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Whitlam posted:Eh. You're not necessarily wrong, but denial is a hell of a drug, especially if it's combined with guilt and a (perhaps wilful) ignorance or lack of education. I had a patient like Jahi once, but she was an adult. Came to the ER after dropping like a stone at home. Did all the usual resuscitation and stabilization stuff, got a brain CT... Worst CT I've ever seen. This lady is dead and is not coming back no matter what we do. For whatever reason, the family totally turned on us, threatened lawsuits, screamed at us to transfer her to another hospital. Nobody wanted to accept the patient because of her condition (and probably hearing the family throwing "lawsuit" around). She ended up getting airlifted to another hospital in the city the next morning. Anyway, it was a combo of all the stuff you mentioned, and none of us took it personally, but it was never going to end well for that family and that sucks. Sudden death is hard to deal with, and we try to help as best we can, but every now and then it all falls on deaf ears, no matter what we/social worker/priest/whatever says.
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Jan 30, 2018 19:19
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If anyone's in the mood to read about actual corpses (and the mistreatment thereof), here's an interesting long read that I don't think has shown up in this thread yet: The Body Trade: Cashing in on the donated deadquote:As her father lay dying, Fasold said, employees from Albuquerque broker Bio Care visited father and daughter, and made a heartfelt pitch: The generous gift of his body to science would benefit medical students, doctors and researchers. Fasold said Bio Care cited several sample possibilities, including that her father’s body might be used to train surgeons on knee replacement techniques. And it turns out that, legally, the owner did nothing wrong! quote:Prosecutors later withdrew the charge against Montano because they said they could not prove deception or any other crime. No other state law regulated the handling of donated bodies or protected the next of kin.
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Jan 31, 2018 01:18
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FeatherFloat posted:If anyone's in the mood to read about actual corpses (and the mistreatment thereof), here's an interesting long read that I don't think has shown up in this thread yet: The Body Trade: Cashing in on the donated dead This reminds me of the Tri-State Crematory , where in 2002, a woman walking her dog in the woods stumbled across human remains behind the crematory. After investigators combed the woods, they found over 300 bodies. Some were “stacked like cordwood,” some were piled in broken-down vehicles, and all should have been cremated. Some were identified, confusing and shocking their families, who had gotten ashes years ago that they believed were their loved one. Many were not identified and the records of who they were are destroyed. Ask A Mortician: What Happened At Tri-State? Mortician, author, and proponent of The Good Death Project, Caitlin Doughty, consistently argues that tragic schemes like the Body Trade and horrific backlogs at crematoria are a result of how we in the US and Canada want as little to do with our dead as possible. All we want is the body to go somewhere else, then either take a quick peek after it’s been made up to look peaceful and non-decayed, or get a decorative box of cremains, and we are culturally so squicked out by the process that we don’t follow up as long as things get done. So things go very, very wrong before we notice anything’s amiss. Doughty, and a growing number of mortuary professionals, are promoting more natural, personally involved death practices. Instead of whisking Mee Maw away only to see her in a few days surrounded by every lily in the tristate area, we should spend time witnessing the body decay so we can get psychological closure. Instead of pumping the body full of formaldehyde to keep it “looking good” to go in a massive fiberglass box taking up space in a cemetery, we either cremate the body or practice natural burial — the bodies remain capable of decomposition, and go either straight into the ground or in a biodegradable box so the organic compounds can return to the soil. (Here’s her TED Talk on the subject ) She went to a funeral pyre in Colorado (where laws regarding who can hold funerals and how bodies can be disposed of are the laxest in the country) and observed that the family and friends of the deceased went from slightly uncomfortable with the nontraditional event, to feeling more free to express raw emotion in the setting, to being so much more intimately connected to their grief than they could at a “normal” funeral. She’s also witnessed sky burials (where the deceased is placed in a ceremonial field, exposed to predators and scavenger birds to be consumed) and offers the families of those she’s handling a chance to attend the cremation of their loved one so they can feel more confident in the process. She discusses that experience on the Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast; it’s definitely worth a listen.
