How Dying From Every Deadly Disease Feels Like - Part 2

[00:00:00]This is how dying from every deadly disease feels like, part two. Smallpox.

[00:00:04]Imagine you're a kid in the 1700s sharing a tiny bedroom with your brothers and sisters during winter. One of them came home sick a few days ago coughing non-stop, sweating through their blanket, barely able to stand, but you still sleep beside them because there's nowhere else to go. Personal space in the 1700s was basically considered a luxury item. But what you don't know is that smallpox virus called variola entered your body days ago through tiny droplets from your brother's coughing, breathing, and talking. At first, nothing feels wrong.

[00:00:36]For around 1 to 2 weeks, the virus spreads silently through your body without causing symptoms. While you're doing NPC tasks like carrying water or feeding animals, the infection is multiplying inside your lymph nodes and moving toward your skin, mouth, throat, and organs. Then one morning, you wake up feeling like you got hit by a wagon.

[00:00:57]Your temperature skyrockets. Your head pounds so hard it hurts to open your eyes. Every joint aches. Your lower back feels like somebody hammered nails straight into your spine. You keep vomiting until your stomach is empty.

[00:01:10]Even laying still hurts. Then after a few days, your skin starts changing. It begins with small red spots across your face and arms. At first, they look harmless, almost like bug bites. But over the next day, the spots rise upward out of the skin and harden into blisters filled with thick fluid. Then more and more spots appear across your chest, your legs, your back until your whole body turns into a scary bubble wrap. All while the pustules grow outside your body, the same thing starts happening inside your mouth and throat, too. Sores spread across your tongue, the roof of your mouth, and deep down your throat.

[00:01:48]Drinking and eating feels like scraping broken glass across raw flesh because it keeps ripping the sores open again. Some pustules actually burst open and leak pus onto your clothes and bed sheets.

[00:02:00]Others dry into thick scabs that crack apart whenever you move your arms or legs. And in the worst cases, you get bleeding from it. Instead of forming normal pustules, blood begins leaking underneath the skin itself. You see dark purple stains spread across your body almost overnight. Your eyes turn red and blood seeps from your mouth and nose.

[00:02:20]Some victims start vomiting blood onto the floor beside their bed while the infection keeps spreading through the rest of the body. At the end, your organs begin failing. Your pulse weakens and your skin turns cold even while the fever burns through you. Eventually, your blood pressure drops so low the body can't move oxygen properly anymore.

[00:02:39]Many victims slip into shock, lose consciousness, and die before the pustules even fully finish forming. Back in the 1700s, doctors could do almost nothing besides isolate you and hope your body survives on its own. Smallpox tore through cities, villages, ships, and entire families like this for centuries, killing millions of people before vaccines finally slowed it down.

[00:03:03]The last natural case of smallpox was recorded in Somalia in 1977. And in 1980, it became the first and so far only known human disease we've ever wiped off the planet completely.

[00:03:15]Meningococcal meningitis. You're a college student living in a crowded dorm. One of your roommates has been coughing for days, but nobody really cares. Everybody still shares drinks, squeezes together on the same couch, and keeps hanging out inside the same cramped room every night. A few days later, tiny droplets from those coughs are already entering your body every time you breathe. Inside them is a bacteria called Neisseria meningitidis, the cause of meningococcal meningitis.

[00:03:42]After quietly multiplying in the back of your throat, the infection starts spreading deeper into your body. Then one morning, you wake up with a pounding headache. You get a high fever. your whole body feels sore and heavy, and you keep throwing up into the sink. But at this stage, you just assume some random flu is going around campus again. So, you take medicine, drink water, turn the lights off, and try going back to sleep.

[00:04:05]But instead of fading, the pain keeps tightening around your skull harder and harder. By then, the bacteria have already entered your bloodstream and reached the fluid surrounding your brain and spinal cord. And once they get there, they multiply insanely fast. The fluid around the brain has very few immune defenses. So, the bacteria spread almost unchecked. Within hours, the area around your brain starts filling with bacteria, dead cells, proteins, and inflammatory fluid. But your skull is a closed box. There's nowhere for all that extra fluid and swelling to go. At first, it feels like the worst headache of your life. Like every heartbeat sends another wave of pain through your skull.

