What changes to your life would you make?

None probably

I'd refrain from aging!

Wouldn't we all, but let's say your chances of.... a sudden stroke are very high, or your chances of a particular cancer are through the roof, or maybe there's a high likelihood of you dying in a car accident.....


?????

There’s a disease that runs in my family which means there’s up to a fifty per cent chance that I will die of that, and in that case I might only have only a decade of health left, before I go slowly crazy and die horribly.

But equally, I might not.

I don’t want to know.

If I knew, it would make no difference. I would want to pay my debts off first. Not enough time to do that. I’d want to enjoy life more and work less, but in order to eat, pay rent and bills I’d have to work just as much. I’d want to arrange for euthanasia before a certain point, but it’s illegal anyway, and too expensive to go to switzerland.

If I didn’t know when, I’d perhaps try to find a cure. My whole life would be focused on that and i wouldn’t enjoy anything else.

In fact knowing I might die a certain way, you’d think I’d have a different plan for my life. Make the most of things? The practicalities and problems of everyday life take precedence, even though, like everyone else, I wish it wasn’t so!
The only thing I can mention is that I’m more likely to travel at any opportunity, rather than save it for retirement, but that’s related to when I’m more likely to die, not how. Same applies to bothering with a mortgage, I’m less likely to do it. Again, relates to when, not how.

Knowing how (or when) makes no difference to anything. Except we would live more in dread and fear of death than we already do.
If I knew I was gonna die a different way, say by getting knocked over by a bus, well then I’d live in fear of buses. If I knew it would be by cancer, I’d become a health freak and try to avoid that. Life would be miserable trying to avoid what might be an inevitable event (or a fixed point in time - doctor who reference: numerous stories in the show where people time travel and see the future and then try to avoid an unwanted event, but in trying to avoid it they just create the circumstances that lead to said event).
The alternative would be to accept said method of future death. But then it would make no difference. So, no difference, or futile pain in trying to avoid it.
And I’ve now talked myself into a fear of buses.

> I’d want to arrange for euthanasia
> before a certain point, but it’s
> illegal...

What will the authorities do to you if you're successful?

Lol. I wouldn’t be brave enough to do it myself, too much can go wrong. And how depressing that I’ve thought this through! I need a better plan. Maybe one that involves not thinking about it.

I would have thought knowing WHEN you were going to die would shake things up. Knowing HOW....what difference does it make, why pose this question OP - what do you think?
If I knew I was gonna die soon, well that would be a fun thread...I’d probably do all kinds of illicit things...

elderolddog Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> > I’d want to arrange for euthanasia
> > before a certain point, but it’s
> > illegal...

In the USA, and to date, euthanasia is legal in:

California
Colorado
Oregon
Vermont
Maine (beginning: January 1, 2020)
New Jersey
Hawaii
Washington [state]

"[Euthanasia's] status is disputed in Montana."

That’s great (probably - it’s controversial for obvious reasons).
I live in England though.

You will probably die of Brexit boredom long before any of your real concerns kick in.

LOL
What do you mean? It’s just getting interesting!
Joking aside, I actually think there are more important things to think about, and I do have more pressing problems.

I think interesting depends on which side of the issue you are on. There are additionally large issues at stake than just Brexit.

I think, in the cases of most people, the "how" can be immensely under the personal control of the person who will [eventually] be dying.

Obviously, there are cases where this would not be true (earthquakes, automobile accidents where your death is caused by someone else's errors, a mass shooting, etc.), but for a large percentage of people, "how" you die is immensely under your own personal control (meaning: in the ways YOU choose to live your life).

If your family has some, at least eventually, life-threatening disease running through it (heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, alcoholism--to name a few from my own family's history), then this knowledge will allow you to acquire amazing personal control over whether you eventually "get" this particular disorder or not, and whether or not you will eventually die from it.

We live in an almost unbelievable (by my parents' standards) world "right now" (means: since the end of WWII), where it is possible to avoid most of the "natural" causes of death which were once, within my own lifetime, considered inevitable. If YOU make the choice to avoid what you know, from your own family background, you are biologically vulnerable to (heart disease, stroke, many types of cancer, etc.), and you strengthen (nutrition, etc.) what needs attention in your own physiology, and avoid known harmful substances or practices (certain pesticides, or smoking, for example), then you will be much less likely to die from that particular cause.

