I know a couple who are in the final stages of their life, and have purchased a suicide machine to use when the time comes.
That time was apparently Sunday, when they tried to use it four times, and ultimately failed.
...
They decided it was time to go, and did the work ... and didn't die.
I'm trying to fathom how one deals with that, mentally. It is now two days later. Two days after they would have passed away. Two more days of eating food. Going to the bathroom. Brushing teeth.
I just can't imagine what kind of headspace that puts a person into...
They have gotten new parts for the machine and are going to try again. Probably this week.
The weird thing to think about is how hard is must have been to make the decision at first. And then, how hard it must be, psychologically, when it didn't work. And then, now, how easy it probably will be the next time.
The mind is a weird place.
(The suicide machine I think they are using is basically a glorified bag over the head with a nitrogen tank attached to it. You turn on the nitrogen, breathe in, your body doesn't get any oxygen - only an inert gas - so you don't feel like you are suffocating, but you do. Very quickly. Apparently you can pass out in under 30 seconds, and be gone in a couple of minutes.)
Yup. That's also why liquid nitrogen tanks ride alone on the elevators -- you won't feel it if it leaks, and it only takes a couple seconds to displace air with evaporating N2. I'm sorry for your loss.Very quickly. Apparently you can pass out in under 30 seconds, and be gone in a couple of minutes.
Back when I mixed in the clubs I grew to detest fog machines. They don't use "fog" they use esters that particulate at low temperatures. More accurately, they're "smoggers" (that smell like bad suntan lotion because the cheapest "flavor" is "coconut"). I did some work on using liquid nitrogen because (A) it makes a nice clean fog that (B) dissipates quickly and also (C) cools down the club quite effectively, which is handy because those places are generally the Devil's armpit but at the time, nitrogen toxicity was tough to map, calculating airchanges per hour in a club environment is a nightmare and as you said, there's no warning so I decided there was no real mechanism to prevent a Lake Nyos situation. Not two years later? Some outfit in Florida started doing installs. They made all the magazines. I wrote 'em to see how they'd gotten around the toxicity problem. They never wrote back. They did uninstall all their systems a month later.
Imagine if that was someone's wake-up call. But, yeah, as you said, this is a very tricky thing to account for and balance/circulate. I've been marveling at how space stations or submarines do their atmosphere for years, but it'd never occur to me in a club. A colleague from chemistry department once told me he detected an argon leak by noticing the air seemed to get dryer by the minute. Left station to check the read on the wall, started hyperventilating, connected the dots in time.I wrote 'em to see how they'd gotten around the toxicity problem.
I am one hundred percent convinced it was someone's wake-up call. Remember - this is the industry that brought you the Fyre Festival. The one article I saw mentioned that they had a couple pass out at one of the hotter clubs and realized that maybe there weren't a whole lot of safeguards associated with it. But then, this is the nightclub industry, so their Wikipedia page is still up. Which probably prompted copycats. And hey - maybe for $85k someone will actually pay for safety monitoring.
Had a Zoom call with them last night. There was a lot of euphemistic terms thrown around, and implications, and, honestly, embarrassment. But I think they just went with a nasal cannula, and didn't do anything to reduce the oxygen they were breathing in. So no 02 deprivation so no death. They were talking about the old hose in the tailpipe technique... but they have a newer car with a catalytic converter, and that's just not going to work on any reasonable timescale. They may have lost their nerve. And yet, they are so deeply unhappy... I wish our medical system was more humane.