No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
So these examples are actually difficult to extrapolate from for the OP's question as these happen to be examples of some of the specific brain changes that people don't notice.
Was just chatting with a neurologist on this.
The brain sort of accommodates for the area based vision loss. They'd mentioned an example where someone who had effectively lost half their visual field in this way would draw a clock that was round on one side but went straight up the middle instead of extending to the other side, and it looked 'right' to them when double checking it.
As well, the one area of language that can get messed up without them noticing is the one responsible for understanding word meanings, as it kind of ends up as a deficit in both what they say and how they hear it. They'll just chatter on with what everyone else can recognize as nonsense words but they have no idea.
Whereas the other area that's related to the ability to form words when speaking they very much notice. They can only speak really slowly, but they know they are speaking very slowly and get very frustrated.
So the deficits your brother had were luckily the ones that didn't end up being very noticable and frustrating for him, but that was possibly more a mechanism of those specific deficits.
OP's question is a fairly different process, but I'd be inclined to agree that in the severe cases there's not much concept of death. But in part, that's because in severe dementia cases there may not be much of a consistent concept of self to consider as ending in the first place. It's quite degenerative by the very end, and the body still being active and reactive outwardly doesn't necessarily mean a subjective and continuous consciousness with an accumulated sense of self is still inside the way we experience it when healthy.
Degenerative brain disorders that attack cognition are scary as shit and I kind of wish more people realized this better as we might have much better laws regarding dignity and frequency in organizing end of life if it were so.
Yeah, I knew he was probably "lucky" with the particular ways in which his brain was being destroyed by the cancer - he was obviously falling apart from my perspective as an outside observer, but from his perspective he wasn't really noticing most of the stuff that was going wrong. He knew something was amiss, of course, but the only thing that really seemed to be bothering him was his inability to use his left arm correctly (another area of his brain that was failing due to the combination of surgeries and tumor and radiotherapy). He was very fastidious about doing physiotherapy exercises for it, which gave him a sense of "fighting back" I guess. He didn't seem to comprehend the futility of it and we certainly weren't going to try explaining it to him.
In the end, I'm satisfied that I was able to ensure that his final months went by in comfortable and familiar surroundings, with his family members around him providing security. He seemed to recognize us right up to the last days. There are a lot of worse ways to go.