character cause of death

rachelpaige98

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I'm revisiting an old novel project and I have a character that dies right at the end of natural causes, but I don't know exactly from what. I need to know, so hopefully you all can help with that.
I'm really not picky about what it physically looks like, so I'll describe the timeline I have and have you tell me what it sounds like to you.
Initially, he's at school (Thursday) trying to convince his friends he's just stressed/tired, but they don't believe him and finally make him go home at lunch. He stays home the following day as well and Monday evening he ends up at the hospital. He dies the following afternoon.

Again, I'm not picky what this literally looks like, it just needs to follow that basic idea. It does have to be sudden, because that's kinda the point of the novel. So it can't be cancer or some other long-term health condition.

Let me know what it sounds like to you! I've tried to figure it out myself and I'm at a complete loss of ideas!
Thanks!
 

frimble3

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Well, there are news stories of teen-age athletes who die on the court of undiagnosed heart-problems. No-one knew there was anything wrong with them. Or, a leaking brain aneurysm? Probably seems like bad headaches until the end.
It probably can't be too dramatically bad, or more than his friends would notice, and the staff would send him to the first-aid office, or call an ambulance, just in case.
 

benbenberi

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There are also news stories about healthy young people (inc children) who die very quickly of sepsis, in a sequence very much like you describe (from minor malaise to rush-to-the-hospital to coma/total organ failure/death in a matter of days, sometimes hours). Meningitis can also do that sometimes.
 

cmhbob

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Blown aneurysm. Pretty much immediate, usually with no warning.

There's also the aortic dissection that killed John Ritter. His took place over a few hours, not a few days.

Meningitis was also on my list of ideas.
 

PVick

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Heart defects tend to kill either very quickly or fairly slowly.
I like Benbenberi’s sepsis idea; once that kind of infection sets in it can be really hard to turn around and can move very quickly. It’s pretty nonspecific too so you don’t have to get bogged down in too many details.
Any kind of internal bleeding can start with fatigue and take a few days to kill. Kids also tend to compensate for blood loss much better than adults such that their condition doesn’t appear as severe as it is. Once they start decompensating though it’s usually too late to do anything.
If you want to give a more specific diagnosis check out an epidural hematoma. Head trauma (getting hit with a baseball at practice, for example) can cause bleeding in between the brain and skull. The blood presses on the brain, squishing it out of place. Initially the patient may be lucid, but will develop headache, nausea, and confusion, and eventually coma and brain death. It can kill within 24 hours if it’s a fast bleed and/or the brainstem is herniated. You can play around with the timing of the progression by making the bleed faster or slower. The prognosis is good if it’s caught early and the patient can get to surgery, but if this is an otherwise healthy kid he probably won’t be rushed to the hospital for a bad headache. Let him go to sleep with a really bad headache and be found in a coma the next morning.
 

neandermagnon

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If you want the character to be ill on Thursday but not die until the Monday, then sudden death due to an undiagnosed heart condition is probably too quick. A former colleague died of this and she went from totally fine to dead within an hour. When this happens to young sportsmen (quite a few cases seen in the news) they just drop dead in the middle of a game. Meningitis and sepsis also kill more quickly (a friend survived meningitis she went from fine to almost dying within 24hrs), however they can be complications of other illnesses (i.e. starts off as one illness/infection which develops into sepsis and/or meningitis) so he could be ill with the original infection on the Thurdsay, then it develops into sepsis and/or meningitis on the Monday and he dies Monday evening.

Quite a few other illnesses may kill within a few days. Diphtheria may be a possibility - it's rare nowadays due to vaccination however if there's a reason why he didn't have the vaccine, he could get it. There have been isolated cases of it in unvaccinated people, the wikipedia page gives these examples: "In early June 2015, a case of diphtheria was diagnosed at Vall d'Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, Spain. The 6-year-old child who died of the illness had not been previously vaccinated due to parental opposition to vaccination.[51] It was the first case of diphtheria in the country since 1986 as reported by "El Mundo"[52] or from 1998, as reported by WHO.[53] In March 2016, a 3-year-old girl died of diphtheria in the University Hospital of Antwerp, Belgium.[54]" This or other vaccine-preventable illnesses (e.g. measles that develops into encephalitis - complications are apparently more common if you get the illness as an adult) may fit the bill, as long as there's a reason why he hasn't been vaccinated. There may be other illnesses and you might be able to find information about different ones on medical websites.

Personally, I think him having a fairly routine infection which develops into sepsis is probably the most likely scenario, given that sepsis is common. Lots of people think they haven't heard of it, because it used to be called septicaemia/blood poisoning but the name changed as it's now known it's not caused by the infection poisoning the blood, but by the immune system's reaction to the infection.
 
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