I apologise if this topic has been covered before, but if any doctors or medical students are watching, I'd like to know what kind of fatal illness can (a) strike at the age of 24; (b) can be diagnosed while the patient is still symptom-free; (c) allow the patient a peaceful and painless death while still looking as good as Ali McGraw. I know this is the movies, not life, but there should be some relationship, be it ever so tenuous, between the two.
sharethanks for the title man, in top 5 threads on the frontpage yours is at the top, for someone who hasnt watched :/
shareIt is surprising why the disease is not explicitly mentioned and we, the audience is left to guess that is likely to be cancer.
Its that man again!!
Spoiler Alert?
shareJenny's doctor recommended a hematologist, which means the disease of blood. So she died of a disease of blood, probably leukemia.
shareI had just started working in hospitals back in 70; over the next few years, I saw a couple of young people die of leukemia. It seemed strange; all we saw outwardly, was they were very tired, sometimes had a low fever. Other than looking generally 'sickly'(pale, weak), they looked pretty normal. But died within a day or two after coming into the hospital. Apparently they had known for a little while that they were soon about to die, perhaps not knowing exactly when. I was just a nurses aide then (they changed the job description to 'nursing assistant' after AIDS was diagnosed); I didn't have a lot of experience. But I was sort of surprised, too, at how fast they died after it just looked that they were just weak and tired. Back then, they didn't know how to treat it at all in smaller hospitals, the big ones like in New York City in the movie might have had experimental treatments, but also, back then, that wasn't covered by insurance to if you didn't have the money, you were essentially just going to die.
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