[00:04:45]Then, your neck starts becoming stiff, too, until even turning your head hurts.

[00:04:49]After that, even the light in the room starts feeling unbearable. Your phone screen feels like a flashback. Sunlight through the curtains hurts your eyes.

[00:04:58]And even simple thoughts start slowing down. Somebody asks you an easy question, and your brain suddenly lags like opening 47 tabs. At the same time, the bacteria are also spreading aggressively through your bloodstream.

[00:05:10]As they multiply, they damage the inner lining of blood vessels throughout the body. So, your immune system panics and triggers emergency clotting. But now, the clotting starts happening everywhere at once instead of only where it's needed. It begins blocking circulation to the skin, fingers, toes, and organs.

[00:05:28]You'll see dark red or purple spots just spawn across the body as your cell tissues start dying. In severe cases, sections of the tissue even turn black and rotting while the patient is still alive. So, now the infection is basically speed running multiple ways to kill you simultaneously. Your brain is under too much pressure to work normally, and the bloodstream is too damaged to deliver oxygen properly. That combination pushes the patient into shock. They become harder to wake up.

[00:05:57]Their blood pressure drops. Their organs stop getting enough blood, and the body starts losing the ability to keep itself stable. Your death will come from either brain swelling, septic shock, organ failure, or all of them hitting you at once. Sometimes the entire process, from the first headache to death, happens in less than 24 hours. Before antibiotics existed, meningococcal meningitis killed most people who caught it. Even today, doctors still treat it like a full emergency because the infection can spiral out of control insanely fast.

[00:06:28]Around one in 10 patients still die even with modern treatment. And during major outbreaks in parts of Africa known as the meningitis belt, tens of thousands of people can get infected in a single season. Yellow fever. Imagine you're traveling through a river town in West Africa in the late 1800s. The air is hot, wet, and filled with mosquitoes.

[00:06:49]Your arms and neck are already covered in bites. So, when another mosquito lands on your wrist one evening, you barely even look at it before brushing it away. For the next several days, nothing feels wrong. Meanwhile, yellow fever virus is already spreading through your body. After entering through the mosquito bite, the virus moves through nearby immune cells and slips into your bloodstream to use it as an Uber to spread deeper into the body. Then, about three or four days later, you wake up feeling like you just worked two shifts.

[00:07:18]Your head pounds. Your lower back aches so badly it hurts to sit upright. And every muscle feels weak and sore. Your fever burns hot enough to soak your clothes with sweat. And somehow, you're still shivering under blankets at the same time. At first, it just feels like some horrible tropical sickness. So, you rest, drink water, and try waiting it out. And weirdly enough, after a few miserable days, the fever actually starts getting better. But, it turns out this is just round one because the virus pulls the phase-two boss fight. Because, while you're recovering, the virus has already been spreading into multiple organs, especially the liver. And, once it reaches the liver, it starts multiplying aggressively and killing the cells at terrifying speed. When that happens, the fever suddenly comes back.

[00:08:04]Except, this time, it's 100 times worse.

[00:08:07]Your stomach hurts constantly. And, nausea keeps hitting you. You also feel a bitter metallic taste in your mouth that won't go away. Then, your eyes slowly begin to turn yellow because the damaged liver can no longer properly clear bilirubin, a yellow waste product from the blood. The yellow chemical starts building up throughout the body until your eyes and skin slowly turn yellow. This is where the disease gets its name, yellow fever. But, the liver isn't just failing at clearing waste.

[00:08:34]It's also failing at making the proteins your blood needs to clot properly. So, now, even tiny damaged blood vessels no longer seal themselves properly. Every time you brush your teeth, your gums bleed. Your nose keeps dropping blood.

[00:08:46]And, small vessels inside your stomach also begin leaking blood directly into the digestive tract. And, when that blood sits in stomach acid for hours, it turns into a thick, dark, almost black-like liquid that you eventually start vomiting back up. And, while the bleeding keeps getting worse, the kidneys start failing, too. At first, you notice you're barely peeing anymore.

