Amusing Ourselves to Death05:48 Nov 02 2007
Times Read: 866
By Martha Brockenbrough
Die in your sleep? Bah -- amuse yourself to death, instead.
A lot of people hope to die in their sleep someday. How boring. And sort of depressing, too, like sleeping through the end of a movie. You never get to find out what happens.
Fortunately for you, I've been thinking about the alternative: death by amusement.
Don't get me wrong; I'm anti-death. But I've seen dying's inevitable, so I'm just trying to lay out a few options for us mortals who might not want to spend our last moments in a puddle of pillow drool.
I'm laying out three alternatives: death by gaming, death by eating and death by coffee. If I could include death by reading or watching movies, you'd know how I'd like to go.
Let's start with death by gaming
Just a few weeks ago, a Chinese video gamer keeled over after a three-day binge. The Beijing news reported this poor 30-year-old died from exhaustion. While it's hard to take everything reported by the state-run Chinese news service literally, two years earlier, a South Korean man, age 28, died after a 50-hour online gaming session.
Let's just assume that he, too, died of exhaustion. Reta Wright-Kinghorn, a Polysomnographic Research Coordinator at the University of Washington Sleep Medicine Center, explained what might have happened.
Our bodies need sleep, not necessarily for resting, like many of us assume. Rather, during slumber, our bodies regulate our metabolisms and restore the daily wear and tear on muscles and bones. It's even more important for our brains, which are busy when we sleep, even if experts aren't entirely sure what they're busy doing.
How much sleep do we need?
When we don't get enough sleep, concentration and memory deteriorate. We are less able to regulate our emotions. We can also disrupt our circadian rhythms. These body clocks help regulate our endocrine, immune and metabolic systems. So in other words, not sleeping enough can make us cranky, sick and fat (in addition to dead, if we're really unlucky, like those gamers). It would be a rare thing to be fatally sleep-deprived. Most of us would fall asleep involuntarily, Wright-Kinghorn said. But, sleep deprivation like those gamers experienced could generate lots of the hormone cortisol, which could fatally ravage a weak heart.
There is one other sort of fatal sleep deprivation called fatal familial insomnia. It's extremely rare. And even though it sounds like the sort of thing you get when you have a baby and stay up all night, it's not. It leads to deterioration in the brain center that controls sleep -- the thalamus -- and causes progressive insomnia, body wasting, coma and death over a period of seven to 13 months. Granted, this would definitely not fall into the "amusing ourselves to death" category.
But then there's death by eating
As the holidays approach, we could add fatal overeating to the list of exciting ways to die -- if the definition of exciting includes "gruesome" and "hideously painful."
I'm not talking about the slow death by overeating, which can lead to diabetes, heart disease and other serious afflictions. Rather, I'm talking about gut-busting, all-at-once overindulging.
It takes some doing -- and possibly help from the spice rack -- but it's technically possible for you to eat so much your stomach pops. The typical stomach can accommodate about four quarts of food. Hot-dog eating champions can no doubt stuff in more. Starving people, including anorexics, can't hold as much. To wit: The Institute of Legal Medicine, a German journal, reported in 2004 the death of a 19-year-old anorexia nervosa victim after a bulimic binge. And in April 1995, the medical journal the Lancet included the stomach-rupture death of a 23-year-old London model who put away 19 pounds of food (along with two glasses of milk).
It's not the rupture itself that's fatal. Rather, it's the infection that can arise when all the bacteria in your gut floods the rest of you.
One thing that can make a stomach more likely to burst is baking soda, which some people take to ease indigestion. The carbon dioxide emitted can put that extra pressure on the stomach. (It's way more than Pop Rocks and soda produce. No matter what you've heard from your friends in third grade, this won't kill you.)
Some years back, the New York Times reported the story of a former National Geographic editor who almost died on vacation after topping off a feast with a teaspoon of baking soda and a bit of water. His stomach ruptured, and he needed six operations to fix it.
Death by java
While the idea of exploding stomachs does make dying in my sleep sound more appealing all the time, such a thing is not likely to happen when you have a coffee habit like I do. In my defense, it's been proven to help with memory and routine chores, the sort any mom faces getting kids out the door to school.
I'd have to work awfully hard to die by my favorite indulgence, though. Apparently, you have to drink between 80 and 100 cups at once, or inject a lethal dose -- more than 10 grams -- directly into your bloodstream. For now, I'll stick with a double shot. In the morning. So I can fall asleep at night after playing those video games.
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