The doctors give me 30 days to live, each post is potentially my last
translate.google.com
translate.google.com
The way he quits, the feeling of "liberation", it borders on sociopathic in some ways. Pretending you're going on holiday when in reality you're going to die, who has time for such games when they've got a 30 day timer running.
It reads like a movie, not like my experience with reality.
(plan pension is a literal translation from dutch: pensioen plan)
It does looks very fake. The engineer says he is also a hobbyist writer, so maybe he has a taste for romanticism, but i think it is way too much stylized to be a real testimony. It definitely reads like what contemporary french author writes.
This line is an incredible clue that it is fake:
>I do not want to go into details about the disease. I do not want to go into the particularities of my life. And because time is short, there will be no comments, no contact address.
Hard to prove false when literally no information is given.
These two lines are interesting though:
>I am 58 years old and I never will 59. I will die in 2013.
>Yesterday, I had the whole life ahead of me. Thirty or forty years, at least. Today thirty days.
Either he's losing track of his lies, he's bad at math or he has unrealistic expectations about life expectancy. If a 58 year old had "thirty or forty years, at least" ahead of him that means that he was expecting to live to "at least" 98 years old.
EDIT: Here are links to Day 2 and Day 3 translations.
At the age of close to 60 I'd assume that you would have some indications of whether you'd live short or past the average life expectancy. Obviously with no guarantees...
Of course, the trend could accelerate, but it could also easily plateau (or even reverse in an extreme case, perhaps due to environmental influences). Current trends don't seem to show 100-year average life expectancy before 2100.
* Edit: this was combined stats for men and women. For men, you can subtract a few years, and for women, add a few. Also, I realise I'm just linearly extrapolating the data, but it's not like the data shows some kind of exponential growth; if anything, it's flattening out.
This is important because I don't think that life expectancy for a 60yr old has changed dramatically ... it's just infant care is better, so fewer people die <5 yrs old, and that raises the long term average too.
This might suggest that your estimate is too liberal — not too exciting. On the other hand, we are working hard, as a society, on some gnarly medical issues, and it's possible we'll make a huge break through and figure out how to deal with obesity, heart disease, or cell aging and totally change the situation over the next few decades.
1. They did not die during their first year of birth. About 6 babies in 1000 die during the first year of birth in the US. 2. They did not die as a youth from depression or driving their car into a tree.
That being said, this histogram (logarithmic scale) suggests that one's odds of living to 100 are still somewhat low: http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/number.jpg
I've never seen anyhing to back up your assertion. Do you have a source for your life expectancy prediction?
Source for historic life expectancy: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
Also isn't it funy how incredible things are always "20 years away"? You might want to rewatch the movies 2001 and 2010 to see where many people thought we would be technologically over a decade ago.
"Do you have a source for your life expectancy prediction?"
I can't get to it now, as I'm sitting on it. In other words, I'm not a biologist and I was making a wild guess. I was trying to make the point that our life expectancies may be significantly longer than we think because they are partly the product of medical knowledge that does not exist now but will be created during our lives. But I should not have used a specific number.
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html
According to that, a 58 ear old male in 2009 can expect to live to 80. That link represents the best information we have available today. Could there be some miracle cure for aging in the next 20 years? Probably not but maybe. Will it help the person who is 78 when it is discovered? Almost definitely not - the aging damage has been done!
I'll give you a few example: "Can I steal this from you?" => "I'm certain you are OK with me borrowing this for 2 minutes.". "Buy enough beer for 3 dozen people" => "We're 6 but we really want to have a good time."
I think most of your clues are inconclusive, but I don't care one way or another. I'm just going to sit back, relax and hope that the emotions I feel from this blog are less real than the actual blog. Because that is what a story is, and one way or another this man is telling a story.
Hey, you forget how health care is so great in France :p
You had much experience of being told you have 30 days to live?
[Edit] Link to twitter https://twitter.com/uncondamne/following
>Mon fils me montre comrent tweeter depuis mon téléphone. Tweeter me suggère de suivre plein de journalistes. Amusant!
>My son shows me how to use tweeter from my phone. Tweeter suggests me to follow a lot of journalists. Funny !
