For all our lovable foibles, the human species can’t quit its most pronounced quirk: We overthink death to death.
On the subject the mind often wanders to Woody Allen, the messiah of mortem meditation and mirth.
The king of kicking the bucket nicely sums up humanity’s secret confession: “I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
While wintering in Florida, I’ve cultivated a freak worst-case scenario in which I’m unceremoniously pounded by a killer coconut dislodged from a towering palm tree.
One could only hope such a cool way to go would become an instant classic cover of The Post: “Killer coconuts whacked by killer coconuts.”
It’s a more tropical version of my usual death scenario: getting pushed onto an oncoming train on a New York City subway platform.
If I harbor any irrational fear about a cinematic demise, I’m in good company: Some of history’s most indelible figures foresaw their own death — Abraham Lincoln portended being shot, while Mark Twain and Winston Churchill prophesied their end days.
To say nothing of the ruthless rulers who condemn their poor minions to guinea pigs lest they be poisoned. Vladimir Putin’s notorious paranoia of being poisoned to death has gainfully employed a glut of nervous taste-testers over the years.
We’re a species who lives in fear of death. Indeed, obsessing about croaking is practically killing us.
While none of us is an immortal Greek god — as far as we know — a new volume details everything from strep throat to snake bites, serial killers to cyanide poisoning, coupled with the lifesaving tools to survive them.
In her debut book, “99 Ways to Die: And How to Avoid Them,” author Ashely Alker, MD, a self-styled board-certified “death escapologist,” bestows fascinating insights on a concept that touches every life, on a conscious or subconscious level: survival.
With equal parts panache and humanity, the emergency-medicine doctor who “confronts death daily” seamlessly blends serious medical advice with wit and storytelling. She shares her firsthand knowledge of flesh-eating bacteria (the kind of “rapidly spreading bacteria that liquefies flesh into zombie goop”) to the handiwork of a sociopathic serial killer (“They aren’t who you think they are, and that’s kind of terrifying”).
Yet the educator who’s passionate about public health and preventative care “even though it’s bad for business” said she wrote a book detailing some awfully stomach-churning ways to go expressly “to prevent emergency-department visits.”
“People think of the ER as chaos,” said the doc, who endearingly explains how to survive the most common (and most terrifying) causes of death. “But what it really is is a classroom about how fragile — and fixable — life can be.”
Indeed, the 39-year-old California native spent much of her young life thinking about death.
Her mother was diagnosed with lymphoma — and given six months to live — shortly after Alker was born. She would go on to battle severe health issues that included side effects from cancer treatments, two open-heart surgeries, a brain tumor, autoimmune hepatitis and pulmonary hypertension — all before the age of 50 — and died during Alker’s final year of medical school.
Yet the doctor, who now resides outside DC, attested that being exposed to death provided profound appreciation for life and argued that death is preventable — to an extent.
Drawing on her life and her own colorful experiences in the ER throughout many of the chapters — which include explorations of sex, poison, drugs, biological warfare, disease, animals, crime, the elements and more — the tome can be macabre yet surprisingly life-affirming.
“Every time evolution rears its ugly head in the form of a table saw without a safety stop or a loaded gun stored in a front pocket, emergency medicine fights back,” she playfully writes, deftly making complicated medicine accessible — and entertaining.
As a new mom to baby Sophia, Alker writes about the cycle of life, with key survival tips: no honey for kids under the age of 1 and remember they can only drink so much water in their lives’ beginning.
She busts the myth of doctor detachment and coldness, writing she “takes that stuff home” each night, “carrying every loss with you for the rest of your life, and there is nothing that you can do to compartmentalize that away.”
The book, with its sections on how not to die while traveling, how to recognize a stroke and how to avoid carbon-monoxide poisoning, is inherently personal, and all information is actionable.
“They’re all based on things that I’ve actually been through with patients, and patients should know that about their doctors, they go through these things with you and you’re never alone. Even the people who pass away, your doctors will never forget you,” she said.
A section on broken-heart syndrome — one of her “favorite” medical diseases — better known as takotsubo cardiomyopathy or stress-induced cardiomyopathy, is touching.
“It’s the most poetic disease because it shows us how deeply we can love each other,” she said. While our deepest expressions of love don’t cause a heart attack per se, “The heart can literally break due to this emotional stress that’s probably in part caused by epinephrine a.k.a. adrenaline surging in the body.”
Yet the body miraculously mirrors human resilience itself.
The heart can often repair itself — “another thing that I find really beautiful,” she said, invoking the memory of her mom’s death. “We can come back from tragedy.”
“When my mom died, it was either you stop or you keep going. And if you’re gonna keep going, then do it correctly and be empathetic and make a difference in people’s lives and try your best to do something that matters.”
Yet the no-nonsense doc — who sprinkles just the right amount of charming whimsy — plainly explains more sobering themes, despite what we believe from medical entertainment.
