[TOPIC] Diseases

Look at pancreatic cancer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancreatic_cancer

Yup, that's what my mom had. She had chemo every month or so to stave off the pain and that would leave her tired for a week, but other than that, the 5 months from diagnosis to her death were almost entirely pain- and symptom-free. The main thing was she'd get more tired easily if she had to do a lot of running around.

It's fast, and pretty much untreatable -- the only thing you can do with chemo is allow the person a pain-free last few months. One weekend she was feeling good, then that night she felt sick; went to the hospital, was delirious for a day or two, then slipped into a coma for a week and eventually passed away.

Even without the chemo -- which was largely experimental, she didn't spend a lot of time in hospitals at all. It was just outpatient treatment once a month or so, and then the last week to ten days before she died. The rest of the time she was at home, making the most of the time she had left.

Ironically, my NaNoWriMo participation last year was cut short by my grandfather's diagnosis of liver cancer. I couldn't live with a dying man and spend all my time writing 50,000 words, so guess which one had to go.

Anyway, had he been diagnosed earlier, his illness would have met your requirements. Liver cancer itself is painless until the very end. That's why he didn't know he had it--no pain. When he was diagnosed he was given less than a month to live (and died within 12 days), but like I said, it was very advanced when he was diagnosed. His symptoms consisted of jaundice (he turned orange), burning sensations on his skin (the tumor had blocked his liver and caused bile to build up in his blood stream, where it exited through his pores), and later abdominal discomfort (his expanding liver squashed all his other internal organs).

He chose not to be treated, so I can't say what would happen if a liver cancer patient went through chemo or radiation or anything else.

If you're interested I would be willing to give you more details. I lived with him so I was there for all of it.

She could get thyroid storm. http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/thyroid-storm

And the cause for it can be relatively simple: thyroid storm is in several cases a very very aggravated case of hyperthyroidism. Hyperthyroidism is attributed to Grave's Disease, an immune deficiency that causes your thyroid to create too much of a type of thyroid hormone. 1 in 8 women get Grave's Disease, and the diagnosis happens usually pretty close to your character's age. Hyperthyroidism is very easy to treat with medicine (safest way from what I understand), surgery, or ingesting radioactive iodine to destroy the thyroid. However, if untreated, it can progress to thyroid storm. Thyroid storm is VERY hard to live with, as it causes heart problems, and infections.

I don't know where your story is placed, but if its in the States it is very possible she cannot afford the healthcare to get the medicine. I have hyperthyroidism and I have to get blood tests done every three months and I have to see an endocrinologist (gland doctor, since the thyroid is a gland) once a year, and the first test they gave me was some sort of xray of my thyroid. It all adds up; even if she has the medicine, she may choose not to take it because she doesn't know how much. The amount I'm taking is always changing.

My twin sister and I both have it, I was diagnosed a year earlier than her, and she is taking a different type of medicine than I am. If you are interested in hearing more, feel free to shoot me a PM or continue on here :)

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Some people follow their dreams. Others hunt them down and beat them into submission.

Bone cancer and leukemias often hit the young. If you don't want there to be "X months to live" diagnosis or cancer, asthmatics often have increased inflammation of the lungs, eventually to the point of where their emergency inhalers fail to work and they die. This is often sudden but results from months of slow inflammation buildup. Also, Diabetes Mellitus Type I presents at a very early age, and these people are prone to ketoacidosis. That again is a sudden event, but your character could have diabetes for months/years and the attack hits at the climatic moment you need it to.

Lyme disease. It's fatal and often can be misdiagnosed. Some docs classify the symptoms as MS or meningitis. Blood tests only diagnosis the disease 40% of the time. The other way to tell is through protein PCR taken from urine.

I heard of this case where a young woman in her early 20's was diagnosed with severe spinal meningitis but docs didn't know the cause but they treated her symptoms. She lived as a model in Florida and went to see a lot of specialists because she still suffered from severe cramping, headaches, etc. Her test kept coming up negative for Lyme disease. Eventually the docs began to think it was all mental and that she was a pretty girl who wanted attention and more drugs. She had to take 27 pills a day while still trying to function as a model and such. Eventually this one infectious disease specialist tested her urine for Lyme and it came back positive.

The way I see it, is that if a doctor treats the symptoms, a person can be well off and on (like in the story above).

Another fatal disease, but one where a woman can still function is Lupus.

NaNo 2007 Novel: The Dragon's Daughter (currently editing)
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Writing Blog: http://summonerchild.blogspot.com/

I'd hesitate to call lupus a fatal disease. These days, most cases aren't. It's also not a disease that permits normal function, usually--certainly it's unlikely to if the patient isn't taking meds.

--P.

I think Ovarian Cancer would work well. Ovarian Cancer is difficult to detect, so by the time it's diagnosed it's usually too late to do much. The survival rate is very low (which is incredibly sad) and many women only have several months to several years to live after diagnosis. You could adjust how long she has left to live according to the needs of your novel.

And with OC you can function quite fine without any treatment for quite some time. The problem with any fatal disease is that there will usually be some signs and symptoms that your character will have to deal with, such as vomitting, dizziness, headaches, hot/cold spells and so on. However, every person with a person with a fatal illness will have different difficulties, so your character may feel sick a lot, but won't have say, fainting spells, and therefore she will be able to function as you require her to.

I, in turn, need a disease that would lead a female MC getting artificial joints at an early age. Any suggestions?

How early is early? This is a long way from my field of knowledge, but rheuatoid arthritis might be worth looking into. It can develop in pretty young children, and joint replacement is one possible option for treating it. My guess is if it were severe enough, she could probably have had joints replaced by the time she's 20, but I don't know about the likelihood of it happening when she's, say, 4. Like I said, this isn't an area I pretend to know anything about, but maybe it's worth a glance. :)

Huntington Disease is an inherited disease that doesn't kill the person until they are adults, and they wouldn't be particularly ill until later in their life also. It is inherited as a dominate gene, which means you only need one parent to pass it on. That parent probably wouldn't have known they had it until after they produced children, which is one reason why this mutation keeps on through the generations. You can google it, but if you want I can scan and send you the couple of pages I have on it.

RE: Artificial Joints

My niece was diagnosed with leukemia a few years ago. The treatments destroyed her joints, and she now has titanium hips and shoulders. She just turned 18, so I think that is pretty young.

RE Huntington Disease

I forgot to mention that there is a chance she would find out she had Huntington's before there were any symptoms. For example, if Mom died, and they found out it was Huntington's, your MC could choose to get tested for this gene. If MC tested positive and was in 20s, there wouldn't likely be any symptoms for years.

Edited for crappy grammar.

I was going to suggest Huntington's too. Worth investigating!

If you're going to go with cancer, I just wanted to say something about "it's too bad to treat - it's too bad to live with". This is not necessicarily true. Some people may actually just choose not to receive treatment because there is a huge chance it won't work anyway and they want to live their lives normally - and they may live on for a few years even without the treatment. I just read a good story about this in a book called A Life Worth Living. Also - Randy Paulsch, the author of The Last Lecture. You could also have been receiving treatment but it's failing (one example is when breast cancer spreads to the lymph nodes and the proposed, highly experimental treatment is a bone marrow transplant to get rid of the lymphoma; this rarely works according to my mom who was a transplant nurse).