It may very well be that the story is true. But when you see obvious giveaways, not only is it valid to doubt what is written but in my opinion a damn public service. I felt sad after reading the post, reflecting on my own mortality, and fleeting times. Then I felt sadder that some A-Hole may be deliberately trying to manipulate negative emotions. Perhaps nothing is off limits.
While posting a comment, stating the story is sad, might be redundant. But, posting a comment about some silver lining might be a common response. My siblings and I laughed at some of the funny events about my dad did while transporting his body to the cemetery. The feeling of grief was overwhelming and that was a coping mechanism.
That being said, given the level of info that was passed on, one might be more enamored by the blog and twitter and translate, as they try to cope with the terror or death. Smells a lot to me like PR company BS. While I suspected it when reading the post, looking thru the HN comments showed that my suspicions weren't unfounded.
All your plans and goals can be achieved in one day. You finish the day reaching your goals. You wake up next day, find yourself alive, you make new goals for that day only.
Rinse. Repeat.
For example, see http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Lan... and http://www.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?Lan...
Where FR>EN fails is vocabulary. This text, as you see, is really basic terminology, nothing technical. The French categorize things very differently in technical texts sometimes - to the point of despair for the translator. Google tends to do OK on that to a point, then fail in alarming ways when you least expect it.
That's basically the M.O. of all completely automated systems though. Especially when concerning non-trivial things like language translation. Stuff like that requires intelligence in many cases to choose the right word based on the context and information the speaker is trying to communicate.
A text translated "word for word" to English from French, using the later grammar, will almost look readable. Strange but not really wrong.
Most errors will be from an over-usage of perfect tenses ("I have visited" vs "I visited") and wrong superlatives ("most fast" vs "fastest"), as these are the biggest differences between the two languages.
His post is written in very clear, straightforward French with few or no fancy flourishes that might complicate the translation. My French is decidedly not the best, and I have no problem reading the original at a decent tempo - there's the odd word missing from my vocabulary that I had to figure out, but that's it.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Frenc...)
Of course you lose a lot of the original's quality, but at least you can understand what you read.
Many wonder if fake. Not much evidence pointing one way or the other.
But I guess almost twenty year of Internet can make you a bit over-suspicious :)
It's an interesting writing and life experience in any case !
Edit: Well, this shows that I'm not a doctor. I have no idea if Hepatitis C can kill as quickly as this. Maybe he was diagnosed very late and his malady already is at its final stage?
lol no! you lost something in translation...
Such sentence is very common in my (Belgian) entourage.
This is also why he adds he is smiling.
I would guess that it's metastatic cancer. Mentioning the liver is an indication. Once the liver's involved, cancer gets very hard to treat. Typical chemotherapy is killing the cancer by flooding the body with poison, and doing that when the liver's compromised is often fruitless (and painful).
Most likely, the doctors have stopped treatment, in which case 30 days is a reasonable median, but he'll be essentially functional until the last 2 weeks. However, there are cases (although they're quite rare) of people living for months or even years after that happens. Spontaneous remission is uncommon (less than 1%) but it does occur. That's yet another reason why doctors don't like giving specific timelines.
What this man is expressing is real. I can confirm it is real, because as a human I can feel many of the same things, as I read it. Whether he will die in 30 days or not, we don't know. And you can, of course, argue about that all day long. You might even be quite put out if he does not. But whether he is having these thoughts and feelings because he is about to die, or whether he is simply exploring these thoughts and feelings because he is a human (and facing death like us all), they are no less real. You may call one fiction because the man does not die on cue, but after reading it, I say it is not fake.
Another couple of those and real people with real problems or calls for help will find it impossible to be heard.
If this is real I hope he makes the most of whatever time he's got left.
If it's not fake, I hope he keeps up like this until the inevitable.
Ah, and before I forget, he's certainly right with a lot of things, fake or not.
I can't even imagine the understanding of my own mortality where I could say "See you tomorrow... Maybe." and actually mean it.
A form of self mockery.
I think I'd like to travel. Not sure.
<Well, I think my son must have created and configured the blog.
He is an engineer and he isn't sure?