[00:09:09]Then, eventually, almost nothing comes out at all. So, the waste that's supposed to be processed by the kidneys starts building up in your bloodstream instead. So, even while you're lying still, your body feels heavier, weaker, and more poisoned by the hour.

[00:09:23]Eventually, your death comes from shock.

[00:09:26]Because of the blood leak, your heart has a less pressure to work with. So, it struggles to push oxygen to your brain and organs. You become cold, confused, and too weak to stay awake. Then, slowly, your consciousness just fades, and then lights out. In this phase, death can happen within about 7 to 10 days. Today, there's a vaccine that can provide long-lasting protection against yellow fever. But before vaccines existed, yellow fever was deadly. During the 1793 Philadelphia epidemic alone, around 5,000 people died in just a few months, which was roughly 10% of the city's population at the time. Severe yellow fever cases still kill around 30 to 60% of patients even today. And once the black vomit and internal bleeding start, even modern hospitals can mostly just sit there and hope your liver figures it out on its own. CJD. Imagine you're a teenager living in the UK in the early 1990s. News about mad cow disease has started appearing on television, but most people still aren't panicking over it yet. Beef is still everywhere in burgers, meat pies, sausages, or even school lunches. So, one afternoon, you eat contaminated beef without thinking twice about it.

[00:10:37]Unfortunately, the cows had malware.

[00:10:40]Some of their cows were carrying a malformed protein called a prion, the cause of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD. When they enter your body, the prions slowly reach the nervous system and start interacting with similar proteins naturally found inside the brain. One by one, they force those healthy proteins to fold into the same malformed shape, too. And once proteins fold wrong, the brain can't use them properly anymore. Instead of saying separated and functional, the damaged proteins begin sticking together into dense clumps the brain can't break down or clear away. Over time, those clumps spread deeper into the brain tissue, disrupting signals between neurons while nearby brain cells slowly stop functioning and die. But for years, you won't notice anything happens. You go to school, watch TV, and hang out with friends. And when the the finally come, the changes are subtle enough that nobody thinks it's a brain disease. You become anxious more easily, irritated over tiny things. Conversations suddenly feels harder to follow. Your family notices your personality feels different, too. But nobody can fully explain why. So, at first, you get diagnosed with depression or psychiatric problems instead. But then, the damage spreads into parts of the brain that control movement. Walking begins feeling strangely unsteady, like the floor keeps slightly moving underneath you. Your hands stop cooperating during simple movements. Speech becomes slower and harder to control because different parts of the brain are no longer communicating properly anymore. You start developing something called myoclonus, a sudden, violent muscle jerk that happens without warning. A loud sound, somebody touching your shoulder, or even a bright light can suddenly make your arms or legs jerk violently for a split second. As more areas of the brain stop functioning, memory and awareness collapse with them. You just can't think of anything else anymore. You stop recognizing familiar faces. And even in some patients, they just stare blankly at walls because their brain simply doesn't work normally anymore. At the end, even basic survival starts breaking down. Swallowing becomes unsafe because your throat can't coordinate the movement properly anymore. Water, food, or saliva can slip into your lungs instead of going into your stomach. So, now eating and drinking can cause choking or pneumonia. Most patients die from complications after that collapse, especially pneumonia, infections, or the body becoming too weak to keep going.

[00:13:04]Most CJD patients die within months after symptoms begin. Around 90% die within a year. Some deteriorate from mild personality changes to complete unresponsiveness in only a few weeks.

[00:13:17]One of the most famous early victims was Stephen Churchill. He's a 19-year-old from the UK who developed depression, personality changes, and a neurological decline before dying from variant CJD in 1995 during the mad cow disease outbreak. There's currently no cure, no treatment that stops the misfolding, and no way to undo the brain damage once it starts. Basically, one protein folds wrong on the wrong day, and your entire brain gets dragged down with it.

[00:13:46]Brain-eating amoeba. Imagine you're swimming in a warm lake during summer.