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Jan 31, 2018 04:21
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Doughty's books are excellent, highly recommend them. Thomas Lynch's book The Undertaking is also outstanding.
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Jan 31, 2018 05:30
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AlbieQuirky posted:Doughty's books are excellent, highly recommend them. Thomas Lynch's book The Undertaking is also outstanding. The Undertaking was a beautiful book, but isn’t it less about his undertaker work and more about like poetry and golf and what have you? It’s been a few years since I’ve read it, I may be misremembering, but I do remember being really frustrated with that book.
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Jan 31, 2018 08:06
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There's a lot about poetry and some about golf, yeah. Doughty is definitely better in terms of factual info about the funeral business, but I liked what Lynch had to say about interacting with the families a lot.
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Jan 31, 2018 12:49
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I guess I'll give The Undertaking another shot. I put it down during the golf segments and figured it was just going to go into the standard midlife-crisis-memoir lacuna.
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Jan 31, 2018 14:15
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The Terri Schiavo case made up my mind on PVS. The legal battle dragged on for years and of course, once they autopsied her, her brain had been shriveling away all the time and they were incubating a husk. e: not to be glib; it still horrifies me, but even as the most loving parent in the world I'd like to think I'd have made some different choices, there.
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Jan 31, 2018 16:02
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RNG posted:The Terri Schiavo case made up my mind on PVS. The legal battle dragged on for years and of course, once they autopsied her, her brain had been shriveling away all the time and they were incubating a husk. Here's a completely opposite case of a mom mercy killing her two adult sons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Carr Huntington's disease is terrifying, especially because you have such a high chance of inheriting it. I completely understand and empathize with this poor woman. 
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Jan 31, 2018 16:30
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So there really was a gay serial killer?
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Jan 31, 2018 23:39
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Pick posted:So there really was a gay serial killer? In Toronto, apparently.
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Jan 31, 2018 23:43
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They say Wisconsin had one once, but I don't believe them.
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Feb 1, 2018 03:03
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Randaconda posted:In Toronto, apparently. His victim was all trussed up with nowhere to go.
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Feb 1, 2018 03:29
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Slowly dying of a radiation poisoning in a repurposed furniture store is peak NuclearWar.txtquote:While government officials would have been rushed by helicopter to Mount Weather, FEMA also devoted extensive planning in the 1980s to scout where the civilian population would live after a nuclear attack, embarking on a top-secret effort with the FBI known as Project 908 (or “Nine Naught Eight,” as it was called) to map the nation’s commercial buildings for possible refugee resettlement—all part of a larger 1980s program, known as Crisis Relocation Planning, that calculated how to evacuate the nation’s major cities. https://www.wired.com/story/the-secret-history-of-fema/
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Feb 1, 2018 06:13
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I've realized just about any caving article unnerves me. I love hiking and climbing and I'd like to try diving, so it's not like I'm super risk-averse. But man, those things offer fresh air, amazing sights, a wide variety of activities to go along with them, cozy campfires, amazing wildlife, lots of stuff. And as a prepared hiker who gets in trouble you at least have some knowledge and gear and can take a few proactive steps to at least try and save yourself/get help. Caving seems to mainly be crawling on your belly in bare, tiny rock tunnels and if you get in trouble, chances are you're either stuck firm in an 11-inch pipe or trapped by a cave-in and all you can do is loving wait and scream for the possible hours or days it takes for rescue to arrive, analyze the situation, and maybe get you out. Hell a lot of caving horror stories have people so stuck they can't even loving eat or drink while they sit there stuck and wait to die. As far as outdoorsy/adventure type stuff goes it just seems like... bad risk/reward.
