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Comment by kingofmen | Hacker News Reader

Uh... which one? Choice is not obvious to me, and I think it would depend on the type of cancer.

From multiple personal experiences, including both of my parents, dementia is a slow, horrible death where you are robbed of your dignity and end up dragging all of your relatives through a very long, very torturous hell. You will be drooling, pissing, and shitting yourself, all while slowly reverting back to a low IQ childhood mentality where you're very likely to have outbursts and verbally or physically attack the people around you. Your loved ones will be tormented, and if you don't have loved ones then if you're lucky you'll be tossed into a room and forgotten about by underpaid, overworked staff at some run-down nursing home. If you're not lucky you'll be laying in a gutter on the street until you die.

Interestingly my wife helped a friend whose father had the disease during the pandemic.

He had worked as a professor and after retirement had suffered with AD for years but had stayed "independent" because his wife was high functioning mentally but low functioning physically and formed a good team.

He'd bought long term care insurance so he had the resources to afford both a room at a care home but also personal help from home aides, including my wife. He didn't really know what was going on most of the time but he never got angry or flustered and was always pleasant to deal with.

We had trouble with certain homes having a way they want to do things or requiring things that weren't really necessary, one insisted that he get a pacemaker because he had bradycardia. When he lived with his son between homes probably the most difficult thing was that he got up in the night to use the bathroom and would end up urinating in the wrong place. He got much better care than many residents because people were always coming around to see him and the staff knew that we cared and would advocate for him.

He passed away at 92 and outlived many of the people who knew him at work so he had just a small memorial ceremony. I saw it as an example of healthy aging and talked about it a lot with my wife -- and it made me think about myself and my own fear that my ability to compensate for my schizotaxia may degrade when my brain degrades and I can picture myself becoming really nasty and it gives me all the more incentive to rewrite my habits while I still can.

You may find this study useful: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09335-x

I've begun taking very small amounts of lithium orotate (5mg), among many other preventative measures.

There's definitely a thread that subclinical doses of lithium could be good for people in general.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10227915/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11954165/

Sadly, cancer isn’t one singular disease. Types of cancer can be excruciatingly painful for many years, which is also tormenting to everyone around you. I wouldn’t wish either on anyone.

Cancer is better than Alzheimer’s. There is no comparison. I wouldn’t wish Alzheimer’s or dementia on my worst enemy.

Cancer. The worst types of it have the advantage of killing quickly. Alzheimer's destroys the self, and you survive a long time with it, leading to much more suffering, both to you (to the extent you continue to exist) and to your family.

I have a different perspective. The worst types of cancer kill slowly and cause agonizing suffering.

Alzheimer's leads to negative outcomes for your caregivers, but by many accounts many affected individuals do not suffer all that much, if at all, due to their lack of awareness.

Cancer times a million

Seeing my grandmother go through dementia for 10 years made me incredibly angry that we don't have assisted suicide available for people.

People with the emotional and compassionate depth of a child are the ones keeping us from allowing people to die with dignity.

If I were diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I would seek out assisted suicide. But I think it's more complicated than that: its existence incentivizes pushing people toward assisted suicide. The government finds a way to help with bloated medical care budgets; unscrupulous family members guilt trip the sick to choose the option to keep the inheritance intact.

The best solution allows it for severe cases, while still investing money in research and spending money for palliative care so it remains an option and not a demand. But that's a tricky line to maintain.

My grandmother's case ended up bankrupting my grandfather and seriously straining the rest of the family. Which ultimately put my grandfather in a pennyless position when he was in his 90's, and poor state care when he was declining - not what he or my grandmother worked their entire lives for. Our family couldn't replace what was lost in the years of care for my grandmother's body, long after she herself was gone.

Never something she would have wanted, but you don't really have a choice and dignified death is never given as an option.

> dignified death is never given as an option

That's not a universal law, in fact it is different in other countries, i.e. it is something that can be changed.

It appears that there are options for care in other countries that are much less expensive.

https://www.alzint.org/news-events/news/health-tourism-the-l...

Not me, I’d hire someone to take really good notes and test all the promising potential treatments one after the other.

No need for lengthy approvals or a drug trial if you’re giving it to yourself. I’d want to go out doing some mfing science.

Its the slippery slope proved real by places like my home country of canada keeping other people from having it. I am a huge supporter of assisted suicide but what my country has gone way too far. find a way credibly Keep it to impending death with lots of pain and alzeimers like disease and you would have strong majority acceptance.

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