[00:13:50]You jump in, your head goes under, and water shoots up your nose so hard it burns. You cough, rub your face, and laugh it off. Everyone keeps swimming.

[00:13:59]Then a few days pass. One morning, your head suddenly starts hurting, but not a cute little headache. You feel a big pressure inside your head. You feel hot, sick, and nauseous. Then you start vomiting. Your family thinks it's food poisoning, the flu, or maybe some random summer infection. So you lie down, try to rest, and hope it passes. Well, it doesn't. Because when that lake water shot up your nose, it carried a tiny amoeba called Naegleria fowleri. You get the little guys when contaminated water gets forced high into your nose, usually from diving, jumping, rough water play, or rinsing your nose with unsafe water.

[00:14:37]High inside your nose, there are small nerves that connect directly to the front of the brain. Naegleria grabs onto that area, pushes through the thin tissue, and crawls along those smell nerves until it reaches the brain. Once it reaches the brain, things get bad fast. The amoeba start attacking brain tissue directly, killing cells and leaving damaged areas behind as it spreads. Every hour, more brain cells die, and the inflammation around them keeps getting worse. When your body finally notices this, it immediately sends immune cells into your brain to kill the amoeba. But the problem is, the fight creates inflammation, and the inflammation brings swelling. In most body parts, swelling has room to spread outward, but your brain is trapped inside the solid skull. So when the brain swells, it has nowhere to expand.

[00:15:23]The pressure just builds inside your head while you feel like it's being crushed from the inside. Your neck becomes stiff. You can't think clearly, and you lose balance. You may start seeing or hearing things that aren't there. Then come the seizures. People around you are talking, but your brain is losing the ability to process what's happening. Your responses become shorter, slower, and you stop responding altogether. Eventually, as more brain tissue gets damaged, your brain can no longer coordinate the basic functions to keep you conscious and responsive. You slip into a coma, your heart and breathing getting weaker. Then, finally, a few days later, the infection wins.

[00:16:00]Most people die around 5 days after symptoms begin. More than 97% of known cases are fatal. In the United States, from 1962 to 2024, there were 167 known cases, and only four survivors. There are treatments, but they have to be thrown at the infection extremely early with aggressive anti-amoeba drugs and care to control brain swelling. The problem is that by the time the headache, vomiting, confusion, and seizures show up, the amoeba is already inside the brain doing demolition work.

[00:16:32]At that point, your only hope is God.

[00:16:34]Diphtheria. You're a child living in Boston in the winter of 1902. Your classroom is packed with coughing kids.

[00:16:41]The windows are shut because it's freezing outside, and every breath in the room has been recycled through 30 different lungs. By morning, your throat feels scratchy, and your forehead is warm. Your parents think it's just another cold. You drink soup, stay in bed, and try to sleep it off. But, by the next day, swallowing starts to hurt.

[00:17:00]Your voice comes out hoarse and thin, and when you breathe in, the air feels like it has to scrape past something stuck deep inside your throat. Then, your mother looks inside your mouth and sees it. A thick gray layer is spreading across your tonsils and the back of your throat. This is diphtheria. The bacteria entered through infected droplets from somebody coughing or sneezing near you.

[00:17:24]They landed in your throat and stuck there. And while they sit there, they release a poison into the tissue around them. The poison starts killing the cells lining your throat. As those cells die, the surface becomes raw and swollen. Mucus, dead tissue, bacteria, blood cells, and sticky wound fibers start piling over the damaged area. But instead of forming a small scab, they spread into one thick gray sheet called a pseudomembrane. And that gray sheet keeps growing. First, it covers the tonsils. After that, it spreads across the back of your throat. Then it creeps lower toward your voice box and windpipe, the tube your air has to pass through to reach your lungs. So, every breath now has to squeeze past a dirty gray layer growing inside your airway.

[00:18:08]At first, breathing just sounds rough.

