Hey there! Welcome back to ‘The Confessions of a Random Blogger!’
We are officially in October, the month of Halloween! You know what that means? ‘Horror’ themed posts for the rest of the month.
I hope none of you guys were actually planning on getting any sort of sleep this month. If you are able to fall asleep after reading one of my posts over the course of this month, I’m doing something wrong.
Halloween is one of my favourite holidays ever.
Not just because of the whimsical aspect of it such as the once-a-year opportunity to dress up as something completely insane like a sexy doctor (side note- are ‘sexy nurse’ or ‘sexy doctor’ costumes distasteful during a global pandemic or just somewhat sardonic?). Halloween also has such an incredibly rich history behind it- there’s so much historical culture behind all of the seemingly meaningless Halloween traditions that we still practice today.
Anyway, today we’re going to be discussing 3 scary things that actually exist. I’m sure we’re all scared of typical ‘scary’ things like blood, gore and violence that we usually see represented in horror movies. However, we usually tend to ignore the things around us that actually have the power to scare us simply because they truly exist and actually have the power to affect us.
It’s actually quite hilarious that we tend to be more terrified of horror antagonists à la Michael Myers more than the things around us that can actually ruin our lives.
With just a simple introspective view of the world around us, more often than not we can find that the environment and people around us are scarier that any horror movie out there. The simple fear of mere existence.
The Perception of Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is defined as a chronic brain disorder that can substantially affect a person’s ability to interpret reality correctly, and can result in cognitive symptoms such as hallucinations, delusion, paranoia, apathy and amnesia as well as behavioural sequela such as social isolation, self harm, agitation and compulsive behaviour.
“If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication … and there is the real illness.”
I’m not even going to begin to explain how scary those symptoms must be. However, that’s not the scariest part of having schizophrenia.
Perhaps, the scariest part of dealing with any mental illness, namely schizophrenia, is not the actual disorder, but the social stigma associated with it. The knowledge that you will never be able to live a ‘normal’ life in the traditional sense of the word.
Fatal Familial Insomnia
I’m sure we’ve all dealt with insomnia in varying degrees of intensity at some point or another.
However, fatal familial insomnia is a whole other ballgame.
Fatal familial insomnia is an extremely rare, genetically linked disease that results in an average lifespan of approximately 18 months after the initial diagnosis.
Fatal Familial Insomnia has approximately 4 stages:
- For an estimate of 4 months, the patient experiences severe anxiety and panic attacks, paranoia and unsubstantiated phobias.
- The patient then begins to experience severe hallucinations.
- A significant amount of weight loss.
- A period of 6 months where the patient experiences a combination of unresponsiveness, dementia and consequent death.
Imagine the horror of not being able to sleep and knowing that there’s no solution for a period of up to almost 2 years with the only possible solution or cure being death?
Since fatal familial insomnia is usually hereditary, many patients often find themselves going about their daily lives, simply waiting for the night that they won’t be able to fall asleep. The night that it all starts.
In fact, many that become familiar with the occurrence of fatal familial insomnia have stated that they experience ’emotional contagion’ which is the phenomena of automatic subconscious behaviour that occurs once a person is aware of a particular set of behaviours.
In simple terms, it’s much more likely that you’ll experience at least some varying degree of insomnia tonight because I told you that fatal familia insomnia is an actual thing that happens to people.
I told you that you wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight!
Anaesthetic Awareness
Okay, so basically the term ‘Anaesthetic Awareness’ is just a fancy way of referring to walking up during surgery.
Anaesthetic awareness, also known as intraoperative awareness is a complication that occurs during a surgery wherein a patient regains consciousness after being put under a a dose of general anaesthesia.
Anaesthetic awareness can be caused by a wide variety of different factors such as prior substance abuse, traumatic injury or just an anaesthesiologist that really doesn’t like you.
Although walking up during surgery in theory can seem quite trivial, anaesthetic awareness can actually lead to subsequent repercussions such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), nightmares, insomnia (were you just beginning to forget about it?) and flashbacks.
No but seriously, anaesthetic awareness is actually quite detrimental and absolutely needs to be more extensively researched- many patients that experience it are even driven to suicide due to the long lasting harmful ramifications.
Thank you for reading! I took a bit of a break from blogging for a while, but I definitely couldn’t pass up the opportunity for a month of scary blog posts. From now on, you’ll be seeing (I mean reading) a whole lot more of me. You can go ahead and decide if that’s a good thing.
Make sure to let me know in the comments- in your opinion, what is the scariest thing that actually exists?
You can check out some of my other Halloween-themed posts here:
The History and Evolution of Halloween
Scary Movies To Watch This Halloween
Connect with me on Instagram!
Until Next Time.
theconfessionsofarandomblogger.com 
Shit, these are scary! 😭😳😱
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