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Feb 1, 2018 15:55
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I've realized just about any caving article unnerves me. I love hiking and climbing and I'd like to try diving, so it's not like I'm super risk-averse. But man, those things offer fresh air, amazing sights, a wide variety of activities to go along with them, cozy campfires, amazing wildlife, lots of stuff. And as a prepared hiker who gets in trouble you at least have some knowledge and gear and can take a few proactive steps to at least try and save yourself/get help. Caving isnt (that) bad and many sections I have been through that really require a squeeze are fairly short. It depends on how big the cave is really if there are multiple paths. Now the fun ones to think about are the underground river systems ones. Are you gonna die from exposure/blood flow issues if stuck or is the rising water going to drown you in place first. Or chultuns, which are basically tiny, artificial caves in the ground full of bat guano and old artifact remnants and you better hope you can squeeze in and have enough space to turn around and squeeze out after recording. Telsa Cola has a new favorite as of 17:54 on Feb 1, 2018 |
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Feb 1, 2018 17:49
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Casual caving is cool and good. The formations might be slightly weathered in most tourist caves, but they're still majestic and alien and beautiful. Shimmying around in mile-long unmapped corridors barely large enough to get your head through is how you leave a weird epitaph. If you've gotta do it, you do you, I guess, but I'm pretty okay with being too fat for explorational caving, personally.
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Feb 1, 2018 17:56
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Casual caving is cool and good. The formations might be slightly weathered in most tourist caves, but they're still majestic and alien and beautiful.  I would love to have some caves around to go check out for fun, but I'll let somebody else do the mapping and squeezing bits.
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Feb 1, 2018 18:59
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Here's the story of how I was closely acquainted with two guys who wanted to become serial killers, but fortunately whiffed it on their first try. Back in 2000 I was at Defense Language Institute (Monterey, California), the US military's training school for linguists/translators/etc. As many goons can tell you, it's a hotbed of weird kids who are somehow really smart but also ended up joining the military, so lots of goofy and spergy dynamics at that place. For this story I'll refer to the guys by their first names just to make this thread less google-discoverable, just so if they ever get out of jail I won't have them stumbling across the thread and messaging me to whine that I'm talking smack about them. Jesse was a skinny little redhead dude, and extremely bright but a very unfortunate guy. He'd been adopted as an infant, and his foster family was pretty rough on him, so he absolutely hated the common military phrase "beaten like a redheaded stepchild". He was huge into military stuff, really proud to be in the Marines, a very conscientious and skilled language student, great team player, all that jazz. But unfortunately it looked like he wasn't long for the Marines, since his skinny frame had taken a pounding in training and he'd come down with some kind of early-onset arthritis so he couldn't do any physical training, and it was looking likely that he'd be processed out soon and never get any further in his career than language school. Jason was really different but also tragic, a skinny weaselly little dude with deadbeat parents who'd been raised by his grandma and had been the weird outcast kid in high school. He was newer to the unit, and wasn't a great student, had a hard time dealing with military discipline, and was overall just an iffy case despite apparently having survived Marine bootcamp and combat training. For whatever reason, Jesse and Jason really glommed onto each other, became bestest buddies, convinced a sergeant to rig the system to make them roommmates (usually you have no choice in the matter), and semi-jokingly called each other things like "soul-twin". Jesse's semi-popularity (or at least sympathetic tolerability) gave Jason a minor status boost, and they both shared a huge interest in militaria, as well as nerdy stuff like horror movies, comic books, and serial killers. Even though Jesse was just treading water until he'd eventually get booted out for his injuries, and Jason didn't really have a lot of potential, they somehow applied Jesse's infectious enthusiasm to rope in a few actually decent Marines into this weird LARP/wargame informal club they created. They'd go buy military surplus camo, outdoor gear, then go out in the woods and run around doing pseudo-military training. And some of them (most notably J&J) took it even further and bought cheap Russian night-vision gear and would crawl through backyards in the nearby suburban communities working on their infiltration skills in an ambitious and creepy way. The night of the Marine Corps Birthday Ball (the huge social event on the