You will, of course, die at some point--but it will be a death you will likely be more agreeable to accepting.

If someone "knows" the probable/likely possible "hows" of their own deaths (by being aware of their biological family history), then they are able to freely choose different paths to "travel".... which means that, although they will obviously die of some other cause(s), these will likely more benign and personally acceptable to that person.

(I am thinking of my deeply beloved Grandpa here, who died of "all three kinds" of leukemia, who finally, in exhausted desperation, said: "No more blood transfusions!!"--which began, as he knew it would, a counted-by-the-hours slide into his inevitable death.)

Unless something happens from the "outside" (auto accident, natural disaster, mass shooting, etc.), most people do have very large personal control over how they eventually die.

To a very large extent, and for most people, a particular "kind" of death is not foreordained....it's just practical biology.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 09/04/2019 03:37PM by Tevai.

I see your point, yes. Of course in the case of avoiding illnesses that run in the family there is greater motivation for living a healthy lifestyle. That is of course the bare minimum you’d strive for, and hopefully would do anyway. But, some people get sick anyway, so I would disagree this is mostly within our control. A good example of that is some people die of lung cancer when they never smoked.
But there are genetic diseases which if you inherit the gene, there’s nothing you can do to avoid it, at least not currently. In my case, if I’ve inherited the gene I won’t live to a ripe old age and that’s just a fact. There isn’t yet any medicine to slow the process down, even.
This is why I decide not to worry about that, and why euthanasia came to my mind. But to be honest I haven’t given it a great deal of thought. If anything it makes me more focused on just living!

I would go to Egypt and take a trip down de Nile.

I have an incomplete screenplay based on this premise. The protagonist knows he's going to be run over by a bus on a particular corner, at a certain time of day, in a specific city. He figures he's fine as long as he never goes to the spot. But events conspire against him and he keeps finding himself at the place of his death. He manages to dodge the bus a few times. Eventually he learns that if he doesn't let himself be hit by the bus then an entire chain of events will be changed in such a way that people he loves will meet gruesome fates. So he steps in front of the bus. But he was lied to.

well, since 10, almost 11 years ago when I lost my mother at age 76, and then 2 months later, my father at age 76, I've just planned on dying at age 76. I'm 62. That gives me 14 years.

But I need to stay longer if I can, so I'm trying to do better with my health. My father died with Parkinson's, diabetes, heart disease, prostate cancer. My mother died with rheumatoid arthritis and some other very serious things. My mother didn't want to die after my father. She told my aunt 2 weeks before she died that she had to die first. My dad had just had a really bad event and it scared her. Two weeks later, she was dead. No bedside vigils. She died eating dinner in a nursing home for a short stay after a hospital stay for infection. My brother found her with a fork in her hand. My dad died trying to get up out of bed in the middle of the night. I had talked to both of them very close to the time they died. Totally lucid.

I do believe my mother decided to die. I hope I can go as smoothly as they both did. Not like they didn't have illnesses, but they were still doing well before they died. Active as they could be, driving, LIVING.

But I did realize recently I have to stay as long as I possibly can, so what I will do is work on being healthier.

I am making choices that otherwise keep me as healthy as possible so that I can hopefully better deal with the cancer and extend my life as long as possible, because I have a 7 year old.

As an exception to Tevai's comment above, I didn't pick this fairly rare tumor that has no known causes.

Humberto Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I am making choices that otherwise keep me as
> healthy as possible so that I can hopefully better
> deal with the cancer and extend my life as long as
> possible, because I have a 7 year old.
>
> As an exception to Tevai's comment above, I didn't
> pick this fairly rare tumor that has no known
> causes.

Agreed.

My Grandpa (a lifelong farmer/ranch foreman), as we now know, undoubtedly became vulnerable to "all three kinds of leukemia" when he was a younger man, working without any kind of physical protection, with his bare hands and with no breathing masks, with the then-newest pesticides which were a Very Big Thing in the farming world when they were first released into the general market.

