Health & Family Ever had a life threatening illness?

I had a lady Uber driver yesterday (Central Coast Area) who told me her life was completely changed several years ago when she had stage 3 Breast cancer.

She had been through hell she said with Chemo Radiation and mastectomy

However she said there was a positive to this and she had completely changed her life from a Legal Secretary to a Spiritual person moving from Sydney up to the lake side at Morriset near Lake Macquarie.

She done Uber casually and was into tarot , crystals etc

She told me she had changed from the person she use to be to someone who doesnt take life seriously anymore nor small problems.

Apparently she is not even clear of the Cancer but they slowed it down .

We both agreed that anyone working over the age of 65yo was wasting their life with maybe only 15 years to go why waste it working ?

As Motivation speaker Gary V said ... the greatest piece of advice , your gonna die , so you dont know how long u got , if your 65 you have about 15 years so dont waste it

It just changed my thinking after being with her about how precious our life is and how it can be taken and how we dint have much time on this earth.

now as im getting older im working harder so i can retire early and go off to my returement in Asia , I would hate to be old and regret that i never did enjoy my life .

I know a guy who is HIV positive , he takes many medications which have bad side effects, eventually it will have a affect on his health , he doesnt know how long he has but he is happy anyway and is living life to the fullest.

Have you ever had a life threatening illness or see someone that has changed the way you think ?( excluding your parents)

I remember when one of my relatives was dying of Cancer I went into the Sacred Heart Hospice at Darlinghurst to see patients out of their beds smoking on the balconys and drinking alcohol on thursdays so it wasnt all sad.

 

Are measles and the mumps still classified as life threatening diseases?

 

Yeah, I've had a couple of scares. My first was at about 34. PE which is blood clots in your lungs after having DVT and a broken leg which was undetected. The clots were just entering my heart valve when I went to Emergency. I was treated straight away with Clexane. I got moved by ambulance within a few hours to a hospital that specialised more in the area. The hospital was overcrowded and wanted to send me back which I refused. So I was moved from an aisle to the store room. I was on about 30mins observation and being in the store room nurses were getting gloves every 5 minutes so I had plenty of thinking time. I decided to move back interstate. I stayed there for two years. I'm forever grateful of that time I had back with my family. My Dad passed away two years later. I also got diagnosed with Stage 1 Melanoma while interstate. I put investing on hold for a few years. I did change, I stopped thinking about the future so much and lived for today. People around you don't change, so it's quite strange. I am grateful for it though.

 

It's interesting Darlinghurst you meeting this lady!! Do you think you attracted her into your life!? Had you been thinking about that sorta stuff and you manifested it. We attract what we focus on.

She was meant to come into your life for a reason. Have you been balanced in your life lately!? investing and yet still finding the balance and spending some money too and enjoying life. You say you are working harder than ever because you want to retire early and enjoy life. Don't forget some balance along the way, to enjoy the journey, the experiences.

Thanks for sharing and the reminder. I belong to these cool Near death experience groups on Facebook and because of what they have gone through tilts transformed them, they see what is truly important in life

 

Yes.

 

Then I've had 2.

 

Most people on here already know about all this from me but since the question was posted.

Stage 3 - 2B Bowel Cancer Sept 2015 just after I turned 40, it was in the Lymph nodes but hadn't metasticised.

Colostomy (Ileostomy actually but not many people know the difference) bag for a year, 8 rounds of Chemo both IV and Pills and 3 surgeries one of which sliced me from just below the rib cage to just above the manhood. They removed part of my Colon and formed what is known as a J-Pouch.

I am left permanently with "some" discomfort but that's okay, it reminds me I am alive enough to feel it . Also the nerve damage I suffered from the Chemo has not yet healed fully, it's still quite unpleasant in the cold and getting into the pool if the water is a little colder hurts like hell until my body adjusts but it's a small price to pay to be alive.

Six weeks after final surgery at the end of Oct 2016 (as soon as I could fly) we flew up to the Gold Coast and bought a house at auction, we moved into it 8 weeks ago. Life to me now is all about living and doing the things I always wanted like living on the Gold Coast, like owning a completely impractical 2 seater convertible, It's taken me only 1 year to get to the point that I only dreamed of for 25 years before I was ill.