[00:18:10]Then, every inhale starts making a harsh, high-pitched wheeze. Doctors call that sound stridor. In normal person language, it's the sound of a child's throat that is slowly closing for business. At the same time, your neck starts swelling. The glands under your jaw puff up, and the soft tissue fills with fluid. Your neck becomes thick and tight until doctors at the time call it bull neck. So now, the airway is getting blocked from the inside by the membrane and squeezed from the outside by the swollen neck. When the two of them comboed you, your breathing becomes a full-time job. It's so bad your lips start turning blue because not enough oxygen is reaching your blood. And sometimes your end comes suddenly. A piece of that gray membrane can peel loose during a cough or a deep breath.

[00:18:55]Once it breaks free, your own inhale can suck it downward into the windpipe like a wet plug and blocks your airway. And when air stops moving, you can suffocate within minutes. But even if the throat doesn't close all the way, diphtheria still has a follow-up email scheduled for you. Some of it leaks into the bloodstream, reaches the heart, and starts damaging heart muscle, too. It causes your pulse to become weak and uneven. You feel exhausted even while lying still. In severe cases, circulation collapses, and the body dies after everyone thought that the choking part had already passed. Before vaccines, diphtheria was one of the most feared childhood killers. In the 1920s, the United States recorded more than 100,000 cases a year, and thousands of children died from it. But today, the DTaP vaccine makes diphtheria rare in many countries. ALS. Imagine you're Lou Gehrig in 1938. For years, you're one of the strongest baseball players alive.

[00:19:52]You play almost every game, and swinging a bat is supposed to be the easy part.

[00:19:56]But somehow, slowly, you trip more often. Your hands feel weaker, and your swing loses power. At first, it just looks like a bad season. Maybe you're tired or getting older. But this is the start of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, usually called ALS. ALS works by attacking motor neurons, the nerve cells that carry movement commands from your brain and spinal cord to your muscles.

[00:20:19]Walking, gripping, talking, swallowing, and breathing all depend on those signals arriving correctly. But if the delivery guy dies on the way, the muscles never get the message. At first, it doesn't look like a disease. It looks like little everyday mistakes. Like buttoning a shirt takes longer, or you keep dropping objects, or your one foot drags slightly, and you keep stumbling.

[00:20:41]But because those muscles are no longer getting proper nerve signals, they slowly begin shrinking and lose the ability to activate them properly.

[00:20:49]Standing up from a chair becomes difficult. Climbing stairs leaves you exhausted. And even something as simple as raising your arms above your head feels strangely hard. Then, eventually, the disease reaches the muscles in your face and throat. Your speech starts sounding slurred because your tongue and lips can't move cleanly anymore.

[00:21:06]Drinking water becomes dangerous because small amounts slip into your airway instead of your stomach. Food and saliva can get stuck in your throat because the muscles coordinating swallowing are weakening, too. But, the most dangerous phase of ALS is when it reaches the diaphragm, the large muscle below your lungs that pulls air into your body every time you breathe. At first, you only notice it during activity. Walking farther than usual leaves you out of breath. Later, even lying flat in bed becomes uncomfortable because the weakened diaphragm can't fully expand your lungs anymore. At the same time, your cough grows weaker, too, which creates another problem. Stuff that should have been cleared out, like saliva, mucus, or tiny bits of food and water, can stay in your airway instead.

[00:21:49]Some of it can slip down into your lungs and bring bacteria with it. Over time, that can turn into pneumonia, which is when the lungs get infected and start filling with fluid and inflammation.

[00:21:59]Because apparently, breathing wasn't already hard enough. But, even without pneumonia, the breathing muscles keep getting weaker. Your lungs can't pull in enough fresh air or push out enough used air. So, carbon dioxide, the waste gas you normally breathe out, starts building up in your blood. At first, that gives you headaches, exhaustion, and brain fog. But later, it makes you feel sleepy and confused because your body is basically poisoning itself with air it can't fully exhale. Without permanent mechanical ventilation, most ALS patients eventually slip into a coma and die from breathing failure. And one of the cruelest parts is that awareness often stays mostly intact while the body keeps shutting down. So, the mind is still there, watching the control panel lose buttons one by one. Doctors still don't fully know why ALS starts. In some patients, it runs in families because of inherited gene mutations. But in most cases, it appears randomly with no clear cause at all. There's currently no cure.

