Ask Lemmy

I got t-boned by a SUV going 55mph.

Cracked my skull, gave me a subarachnoid hemorrhage (50/50 on surviving those), cracked a couple ribs, lacerated my spleen, and broke my pelvis into eight pieces. Spent a week in ICU, then another two weeks in a nursing home and couldn't stand on my own two feet for almost a year, went through the PT to relearn how to walk, then COVID hit.

Found out that most of my friends were fake, outside of my partner, one person offered to help drive me to doctor's appointments, and one person showed up a couple of times to chat through the year. Nobody brought food, or offered to help with the housework, or wanted to help with errands. Not even my family or my partner's family.

Because of the whiplash, I've since developed bone spurs in my neck that are pressing on my spinal cord and between that, the pre-existing brain tumor, and the TBI, I've not been able to hold down steady employment since.

I ate a french taco. Never again.

Nothing would stay in my body, even water.

I got COVID from my kids in 22, had a bad fever, that passed and then I never really recovered. Followed my doctor's orders, took a walk every day, until I couldn't leave the house anymore. Eventually sitting on the couch was too much and now I can't leave the bed and I'm getting dumber every day. I can't shower, I have to balance getting worse through the exhaustion of brushing my teeth or, well, brushing my teeth. Watching long movies is too hard, watching shows is too hard, playing games is too hard.

Yesterday my CPAP machine broke down so now I'm feeling even worse because I can't sleep property. So I guess that time is now.

Food poisoning. Thursday, February 19, 2026. Ate an egg and cheese breakfast from the work cafeteria. By lunch I was feeling kind of queasy but soldiered on. I came home, napped, then got up to make and have dinner with my fiance that gets home from her job around midnight. 2 am, Friday morning I am projectile vomiting. It comes out of me with such force it splashes all over the walls, floor, and nearby sink despite me being right over the toilet. At the same time, I lose control of my bowels and explosive diarrhea my pants. I clean the walls, and floor, then I take a shower. I put fresh clothes on and try to settle down. Every 30-40 minutes I'm running back to the bathroom to heave over a bucket while my large intestine voids all contents. No sleep. At 8 am I am running a fever of 103 F. I call out of work. At 10 am I am shitting blood. Luckily I live across the street from a hospital that has an emergency room. I walk over, fill out forms, and wait to be called. I go to the bathroom twice more, and shit lots more blood. I pass out in the waiting room. I wake up hooked up to IVs, getting a blood transfusion and emergency dialysis. Spent 3 days in the hospital. Fuck Mazzone Hospitality

Guillain-Barré syndrome. I was almost completely paralyzed for two weeks, in the ICU. It took them several days to diagnose. It was being in a episode of House.

Went home a week later once treatment started kicking in and I passed all the physical exams. Took 3 months for a full recovery.

It's very rare condition and every med student in the entire hospital wanted to hang out with me and take my history. I have never been so popular in my life. They literally wheeled me down to a lecture hall and did a diagnostic seminar on me.

I get a flu shot every year because I had the FLU once. I was about 25. Before I had the all-caps FLU, I couldn't understand how there could be a flu epidemic that killed many people, isn't it just a bad cold, a fever?

No. My whole family got it and couldn't get out of bed, I am kinda surprised none of us did die. It was a week of just laying in the living room together so I could nurse the baby and we managed to get enough to drink somehow and change the diapers, but barely. I really did feel like I would die. I do now understand how flu can kill someone. Like if I didn't need to keep the baby alive I probably would have gotten too dehydrated and died.

Back in August 2024 I got dengue (idk how, maybe a mosquito) and I was forced to have blood tests every day until the amount of platelets in my body increased

I was in and out of the hospital at least once a month for many years before doctors finally diagnosed me. Achiness, exhaustion, open sores in my mouth and my genitals and the pain was so bad I couldn't eat or walk. Like clockwork, those sores would heal and then two weeks later more would erupt. I had to drop out of college because I wasn't well enough to sit in class.

Behcet's Disease. A very rare autoimmune disease that presents as inflammation in small to medium arteries and can strike anywhere in the body.

I was very bitter for a long time - I was accused of being a slut, I was treated for syphilis and herpes even when I tested negative for all STIs, I was not believed about my symptoms for years and years. It sucked.

I was on a bicycle tour from Berlin to my home in the south of Germany.
Started in early October, with two GDR army daypacks bungeed to my bike as panniers, a tent, a summer sleeping bag and no jacket.
The first night I found out that was a big mistake, I got hardly any sleep cause I was freezing my nuts off.
Next day I was sniffling and feeling weak.

The second night I didn't get any sleep at all. I'd pitched my tent on the edge of a corn field.
Which turned out to get harvested during that night.

When I packed my stuff in the morning, I had a fever and realized I couldn't go on, so I rode to the nearest town and took the next train home. My condition quickly got worse during the train ride.

Somehow I managed to make it to my house and collapsed in bed, where I basically stayed for the next three days.
When the fever broke I went out to buy food, but my bicycle wasn't in the garage. It was just gone.
I had no recollection of where I had left it, just a hazy feeling that I'd stopped somewhere in my home town before I went home.

Never found it again.

For me it was during the H1N1 outbreak around 2009, I was one of the folks who got it. Much of my memory is fuzzy from that time, but I learned after the fact I had a fever of around 104. They put me in an ice bath to cool me down, and then later I was in bed and definitely started hallucinating that my blanket was trying to strangle me but I was too weak to move it. Hospitals were pretty overrun if I remember right, so we just had to treat it at home. Scary stuff, but kinda funny imagining my blanket trying to kill me in retrospect.