I have changed a lot, im a much calmer person now, I don't get too worried about things in life anymore. The knowledge I gained from going through this experience is invaluable and actually made the struggle almost worth it in a weird sort of a way.

Everything I do with my life now is about enjoying myself, I really love living and I love the life that I have .

Nothing made me want to live more than thinking I was going to die.

 

My scare was 3 years ago now..

I have always had reasonably poor vision(glasses/contacts) but through January 2015 I had noticed my vision becoming increasing poor in both clarity and colour.

I went to get a check up from a large chain optometrist who did heaps of tests and told me that they could not detect any issues with my vision and sent me to a specialist eye clinic who did the same tests and basically sent me off and said "come back in 12 months and we will re test your eyes than!!"

Over the next few weeks my vision became increasingly worse until one day whilst out for lunch I basically broke down and told my wife something was really wrong so we headed off to the eye/ear hospital.

Over the next few days we were in and out of doctor's until whilst sitting in the specialists office my MRI results came back with a 4.8cm Pituitary tumour, whilst benign(didn't know that when I was diagnosed)it's fair to say the world seemed to go in slow motion..

Treatment for my type of tumour(Prolactonoma) is medication which normally shrinks tumour size so it doesn't push against optic nerve as it had done which mine thus giving me vision problems...fast forward 6 months and another MRI which showed the tumour had not reduced so I was booked in for surgery on August 5th which went off without a hitch removing all of the tumour..

Now I am currently on medication to reduce chance of tumour coming back and a yearly MRI...

Great line from @Dan Donoghue

My scare was minor compared to other illnesses I hear about but it does make you question your mortality and what matters!!

 

Dude, you had something growing in your head!!!!, that is not minor (Good to hear that they got it all though )

No scare is minor and no one scare is bigger than someone else's, Think of it this way. In YOUR life, that was the biggest scare you have had and made you question life right? In MY life mine was the biggest scare I have had and made me question life. They are of equal value in what they gave us.

A friend of mine once referred to that moment when you truly think you will die but you don't as "The Gift", Everything changes after you get "The Gift". We often spoke of how lucky we are to have been given the gift and have the opportunity to make changes after receiving it .

 

We have a survival bias here

 

Burst appendix - vomiting and uncomfortable gut but no abdominal pain. Surgeon said that if I'd left it another 24 hours then I'd be dead.

Followed a few years later by a very long and difficult natural birth when junior decided to come out upside down so pumped full of drugs to slow some things down while the rest of the body caught up.

Puts things in perspective when you think that if it'd been a mere 50 years previous, I'd probably be dead twice.

 

She probably cant stop working as cant afford it.......

And to answer your question - yep twice.

Both issues are "non-recurring" eg my chances of getting them again are the same as you dying from them but both of them are 1 in 20,000 .....lol I just happened to get 2 of them but survived them both brilliantly and to be honest most of the time don't even think about it

 

Hubby has now had three close brushes with death and avoided them all.

Most recent was a full blown anaphylactic reaction to a prescribed drug, luckily still in the hospital emergency department, still took major resuscitation efforts but would have been unsurvivable elsewhere.

You certainly look at life differently afterwards.
Marg

 

Not life threatening per se but I had some major surgery when I was 23 that took a while to recover from. Without it, I would likely have been disabled by my 40s. It does certainly put things in perspective but has also made me a bit impatient in some ways as I'm more conscious of time

 

I was just two when mum had concerns about me. She took me to doctors who all said it's colic. Mother new better. She found a freshly minted doctor who said "I don't know what is wrong with your child but he's clearly sick". After loads of tests and a scan in the only CT machine in Australia found that I had kidney troubles. My left ureter was like a roller coaster and the **** couldn't get from my kidney to my bladder.

I had surgery to straighten it and it all worked out fine. It was the first surgery of it's type. I returned every year till I was too old to go to the children's hospital. A number of papers were written about me.

My earliest memory is having a urinary catheter removed.