So when I'm caught up on my regular threads I like to explore the farms for interesting new content, and one of the listed Happenings today was a thread I'd briefly looked at last year when it was fresh and never stayed current on:
StoneMan Warrior, who was an absolute raging schizophrenic who thought that the Screen Actor's Guild of America was out to assassinate him with squads of roving lions (yes, real lions) and Electric Company maintenance workers and that he was the last surviving human in Oregon who wasn't some sort of SAG replacement-bogeyman. He's in happenings today because apparently he's been confirmed dead, after an increasingly dire slide into oblivion since about March of this year.
The relevance to this thread is that (at least based on where I am in the thread, admittedly not caught up to ToD yet) he died from something that might be awfully familiar to those here. Foot turned blue/gray from diabetic neuropathy, sores on his shins opened, spread, and turned into huge rampant patches of infection eating up most of his leg. Went to the doctor, doctor said 'holy shit that's probably cellulitis and you need to go to the hospital like yesterday', and he convinced himself that it was all some sort of evil conspiracy by the SAG to assassinate him or something. Didn't go to the hospital. Shit keeps spreading. As of April in the thread he was starting to develop blurred vision, fever, constant pain, and weakness. It was looking pretty grim, and based on knowing how this ends if not the details I'm assuming it went exactly as one might expect.
This dude was raging, batshit schizophrenic and yet all I could think about was Lou's last brush with terminal idiocy. I think this dude's leg(s) had to be amputated before the end and it still didn't save him. The general consensus by the thread readers was that it was a horrifying example of the system failing the vulnerable; he was liveblogging his leg rotting off on tumblr, complete with pictures and novel-length explanations showing he was clearly not in his right mind, and Kiwis were desperately calling the local authorities begging for them to come do some sort of involuntary commitment before this dude died... but he did anyways.
It was just really horrifying to read, and sad, and also kind of infuriating because all I could think of was the damn Foothole Saga. Lou had no excuse other than his own absolute pigheadedness and it's only really through luck that he didn't lose a hell of a lot more than foot bone, while this guy clearly wasn't capable of getting help and died for it despite everyone's best efforts. Next time you're obsessively reading this thread, Lou, you should take a gander through that thread and see what could happen the next time you decide to just ignore your problems because you'd rather have titty kitty art.