I've had to go to the emergency room three times now for severe food poisoning, in two countries. In the US it cost about $3k each time, post insurance. In Canada I was able to walk out of the ER like it was a pokemon center

Nora virus in 2023. I litterly thought i was dying. It got me so hard that im now lactose intolerant and have some trouble processing meat. Throwing up, not being able to lift limbs, constant sweat and freezing, diariah. Omg and that for a week!!

I remember it well.

The first signs was when I was sitting in a taxi to the airport for a work trip abroad to London.

I remember being annoyed at having a cold for the duration of the trip.

If it had just been a cold, it would have been fine.

It got so bad that at the end of me week there, I couldn't speak.

As I got sicker, I also got a scare that I might have flooded the hotel, which made me worry that I might loose my job.

Anyway, I just got sicker and sicker, I went to the doctors when I got back, and was diagnosed with one sides pneumonia, with an unknown cause.

I got generic penicillin, which I couldn't swallow properly, so I had to dissolve the pill in water and slowly sip it, took an hour or so to get one pill in me.

It got worse to the point I went to the Emergency room in the hospital, and was admitted to the infection clinic, I had to stay for two days.

I got an IV with penicillin and finally started getting better.

My mom got sick at the same time with similar symptoms....

I never conclusively found out what I got, but my mom was diagnosed with Mycoplasma, so I probably got it myself.

I was away from work for a month and a half, and missed almost all of the summer of 2019...

It was terrible.

For anyone curious, I would suggest against trying mycoplasma, it is not a brilliant experience.

when i was a kid, i got food poisoning or something at Great America (an amusement park), and projectile vomited corn dogs all over the parking lot.

(this is not the sickest i've been, but i do feel it's probably the most entertaining story.)

Fish poisoning from the student cafeteria. Since then, I can't stand fish and seafood.

Not me but my partner also wanted to add to this:

My mothers cooking isnt great. Typical german "package cheap of the cheap fresh frozen" the nightmare of everyone who hold food in high reguard. We visited them on second christmas day / her birthday. That day my partner only ate her soup thing. The day after my partners and my stomach was upset really badly and bloated. Luckily mine not as badly as theirs. They threw up foam, like soap foam. That happened again in january when he went to my parents again to drop something off. My parents cook right next to the sink. So the likelyhood of soap (that they barely use but still) to have ended up in the food and that is also the theory we went with as explaination for the cause

We were living in Haiti and needed a vacation as there had just been a revolution. We decided to do some Caribbean island hopping. The day we left, I caught dengue fever. Sick on the plane. Landed in Puerto Rico and took a hovercraft. Hurricane close by. It was so rough, I couldn't stay inside and lay on oil barrels at the back. By the time we got to St. John, my nose had sunburned so bad, it was oozing fluid. (It's been redish ever since) In St. John, wild donkeys broke into our tent and ate all our food. Took a water taxi to Tortola. Tenting on the beach. The whole town(except us) evacuated because the hurricane was approaching. Spent a wild night. Huge winds. No one around the next morning so we ate coconuts that had fallen during the night and hiked out of there. Worked our way back to St. John to catch the hovercraft back. It had been canceled because of the hurricane. The dengue lasted seven days. Felt horrible the whole time. At the end, I got extremely itchy hands and feet. Not fun. It made a good story, though.

Was on vacation and in some fever induced state went to sleep in the car in the garage. The mother did not enjoy the various stages of panic/denial/etc of losing their sick child.

got bit by a dengue beaver apparently

I had bronchitis for the entirety of November 2024, was straight up barely able to talk for a bit, and at one point vomited just because I was coughing so much it activated my gag reflex

I had one terrible bout of food poisoning. When my wife and I were visiting my hometown for a few days, we visited an island with a beautiful sandbar and stayed overnight. It wasn't a tourist destination so there was one hotel in the entire island. Since there were no restaurants around, we ordered dinner and breakfast the next morning at the hotel. I was already feeling uneasy on the boat ride back to the mainland, but chalked it up to seasickness because of the rough waters. We got back back without issue and that's when it started. Within an hour of getting back, I was already shitting and puking alternately, every 10 minutes. Then had a fever for the next 2 days. I also theorize it triggered my bout of hyperthyroidism somehow, because it started right after that incident.

I drove from Las Vegas to a bit above Breckenridge in a single day and got mild altitude sickness. It doesn’t sound like much, but damn, I couldn’t hardly walk without feeling like I was about to keel over from the shortness of breath. Puked a lot too. Got dehydrated enough to pee brown. I remember being super out of it trying to make ramen on the stove and watching the water boil after just a minute, so I stuck my hand in out of disbelief — sure enough, it was just mildly warm. Weird stuff.

The chicken pox sucked. It itched and itched and itched. I lived in an oatmeal bath. I was a cold though. My mother got it when we got it, so she was an adult. So much worse.

I'm kinda pissed now remembering getting chicken pox, because the vaccine for it only came out a few years after I had to suffer through that shit. I still have scars on my arms from the blisters.

I was 20-something years old. I drank waaaay too much at a party, it made me really sick. Sworn I'll never put alcohol in my mouth ever again. Kept my promise for like a whole week.

Ate a bad kebab, nearly shat myself on the tube coming home from work, spent two days in bed with diarrhoea and vomiting, and I’ve had IBS ever since. Good times.

I got Covid at a summer job that mom forced me to do during the height of the epidemic... and because she told me that she regretted giving birth to before my 2nd dose of vaccine, I skipped it because I was being suicidal, so that's how I got covid.

I wonder if I had heard that before the first dose and skipped it too, would I have died?

Lmao why was I even trying to kill myself with a virus that has 1% death rate... too cowardly to jump off a bridge I guess