My Grandma, at least by 1945 (though she probably began about ten or so years before), had become one of the first, committed, "Health Food Nuts." Again: at least by 1945 she had made a near-total overhaul of what she and Grandpa were eating (minus holiday meals, and minus the times when my nuclear family was visiting them), she was--also undoubtedly and without any comprehensive knowledge of what she was doing (because they literally did not know back then)--extending [greatly] the time before Grandpa became ill enough to go to a doctor to find out why he was suddenly so weak, and why (for the first time in his life) he was suddenly so incredibly depressed.

Had Grandma not totally changed their diets for the better years earlier, Grandpa likely would have developed active leukemia far sooner than he actually did.

I am facing a somewhat similar situation right now. When I was in my late teens, and I wanted a job closer to where I lived (I had been previously been working for the City of Los Angeles, in City Hall, in downtown L.A.), I went through a free training program to become a circuit board assembler. (The circuit boards were for inertial guidance systems for airplanes.)

As a part of my job (at least forty hours a week; usually more hours than that because of overtime), I spent eight+ hours a day in a constant liquid "bath" of perchloroethylene ("perc"), because this is what we used, moment-to-moment, to clean the circuit boards we were assembling from the solder goo--and all of that perc was, for those eight+ hours, soaking into the numerous cuts which we all continuously had on our unprotected hands as we assembled/disassembled/reassembled all those thousands of circuit boards.

For a long time now, I have realized (especially because of what happened to my Grandpa) that I am a likely candidate for cancer. The current list of cancers associated with perchloroethylene (the fluid which is also used to "dry clean" fabrics) is: non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, multiple myeloma (affects white blood cells--and this does tie-in with my Grandpa's leukemia in my mind), bladder cancer, esophageal cancer, and on and on.

My Grandma, if she were alive now, would be super proud of me. My diet is now close to impeccable (for the most part), and when new facts come out I continue to improve what I eat.

I actively avoid other types of known carcinogens (including sun damage to skin), and I take, by most people's standards, a huge number of nutritional supplements daily, starting with the usual spectrum of known vitamins, minerals, probiotics, etc., and ALWAYS including my daily Super Bio-Curcumin capsule from Life Extension--the ingredients of which are scientifically KNOWN to be protective from cancer. (This is why people in the Indian subcontinent have such tiny numbers of cancers, despite the enormous and widespread poverty which suffuses each of their lifetimes. Just about every single person above infancy in the Indian subcontinent eats a combination of turmeric, black pepper, and cooking oil every single day of their lives, and it is these specific components which are in the Super Bio-Curcumin capsule.)

And again: When new scientific facts come out, I adapt my diet to fit that new knowledge.

I may still die of cancer (I certainly did set up a future death by cancer when I assembled circuit boards during my early adult years), and I have different kinds of cancer in both of my bloodlines, but to the best of my ability, I will do what I need to do to make as sure as I can that the cancer potential in my future is as tiny as I can possibly make it.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 09/06/2019 07:48PM by Tevai.

My wife dreamed that she was killed in a fatal auto accident. She said it was so realistic that she felt is was a revelation. Because the accident occurred while she was turning left, she avoided any left turns, except when I was in the car with her (not part of her dream).

One Sunday morning after my wife brings me to the bishop's home early before our ward meetings as usual, the bishop notices that my wife turns right at the end of their street.

"But your home is a few streets to the left. Won't she have to drive far out into (a rural neighbourhood) by going the other direction?" says the bishop.

I explained that my wife won't turn left when driving alone because of her dream (vision).

The bishop says, "Try nudging her in her sleep. Maybe she can make that turn again safely."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_Cqohz0188

Think in terms of bridges burned
Think of seasons that must end
See the rivers rise and fall
They will rise and fall again
Everything must have an end
Like an ocean to a shore
Like a river to a stream
Like a river to a stream
It's the famous final scene

And how you tried to make it work
Did you really think it could
How you tried to make it last
Did you really think it would
Like a guest who stayed too long
Now it's finally time to leave
Yes, it's finally time to leave
Take it calmly and serene
It's the famous final scene

It's been coming on so long
You were just the last to know
It's been a long time since you've smiled
Seems like oh so long ago
Now the stage has all been set
And the nights are growing cold
Soon the winter will be here
And there's no one warm to hold

Now the lines have all been read
And you knew them all by heart
Now you move toward the door
Here it comes the hardest part
Try the handle of the road
Feeling different feeling strange
This can never be arranged
As the light fades from the screen
From the famous final scene