calendar), most folks were wrapping up by having orgies with Air Force girls or passing out drunk on someone's lawn, but J&J slipped back to the barracks, put on their all-black sneaking gear, and went out for a "night patrol" down on the coast after midnight. Around 2am, they ran across a girl in her twenties who'd been out smoking weed on the beach, walked up to her and said "bitch, are you ready to die?" They then pulled out Swiss Army knives, tackled her, and proceeded to give her 50-some knife wounds, including slashing her face to ribbons, cutting her throat repeatedly, etc. According to the victim, after a few minutes of this they stepped back and just watched her, and one said "bitch, why don't you die?" She replied "just leave me alone, and I promise I'll die" so J&J figured that sounded reasonable and walked off into the night. The paramedics say that if she'd been left there for much time at all she'd have been a goner, but by sheer luck a dude who couldn't sleep had gone for a jog down on that same beach path, found her a few minutes later and got her an ambulance in time. The stabbing in the sleepy little Monterey suburb of Pacific Grove was huge news all throughout the county, though given that she described them just as "two guys in black with military haircuts", and the town is dominated by a huge military base, we didn't think too much of it at first. That is, other than the fact that one guy from my floor of the barracks got picked up that very night for the crime. He was coincidentally a good friend of J&J, and had the misfortune of being out at 2am fueling up his car and wearing all black, and when the cops searched him he had a dagger stuck in his boot, so he got hauled in pretty quick. That was actually my first clue that anything was going on, since that night a friend went door-to-door in the barracks collecting money to bail him out. Coincidentally, he hit up J&J for cash, and even though they clearly knew it was a buddy of theirs picked up for a crime that they themselves committed, they chipped in a $20 but asked for change back. The arrested friend ended up getting out once his alibi was established, but still had to get a lawyer to plead down felony charges since in CA carrying a regular pocketknife is fine, but a dagger with both edges sharpened is considered an offensive weapon vice a utility tool so he was screwed on that account for months. All this was in November of 2000, and for months the case was just in limbo since they didn't have much usable info from the victim and not enough forensic info to be able to narrow things down. There's a lot of rumor and speculation as to how this all eventually fell apart (including accusations of illegal searches by J&J's superiors that turned up evidence but also freaked out the cops and lawyers as potentially ruining the case through malfeasance). As far as I know the official story was that around March, Jason was cracking under stress and told a military psychologist part of the story, and she was able to waive doctor-client privilege by declaring him a homicide and suicide risk and turning him in. J&J were picked up shortly thereafter, and when their mugshots in uniform showed up in the paper there was much comment in the barracks about how they were missing their rank insignia in the photo, presumably since the rank is held to the collar by sharp pins and potentially a weapon. They went up together on a number of charges, mostly the attempted murder, but apparently also something called "mayhem" which is what California calls it when you're egregiously violent beyond what the crime would normally require. The victim's identity was kept secret for whatever reasons, I think including the risk that they or compatriots might track her down and kill her somehow, but there was much discussion in court of how severe her wounds were and how much surgery she was going through to look normal again. Eventually they were sentenced with something like 35-to-life with no chance of parole for seven years, and when I glanced at google I think they both got a "lol, no" at their parole hearings around 2012 or so. Info continued to leak out after that, and our unit commander was traumatized and scandalized (exacerbated by being a straight-laced Mormon) so we got to hear some very passionate speeches from him about what filthy degenerates they were. The eventual legal searches of their barracks room turned up tons of horror movie paraphernalia (figurines, posters, etc) and apparently most of it shoplifted. Also the commander made a big deal about the "pornographic photographs of each other" that were found (we all guessed he just meant they took photos of each other jacking off) and how when they shipped their personal effects to their next-of-kin he put those photos on the very top so they could "see the kind of kid they raised". Also notebooks full of planned attacks, drawings of mutilated women, and really detailed journal entries about how great the stabbing experience was, which were strong evidence at the trial. Among the chilling discoveries was a detailed plan for Victim #2: Jesse was banging a barracks-bicycle girl, and apparently they'd worked out a plan where he was going to publicly talk up a planned date downtown with her, privately tell her to meet him in the woods for a hookup, and then to