Just in case you wanted an idea of how you're going to pop off at some point decades down the road, here's a good snapshot, per Fox News:
Each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) releases a list of the leading causes of death among U.S. adults. ...
Among a total of 3.46 million deaths in the year 2021 (the most recent year for which data is available), 74.5% of these deaths were attributed to 10 causes, according to a Thursday press release from USAFacts.
Here's the list, with associated mortality counts:
1. Heart disease: 695,547
2. Cancer: 605,213
3. COVID-19: 416,893
4. Accidents: 224,935
5. Stroke: 162,890
6. Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 142,342
7. Alzheimer's disease: 119,399
8. Diabetes: 103,294
9 Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis: 56,585
10. Kidney disease: 54,358
That looks like it about checks out. Heart disease has always been a bad one in the U.S. Cancer too. And we're a notoriously accident-prone people, God bless us.
I'm a bit dubious about "COVID-19" in there. Health officials have been chronically prone to over-diagnosing COVID over the past three years. It seems like if you've had COVID anytime in the last six months, and you die for any reason, they'll chalk it up to the virus. There are pretty obvious reasons why.
The good news is, a lot of these problems are pretty preventable.
But I'm not going to leave it there. No, you come to Not The Bee for the goods, and while you're probably gonna die from one of these things, 25% of you won't. With that in mind, here's a few of the weirdest ways people have died in the last year, which can be found on this handy running list over at Wikipedia.
- A 30-year-old Wichita man was killed in his truck when his dog stepped on his rifle in the backseat and pulled the trigger.
- A Brazilian man decided it was a good idea to bring a gun to an MRI scan for his mom and the weapon pulled out of his waistband and fired (if you're stupid enough to do this, at least use a Kydex holster, fam).
- An 82-year-old man in India was killed when a train hit a cow and launched it 100 feet into him.
- A 72-year-old Italian man was killed when a shelf in his warehouse broke, crushing him under thousands of pounds of Grana Padano cheese.
- An elderly couple was killed when a Denny's sign fell on their car in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.
Just for extra fun, here are a few notable deaths from history:
- The Egyptian Pharoah Menes was carried off and eaten by a hippo.
- The Greek poet Anacreon choked on a grape stone.
- Henry I of England died from eating too many lamprey eels.
- Henry II of France got a splinter in his eye while in the audience at a jousting tournament that festered and turned into a full-blown infection.
- French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully stabbed himself with a staff while conducting and refused to have the infected foot amputated because he didn't want to lose the ability to dance.
- A man named John Cummings tried to eat LITERAL KNIVES and managed to "pass" up to 14 at ONE TIME but then he swallowed 20 and died after FOUR LONG YEARS IN PAIN in 1809.
- Allan Pinkerton, who founded the Pinkerton Agency that inspired the Secret Service, tripped on the sidewalk and bit his tongue, which became infected and killed him.
- In 1888, an Iraqi man died when a meteorite shower fell on his village, making him the only known person to have died from falling space rocks.
- King Alexander of Greece died from an infection in 1920 when he was bit by a pet monkey while breaking up a fight between his German shepherd and another pet monkey.
Alright, I'll stop there because you can only take so much in one setting.
Just remember: We're all gonna go one day (hopefully a long time from now, God willing). How you get there and how you go matters, so live well!
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