[00:22:57]Most patients die within two to five years after symptoms begin, usually because the breathing muscles fail. Lou Gehrig died in 1941, less than 2 years after his diagnosis. African trypanosomiasis. Imagine you're a fisherman living near a river in Congo.

[00:23:12]You spend most mornings walking through thick brush near the water, carrying nets, swatting flies, and trying not to lose your mind every time something bites you. Then one day, a tsetse fly lands on your arm. It hurts more than a normal mosquito bite, but you've been bitten by insects your whole life. So, you slap it away and keep moving. A few days later, the bite area becomes sore and swollen, and you start having a fever. At first, it comes and goes. You feel hot, weak, itchy, and tired. Your joints ache. The glands in your neck swell up. You still try to work because the symptoms don't feel dramatic enough to stop your life. But the problem is that the fly delivered very tiny and illegal passengers. The disease is African trypanosomiasis, also called sleeping sickness. It's caused by tiny parasites called Trypanosoma brucei, which spread through infected tsetse flies. After the bite, the parasites slip into your lymph system and bloodstream. Then start moving through your body while staying outside your cells. Now, while most pathogens at least hide somewhere and are waiting to attack, these parasites have a dirty trick. Their outer surface is covered in special proteins they can constantly change. So, every time your immune system finally learns to recognize them, the parasites basically show up wearing a fake mustache and a different wig. The cycle is just the parasites multiplying. Your body notices. You get a fever. Your immune system fights back. The parasites change their surface again, and the whole process restarts from zero. Over time, that constant battle starts wearing you down. You lose weight and feel weak.

[00:24:45]Your blood count drops because the infection helps cause anemia, meaning you don't have enough healthy red blood cells carrying oxygen. So, now even normal movement feels heavier than it should. Walking to the river starts feeling like your body added ankle weights without asking. Then the parasites reach the brain. Once they cross into the central nervous system, the disease enters its most infamous stage, sleeping sickness. Your sleep cycle completely breaks apart. You feel exhausted during the day but restless at night. You drift off randomly then wake up confused. And it doesn't stay as just sleepiness. You become confused, lose coordination, and walking becomes clumsy. In the final stage, everything slows down. You stop making sense when you talk. Seizures can happen again and again. You become harder to wake.

[00:25:31]Eventually, you fall into stupor, then coma. Death can come from brain damage, choking on fluids, dehydration, another infection, or the heart finally giving out under the stress. And what makes it worse is how long this can drag on for.

[00:25:47]The slower form, called Gambian sleeping sickness, can hide in the body for months or years before severe brain symptoms fully appear. The faster form, called Rhodesian sleeping sickness, can move from fever to brain invasion within weeks or months. So, either the disease takes the scenic route or it floors the gas. Treatments do exist and survival rates are much better today, but doctors need to catch the infection before the parasites dig too deeply into the brain.

[00:26:15]Because once your sleep is gone, your body usually follows it out the door soon after. Malaria. You're a 6-year-old child in a rural village in sub-Saharan Africa. One night, a mosquito lands on your arm, bites, drinks, and flies away.

[00:26:29]You scratch the spot and go back to sleep because mosquito bites happen all the time here. For the next 1 or 2 weeks, nothing feels wrong. Then one afternoon, the fever hits hard. You shake, sweat, vomit, and feel so weak your family hopes it's just another normal fever. But the bite sent deadly parasites into your body. The parasite is called Plasmodium, and the deadliest kind is Plasmodium falciparum. When the mosquito bites you, the parasite hides in your liver, multiplies quietly for days, then bursts into your bloodstream all at once. After getting deployed, they basically become xenomorphs. They invade your red blood cells, multiply inside them, and then burst them open, too. Each destroyed blood cell releases even more parasites that immediately invade new blood cells again, over and over. That repeating cycle is causing you to keep getting waves of fevers, chills, sweating, exhaustion, and pain.

