11 Medical Professionals Reveal Terrifying Diseases You Never Even Knew Existed
By Lily Hunter
1. Stevens-Johnson’s syndrome. Its a super allergic skin reaction where your skin peels off, and your mucosa gets involved. Mouth, anus, urethra: all start peeling off. If it covers more than 30% of your body, then it turns into Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis. Which kinda sounds like a cool band name I guess.
2. Ondine’s curse, where one has to consciously be breathing at all times. The ability to have autonomic or unconscious breathing isn’t there. If you forget to breathe, you don’t breathe period, until you consciously choose to. If you fall asleep you die. There’s ways to help this, but that is torture.
– MrRozay
3. Fatal Familial Insomnia. It’s a rare inherited prion disease where your hypothalamus gets wiped out in such a way that you slowly stop sleeping over a few weeks to months, go insane and then die roughly a year later.
4. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It’s a prion disease. Basically, a misfolded protein makes its way into our brain and, for reasons not fully understood, our normal proteins start to change configuration to match this misfolded protein. These mistake proteins buildup and your brain starts to deteriorate, fast. But that’s not even the scariest part. The scary part is that it can be dormant for a long long time. You can be totally fine! Then one day you might start getting confused, then having weird neurological problems (weakness, spasticity, coordination problems, etc), and within 2-3 weeks, dead.
– xPKx
5. Naegleria Fowleri. It’s a protozoan that can live in lakes, ponds, rivers, basically any fresh body of water. If you swim in infested waters, there’s a chance this little bastard can make it into your body. Typically it’ll happen only if water shoots up your nose and you also happen to have a defect in your cribiform plate. I won’t get into an in depth anatomy lesson now, but cribiform plate is in the nose. It separates nasal mucosa from the brain. Anyway, the little bastard gets into your brain and starts chowing down. Typically, within about a week of him getting in there, people start getting severe headaches, nausea, vomiting, stiff neck, and may have changes in smell. Death often occurs not long after developing symptoms. Fatality rates are about 95%.
– xPKx
6. Aortic aneurysms are scary because they can kill so quickly. You experience a tearing pain in either your mid or lower back. At any point after that the almost microscopic tear in the inner layer of your aorta ruptures. You then have as little as two minutes to live as you exsanguinate internally.
7. Medical student here. Trigeminal Neuralgia also known as the suicide disease. It produces pains so bad patients often end up killing themselves rather than living with the disease. The nerves in your face continuously fire at random times causing chronic excruciating pain and doctors do not know how to stop it.
8. RN here. The patients I take care of that have end-stage COPD are truly living in hell. You’re out of breath from the most basic movements, you can’t catch your breath after doing anything, and you constantly feel like you can’t breathe. You’d think these people had just run a marathon after standing up and sitting down. Meds help a little bit, but it’s a horrible way to go. Don’t start smoking kids! If you do already, QUIT!!
9. Lesch–Nyhan Syndrome. Compulsive self harm behaviour that usually starts around age three. They’ll bite their fingers off, bite their lips off and if you put gloves on them, they’ll jam their fingers in something.
Sufferers usually have their teeth removed. And apparently, they’ll ask you to stop them while they’re hurting themselves.
10. This is probably going to get buried, but ankylosing spondylitis. Your vertebral column and pelvis literally fuse together into a single unit. There is no known cure, and it doesn’t directly cause death. But imagine knowing that your back is slowly fusing together…. and one day you’ll wake up in the morning and never be able to get out of bed again, with your mind fully intact but in excruciating pain (the disease can also compress nerves as they exit the vertebral column)
– squimkin
11. I’m a nurses aide and i work in a Nursing home/Rehab facility And i’m so scared of C.Diff (Clostridium difficile colitis) infectious diarrhea where you shit your brains out, its hard to get rid of, many people get severely dehydrated. Once you smell it you will always know it its very distinctive, I can diagnose it with my nose by now. Sometimes when someone really can’t get rid of it they do a stool transplant (Fecal bacteriotherapy) where they put someone elses clean shit inside you to introduce healthy bacteria. Its horrible.