“Most patients will not pop up like a spring daisy after CPR. Only 10% of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests will come back to life at all, regaining a heartbeat and then, hopefully, regaining consciousness hours to weeks later. Patients don’t wake up immediately after CPR,” she writes. “Only 10% of births start with the water breaking. Serial killers aren’t diabolical geniuses, just narcissists, and trauma surgeons do not search for bullets.”
She rails against pseudo-scientific snake-oil salesmen, “unqualified, often uneducated” health influencers who spread dangerous misinformation.
Citing the Dunning-Kruger effect — the phenomenon of having just enough information to be dangerous, like knowing only where the gas pedal is but not the brake — the doctor bemoaned how vulnerable people can get conned.
Throwing shade at lifestyle goddess Gwyneth Paltrow — without naming her — Alker blasts the “celebrity convincing followers to place a jade egg in the vagina to strengthen the pelvic floor and balance hormones.” The problem? “The egg only causes infections and unfortunate hunts.”
For so-called trendy diseases, like chronic Lyme, certain well-heeled, Hamptons-based populations have become “a target of medical charlatans and medical businesses alike,” she writes.
“Rightly frustrated patients looking for a diagnosis are sometimes taken advantage of by businesses and practitioners who are aware of the inaccuracies of Lyme testing, but the wrong diagnosis helps no one, and ‘chronic Lyme’ is one of those diagnoses.”
She warns readers to be suspicious of those “offering miracle medical diagnoses and solutions in exchange for out-of-pocket costs.”
Alker stresses no one gets out of here alive — despite the Bryan Johnson, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos types’ quest for immortality.
While no one has cracked immortality — to our knowledge — Alker, also a medical technical consultant and screenwriting editor for TV and film, invoked the new Sundance film “In the Blink of the Eye” with Kate McKinnon.
“I don’t know if immortality is what we need as a species,” she told The Post.
“I understand the fear of death, and I think that’s only natural. I don’t really want to die, but I do think it does make life precious.”
Alker added that the quest for immortality is “evolutionary-driven because it was very important that we didn’t die before creating offspring, but might not be what humanity really needs.”
For those who could very well be missing out on life while trying so hard to cheat death, the doc stresses “balance.”
“I don’t know that immortality is going to solve the problems that we have — it might be something bigger, like empathy,” she said.
“Life is about balance from a personal perspective, but that doesn’t mean you need to die of smallpox – we got rid of it,” she said. “I do my job not just to help people prolong their life, but to help eliminate suffering as much as possible. And I think that a lot of these people that are on a quest for immortality maybe don’t understand suffering the same way that some others do.
“There’s not a lot of people on a quest for immortality that had childhood cancer.”
Being a doctor and experiencing every high and low makes it easier to believe in miracles.
“The important thing is that you don’t need to replace science with miracles,” said Alker, who works in high-pressure environments daily, dealing with the emotional toll of seeing preventable accidents and tragedies. “Understanding our physical world — and the pursuits of math, physics, biology, chemistry — that is something that we’ve done as human beings that created a better world for us.
“We live longer, we live healthier, we can travel, we created our own miracles by understanding science,” she said. There’s space for science and miracles to mingle, “but you need to use the science and be intelligent about your existence.”
Dr. Alker’s five most fascinating ways to die:
Prion diseases
“It’s the only infectious disease that’s spread by proteins,” said the doc. Other prion diseases in humans include fatal familial insomnia, a “universally fatal genetically inherited progressive insomnia where prions destroy the thalamus, the part of the brain controlling the sleep-wake cycle. Eventually, those with this disease can no longer sleep, spending a year in a waking nightmare, surviving an average of 18 months after onset,” she writes, telling The Post, “In most cases that aren’t genetic it’s very preventable.”
Leprosy
“It’s a very interesting disease, often stigmatized throughout history, but it is treatable and actually not as infectious as we thought,” said Dr. Alker, noting a genetic predisposition makes certain people susceptible. “We thought we’re so afraid of this disease that we created colonies and basically forced people to live in these colonies, including one that recently closed in Hawaii, our last leper colony in the United States.”
Carbon monoxide
“About half of US homes don’t have carbon-monoxide detectors,” rails the doctor, who thinks they should be in fire alarms. New homes do roll both into one, but Alker added most homes were built before there were codes, and it isn’t required in homes federally or in most states.
Tetrodotoxin
“Tetrodotoxin is really cool,” explains the doc — the pufferfish poison “basically causes paralysis.” While many other animals have similar toxins, this one is more widely known because the fish are a delicacy in Japan and greater Indonesia.
Serial killers
“Serial killers are interesting,” said Alker, who “unfortunately met one” while she was studying in Cyprus.
“It’s very ironic because the United States has more serial killers than anywhere else. Whether it’s just because we’re better at catching them or we’re a country of sociopaths, I’m not sure.”