establish an alibi he'd walk around the barracks looking for her all evening and complaining he'd been stood up, and meanwhile Jason would stab her to death and bury her in the woods. Said girl apparently took this discovery really hard, did a major lifestyle change and became a Mormon, so the case just had a lot of weird knock-on effects. This is kind of a gossipy version of events, but I figure the insider perspective may be useful, and you can pretty easily google up the famous Pacific Grove stabbing of 2000 if you're curious about the official story. As far as I know they're both still in jail, and a few years back the family of the victim was trying to sue a bunch of Marines from their chain of command, alleging that "combat training" gave them the skills and motivation to attack their daughter. Not to be insensitive, but that's kind of a lame argument since by Marine standards they were (albeit fortunately) really bad at actually killing someone, and everyone else at the unit who had extensive training in bayonetting dummies and machine-gunning hillsides managed to not murder anyone while there, so seems a long shot. So that's the story of J&J, and how their planned career as serial killers was cut short early. Given that we invaded Afghanistan about five months after they were arrested, I wonder if they're kicking themselves in jail for not having just laid low longer and waited for a totally legal and legit opportunity to kill people, but here we are. TapTheForwardAssist has a new favorite as of 22:01 on Feb 1, 2018 |
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Feb 1, 2018 19:09
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Hey remember D. B. Cooper? http://www.seattlepi.com/seattlenews/article/Latest-on-D-B-Cooper-Investigators-say-he-was-12543305.php Seattle PI posted:A private investigative team announced Thursday morning that members now believe D.B. Cooper was a black ops CIA agent possibly even involved with Iran-Contra, and that his identity has been actively hidden by government agents. idfk
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Feb 1, 2018 19:20
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:a lot of interesting words Wow, thats pretty crazy. Read an article on the crimes and your version doesn't sound too far off from it either.
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Feb 1, 2018 19:56
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TapTheForwardAssist posted:Here's the story of how I was closely acquainted with two guys who wanted to become serial killers, but fortunately whiffed it on their first try.  DLI is essentially a government-run, human-sized version of Calhoun’s rat crowding experiments.
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Feb 1, 2018 20:05
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Delthalaz posted:Hey remember D. B. Cooper? How good is this evidence, actually? “Private investigator doing a solo investigation” usually veers into crackpot or self-promotion territory if a big claim comes out.
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Feb 1, 2018 20:30
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business hammocks posted:How good is this evidence, actually? “Private investigator doing a solo investigation” usually veers into crackpot or self-promotion territory if a big claim comes out. More so if it's a large, coordinated multi-agency conspiracy the government has managed to keep the lid on for over 40 years.
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Feb 1, 2018 20:35
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business hammocks posted:How good is this evidence, actually? “Private investigator doing a solo investigation” usually veers into crackpot or self-promotion territory if a big claim comes out. Um excuse me, that's "private investigator doing a solo investigation by cracking secret government conspiracy coded messages" to you. Much more credible.
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Feb 1, 2018 20:52
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Goon Danton posted:Um excuse me, that's "private investigator doing a solo investigation by cracking secret government conspiracy coded messages" to you. Much more credible. This new Nicholas Cage movie sounds terrible.
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Feb 1, 2018 20:53
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business hammocks posted:How good is this evidence, actually? “Private investigator doing a solo investigation” usually veers into crackpot or self-promotion territory if a big claim comes out. Buy the book and find out! (probably)
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Feb 1, 2018 21:08
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Depressio111117 posted:http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article193660734.html My mom has stopped obsessing over this case (my mom gets obsessive over true crime poo poo, in a very unhealthy way) which is good for her mental state but means I won't be getting any more details. Which is just as well - the facts that were coming out about this were just really sad. She married this guy very recently, found out he was an alcoholic, and tried kicking him to the curb. His response was to beat her to death. Still, his mugshot is really something. 
