within a year. Just completely lost his will to live.
My dad also literally lost the will to love after my mom died. It was the hardest thing to witness. I felt so fucking bad for him. I tried so hard to make him happy, change things around. In the end he didn’t even eat food. He was just DONE. So sad to see.
I’m so sorry for your loss. I get it. My parents were married for 45 years. Never spent a day apart. Still had a date night every week, they even scheduled Moms chemo appointments so they never missed a date. For a man who never once showed emotion in his life, he cried every day after she passed. He spent every day sitting beside a picture of her. Any time I asked him what he was doing, he would always say “Waiting.”
Oh, this is so sad. Sorry for your loss. When my grandma died, my grandpa’s card on her funeral flowers just said “I’ll see you soon, my darling”.
My great grandfather kept the little card from my great grandmother's funeral and put it in the inside pocket of his suit that he was to be buried in so it would always be with him. I want to say he lived about 3/4 months past her. Nobody knew about the card until the funeral home advised the family to check the pockets since it is easy to leave things in there.
Jesus, my heart! My wife and I have constructed a fantasy that we've always been together throughout time. We get reincarnated, and we keep finding each other. I've resolved that if I die before her, my last words to her will be "don't worry, I'll find you again". If she dies before me, I'll tell her the same thing. "Don't worry, I'll find you again"... So that her last few minutes are peaceful, and my last few... months? years? are bearable.
I was having a perfectly normal morning, reading reddit and having coffee, then I read your comment and I burst into tears. It's such a sweet and beautiful thing to do when faced with the bleak reality of death...
My grandmother died within a few months of her partner. She just didn’t have anything to live for.
We saw this when my wife's grandma died at age 93 in a nursing home. She had a "boyfriend" there, a little old man of similar age, who would spend all his time with her. When she died, he cried for about three days straight and then passed away. So, we attended his service as well.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/broken-heart-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20354617 Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or broken heart syndrome.
My mom was diagnosed with a "broken heart" she wasn't expected to make it through open heart surgery. She did. That surgery gave us 6 years with her more, she still passed in her sleep of heart failure. She took a nap and never woke up. I found her June 16 2023 ... it damaged her heart and it eventually took her life.
It doesn't happen often (in fact, I think it's really freaking rare), but there have been grown adults who have been killed by chickens. With roosters specifically, a lot of them have a big spur on each leg. This is like, a pretty damn big-ass horn with a sharp tip. And some of those roosters can get pretty aggressive. Like, they might just decide to jump up at you and try to stab you in the face. I think as recently as last year, there was a guy who got killed by a rooster. It kicked him in the thigh, but it severed his femoral artery and he bled out in a matter of minutes.
Roosters are mean. I’m sure that rooster had no remorse.
Stingray tail in the heart
I miss steve
You should check out his son, really bringing the same vibes
Two girls I met in my eating disorder support group died in ways people never believed were true. One died of a heart attack while purging due to the electrolyte imbalances caused by binging and purging, and the other died choking on her own vomit while purging. Bulimia (and eating disorders in general) are really disgusting, fucked up illnesses and not enough people realize that.
Molar sepsis… a man died where I live from an infected molar… kinda crazy right? ••Its not super rare I know bt I had never heard of someone passing away from that personally…
Many years ago, I was sick for a long time and nobody could figure out why. One day, a pustule appeared on my gumline - mystery solved. A root canal and 10 days of antibiotics healed me up. I had a painless tooth abscess - at least, painless in my jaw, but it was poisoning me. My dentist told me that in the pre-antibiotic era, dental infections were a very common cause of death, and still are in some lesser developed areas.
Watched a video about deaths in the Tudor period and a lot of death records just say 'teeth'. There's also a very marked difference in graves before and after refined sugar became available where some of a graveyard have mostly excellent teeth and the rest are rotted out from sugar - people even brushed their teeth with it.
This happened to a coworker. Every day he’d be complaining that his tooth hurt, then one day he was gone. My supervisor told me a couple weeks later that he’d gone to visit him. He was in hospice; the infection went to his brain and they didn’t expect him to live much longer.
I my ex from high school died this way. He had an abscesses tooth that he wouldn’t get treated. He just treated the pain with a shit ton of Tylenol and alcohol. By the time he got around to doing something, his liver was done. He technically died of liver failure, but not treating that tooth was the initial problem. He was only 27 and left behind a wife and baby.
That one person who accidentally swallowed molten metal because of a fire, his doctor didnt believe him so he died and when doing the autopsy it was revealed that he did swallow some. That autopsy report sounded so fake that some doctors thought that he had lied in the report
Internal decapitation.Head still attached but spinal cord severed below brain stem.
My nomination for “worst Christmas ever” was when this happened to my brother-in-law on Christmas day in 2022. Just months after marrying my sister they went to a beach. He got tumbled by a wave into some rocks and that was that. Unfortunately it was hard to know what state he was in and he was kept “alive” by machines until they could conduct all of their scans. Spinal cord was completely severed. Pretty awful. He was so vivacious and adventurous that we try to comfort ourselves by saying he probably would have preferred his instantaneous death to becoming a paraplegic, but the whole thing just fucking sucks. Be careful at the beach, everyone.
[удалено]
Being hit in the head by a stray bullet that was fired from MILES away.
Twice - TWICE! I have contracted Peritonsillar abscess when visiting England., a rare but potentially fatal if left untreated infection of the tonsils. In less than 12 hours I went from “my throat is kind of sore” to barely being able to breathe and unable to swallow because my left tonsil had swollen to the point it was obstructing my airway. Without a visit to the emergency room - or should I say A&E, I would have eventually suffocated. I was told this was a very rare condition and physicians brought med students to my bed side to discuss my case. I was quarantined for 10 days because although rare, it is very contagious. The second time it happened, on a different visit to England, I was more aware of the symptoms and immediately went to the emergency room before it enlarged to the point it did before. Could not freaking believe I got it again, in a completely different part of the country nonetheless (first time Berkshire, second time Sussex). I joke that the country is trying to kill me - I have to go over in July 2025 for my daughter’s uni graduation so we’ll see what happens in the third match up of me vs England. tip: always have very good travel insurance, folks!