[00:27:23]And while the fever keeps coming back, your blood is slowly falling apart. Red blood cells carry oxygen around the body, but malaria keeps destroying them faster than your body can replace them.

[00:27:33]Your heart starts racing trying to move enough oxygen through your system, but there are fewer and fewer healthy blood cells left to carry it. Your skin becomes pale. Your body feels weak and heavy. Even breathing starts feeling exhausted. And if you get falciparum malaria, the blood problem gets even worse. The infected red blood cells become sticky. Instead of flowing smoothly, they cling to the walls of tiny blood vessels. Little by little, those vessels get blocked, and the organs behind them start starving for oxygen. Your kidneys begin failing. Your lungs start filling with fluid. Your body switches into emergency metabolism because tissues are starving for oxygen, and acid starts building up in your blood. And for dessert, the blockages finally reach the brain. You become confused. You stop responding normally and keep getting seizures. By this point, the fever is basically the least impressive thing happening to you. Some patients die after slipping into a coma.

[00:28:27]Others die when the swelling reaches the parts of the brain that control breathing itself. Malaria is treatable if doctors catch it early. That's why things like bed nets, vaccines, mosquito spraying, prevention medicine, and fast testing matters so much. In 2024, malaria caused an estimated 282 million cases, and around 610,000 deaths worldwide. Most deaths happened in Africa and many were children under 5 years old. Botulism. Imagine you're at a church potluck in Ohio in 2015. The tables are packed with homemade food.

[00:29:01]Potato salad, canned vegetables, casseroles, desserts, all sitting out for hours while people eat and talk. You make yourself a plate, head home full, and think absolutely nothing about it.

[00:29:12]Then the next morning your eyes stop working properly. Your vision turns blurry. Your eyelids suddenly feel weirdly heavy, like gravity got buffed overnight. Your mouth becomes so dry your tongue sticks when you try talking.

[00:29:25]A few hours later swallowing water starts feeling wrong, too. Water dribbles back out of your mouth. Your speech turns slurred and the muscles in your face start quietly shutting down one by one. Congratulations, you have botulism. The food contained botulinum toxin, one of the most powerful poisons ever discovered. After you swallow it, the toxin enters your bloodstream and locks onto the nerves controlling your muscles. Then it blocks those nerves from releasing the chemical signals needed to make the muscles move. The paralysis usually starts around the face and moves downward through the body.

[00:29:58]Your neck becomes hard to hold upright.

[00:30:00]Your shoulders and arms feel unbelievably heavy. Sitting up starts feeling exhausting because more and more muscles quietly stop responding. And the entire time you stay fully awake and aware of everything happening. Then the paralysis reaches the muscles that expand your chest and pull air in. No matter how hard you try, your chest just doesn't pull in enough air anymore. So your breaths become smaller and weaker.

[00:30:22]As a result, carbon dioxide starts building up in your blood, causing headaches, confusion, and the horrible feeling that every breath is only loading to like 60%. At the same time, saliva and mucus start collecting in your throat because your cough becomes too weak to clear anything out. Some patients choke on their own secretions.

[00:30:41]Others develop pneumonia after fluids slip into the lungs and just kind of stay there paying rent for free.

[00:30:47]Eventually, your breathing just gives up and it's game over. Botulism is rare, but people usually get it from improperly canned or preserved food where the bacteria quietly grow and fill the food with toxins. Home canned vegetables, fermented foods, garlic stored in oil, vacuum packed foods, and even baked potatoes wrapped in foil have caused outbreaks before. The terrifying part is that contaminated food can still look, smell, and taste completely normal. So, your end game can literally start with potato salad. Treatment has improved a lot with antitoxins and ventilators. And today, the fatality rate is usually around 5 to 10%. But recovery can still take weeks or months because the damaged nerves have to slowly regrow new connections before muscles work properly again. In the United States, only a few hundred cases are reported each year, but outbreaks still hit hard. In the 2015 Ohio church potluck outbreak, 29 people were poisoned after eating potato salad made from improperly home canned potatoes, and one person died.