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Feb 2, 2018 20:11
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Did you read the New Yorker article? At least two very qualified, even by the estimation of outside people, neurologists suspect that she's not brain-dead, she's minimally conscious. I just wanted to echo this. If you read the article until the very very end, it's clear that it's very possible she's become minimally conscious - even if she was braindead for quite some time, her brain seems to have healed to a certain extent. We're discovering that it's a more elastic organ than we think, all the time. The question is, how far can the human brain heal, and how long would it take? Would it take the rest of her natural life to finally become a person again, if the possibility even exists? If so, that brings up the very uncomfortable question of, how long do we wait? And why does it heal for some, but not others? And when does it become torture to the person inside? It's not so simple morally anymore. We want it to be, though.
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Feb 2, 2018 20:31
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Did you read the New Yorker article? At least two very qualified, even by the estimation of outside people, neurologists suspect that she's not brain-dead, she's minimally conscious. oh jesus christ i thought she was dead. Why hasn't one of the nurses OD her with morphine
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Feb 2, 2018 20:33
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Re: the DB Cooper thing, the gut is upset the FBI isn't reopening the cold case. But the statute of limitations passed. So verifying the Pi's investigation will literally eat up weeks to months of work to solve a crime that can't be prosecuted vs. solving other cold cases that can be.
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Feb 2, 2018 20:59
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StrangersInTheNight posted:I just wanted to echo this. If you read the article until the very very end, it's clear that it's very possible she's become minimally conscious - even if she was braindead for quite some time, her brain seems to have healed to a certain extent. We're discovering that it's a more elastic organ than we think, all the time. The question is, how far can the human brain heal, and how long would it take? Would it take the rest of her natural life to finally become a person again, if the possibility even exists? If so, that brings up the very uncomfortable question of, how long do we wait? And why does it heal for some, but not others? Yeah its complicated. If she is minimally conscious then how long is she aware before she goes back asleep/unconscious? Is she going to be "trapped" in darkness with no means to communicate besides subtle movements?
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Feb 2, 2018 23:12
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Depressio111117 posted:My mom has stopped obsessing over this case (my mom gets obsessive over true crime poo poo, in a very unhealthy way) which is good for her mental state but means I won't be getting any more details. Which is just as well - the facts that were coming out about this were just really sad. She married this guy very recently, found out he was an alcoholic, and tried kicking him to the curb. His response was to beat her to death. That's one way to stop obsessing over something, but should you be telling us about it?
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Feb 2, 2018 23:48
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Jedit posted:That's one way to stop obsessing over something, but should you be telling us about it? Oh she’s no longer obsessing simply because she’s gotten distracted, not because the details are sad.
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Feb 3, 2018 00:04
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Depressio111117 posted:Oh she’s no longer obsessing simply because she’s gotten distracted, not because the details are sad. So the afterlife distracted her after she got beaten to death?
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Feb 3, 2018 00:19
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:So the afterlife distracted her after she got beaten to death? 
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Feb 3, 2018 00:38
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Has anyone ever recovered from being brain dead if it didn't fix itself with in a year or so? Google didn't find anything except people that recovered with in months from being brain dead, but my google fu isn't that strong.
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Feb 3, 2018 01:29
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Solice Kirsk posted:Has anyone ever recovered from being brain dead if it didn't fix itself with in a year or so? Google didn't find anything except people that recovered with in months from being brain dead, but my google fu isn't that strong. The Oliver Sachs "Awakening" phenomenon did affect public perception. Sadly few people realized that entire story was incredibly sad.
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Feb 3, 2018 02:32
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Were those people "brain dead" though? Would pumping Jahi up with L-DOPA help her at all?
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Feb 3, 2018 02:38
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Solice Kirsk posted:Were those people "brain dead" though? Would pumping Jahi up with L-DOPA help her at all? No, and no. The Awakenings patients had some sort of Parkinson's resulting from encephalitis lethargica. Jahi doesn't have Parkinson's. Her whole case makes me so sad.
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Feb 3, 2018 04:25
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