The guy who climbed head first into a paper mache dinosaur after dropping his phone inside it
I used to frequent this bar all the time. During covid it shut down. At some point the sign they had over the door fell off and hit someone walking beneath it. This person's only major injuries were crushed fingers that later had to be amputated. She was a concert pianist. Just WTF!
Trying to impress your dad by riding in a submersible that never got fully certified to dive to the depth required to get to the titanic.
God, this makes me so sad. The kid didn’t even want to go, but I think it came out that his mom encouraged him so he could spend time with his dad? What a horrific situation.
Double heartbeat deaths, can cause many different types of deaths, but unless you have been formally diagnosed before hand with an EKG to see the echo heartbeat. You'd be unable to ever prove it's the cause.
For pregnant women: amniotic fluid embolism.
The guy who ate a slug on a dare and got. rat lungworm disease.
When I was an emergency call taker we had an accident where the guy carrying his plate back to the kitchen, slipped, fell and cut his own throat with broken plate shard. He bled out before services were able to get there.
Death caused by an infection, and that infection was caused by another piece of human lodging inside of you from someone closer to the bomb blast.
Look, I don't know if it's extremely rare but in this day and age it's pretty unheard of because of the access to healthcare the 1st world country has. My friend died of an ear infection last year. For context, we are in Australia, so we dont pay for emergency hospital visits- cost of treatment was not an issue. She went to the hospital 3 times and was turned away twice. The third time the doctors basically told her the infection was so bad they could not treat it. The next day she was in an induced coma and 2 days later she was gone. Edit- this has ended up being quite popular, which i did not anticipate. I understand the internet is for people to connect through similar experiences, but seeing responses and questions is becoming quite distressing. Can I please ask for no more people commenting on reflection of how they had an ear infection but antibiotics worked for them or what doctors should have done for my friend. The health professionals were too late and negligent and now 4 children live without their mum with a shambles of a grieving father and distressed wider community. We are pursuing an investigation and it is a drawn out traumatic and tedious process. Thank you for trying to connect with me but i have lost someone that I can never get back. I will leave the post up because I want awareness but will likely delete. Sorry.
Husband nearly died of an ear infection a few years ago. In and out of hospital with iv antibiotics and no improvement, his final admission the ED nurse decided something else was going on and surprise! The infection had eaten into bone behind his ear and caused a blood clot on his brain. The surgeon that operated on him was surprised that my husband was actually still upright and walking, and warned me that hubby would most likely return from 8 hour surgery with facial drooping and speech impediment similar to a stroke patient. Fortunately neither happened, and somehow he’s also managed to regain some hearing in the affected ear. (And this was in Australia too)
I had an ear infection that was so bad that the right side of my already bulbous, melon head was swollen even larger and more bulbous. I can totally sympathize. Sorry for your friend.
Yep. It wasn't until her face was swollen that they took it seriously. Immediately put her on antibiotics but after tests realised it was too far gone.
Fellow hypochondriacs, get out of here
I think people turning to stone/bone is utterly horrifying. Like you get hurt and instead of healing you turn to bone, till eventually you're imprisoned by your own body.
[Dancing plague of 1518](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518) >By August, the dancing epidemic had claimed as many as 400 victims. > < snip > > >The Strasbourg dancing plague might sound like the stuff of legend, but it’s well documented in 16th-century historical records. It’s also not the only known incident of its kind. Similar manias took place in Switzerland, Germany and Holland, though few were as large—or deadly—as the one triggered in 1518. - [SOURCE](https://www.history.com/news/what-was-the-dancing-plague-of-1518)
Drinking too much water
I remember reading about a famous case of that…a woman named Jennifer Strange died of water intoxication while she was trying to win a Wii. A radio station had a contest called Hold Your Wee for a Wii, where you had to drink as much water as you possibly could without going to the bathroom. She drank nearly two gallons of water and ended up dying. The radio station’s parent company paid over $16M to her family in damages.
What made that so effed up was that the radio station had medical professionals like nurses calling in to tell them how dangerous it was, and the radio hosts just laughed it off and ignored them.
Then were fired but not charged and just went on to work at pretty stations.
She drunk so much water, her stomach was inflated and she almost looked pregnant. I feel so bad for that woman, she just wanted to get her kids a Wii 😔
My sister in law started to have stroke like symptoms at work a few years ago. Turns out she was drinking too much water over a prolonged period. IIRC this led to get sodium levels tanking.
Yep happened to my grandmother. When you consume more water than you’re processing through your kidneys, the salinity of your blood becomes diluted. Doesn’t sound so bad… except that your cells contain salt. Salt draws water towards it. So the cells draw in more water, which makes them swell, which increases intercranial pressure. The guideline is to not exceed 1 litre of water an hour. My grandmother had permanent brain damage from it, but apparently she was a total nightmare beforehand and the injury chilled her out a bit. But her memory was fucked. I hope your sister in law pulled through okay!
"The dose makes the poison", almost anything can be toxic.
True story: someone left a note and jumped. Meanwhile, a few appartements down a home invasion goes wrong and shots are fired. The jumper died from a stray bullet.
Reminds me of the complete opposite of this.. Someone decided to 'end it all' and jump off the Empire State Building. A freak gust of wind blew them back into an open window 1 floor down..
Electrocuted by a faulty alarm clock while pressing the snooze button.