Animated Views Celebrity Obituary Thread

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GeorgeC

Post by GeorgeC » March 18th, 2009, 12:15 am

Falling and hitting your head on SNOW isn't going to cause a problem.

IF she did experience headaches and so on, she probably had a pre-existing undiagnosed condition. Weak blood vessel or something else, who knows? Hopefully, it IS just brain swelling... but even that can be bad if she doesn't respond to treatment. This happens all the time. Whether it's cerebral hemorrhage or not, I don't know. The hospital and her physicians are doing the right thing by keeping clamped up about it. Unfortunately, since she IS a celebrity it just fuels the rumor mills and sows confusion. There is no choice but disclosure about what happened. The family press conference tomorrow (Wednesday) should sort this out. Fingers crossed for GOOD news...

John Ritter had an undiagnosed problem with one of his major arteries and died from internal bleeding. Very painful death from what I understand. There was nothing the hospital's doctors could do for him at that point in time which is why I'm sort of upset with his widow and her lawsuit against the hospital.

Contrast that to what happened to Dennis Quaid's young kids. Somebody at THAT hospital (Cedar-Sinai which is a WELL-regarded hospital) screwed up big time on the doses of medicine they gave his twins and nearly killed them! Quaid was right in his suit and hopefully that woke somebody up and convinced them to change procedures at C-S.

Medicine is probably one of the roughest and most stressful fields to get into. Short of being in the military, there's no other field with jobs top to bottom that literally involve life and death situations every day. Add on top of that people who believe that the money mill for medicine is endless and look to get a quick cash settlement. There are far too many nuisance lawsuits and lawsuits that have little-to-no-merit like the Ritter case.

GeorgeC

Post by GeorgeC » March 18th, 2009, 9:24 am

http://www.people.com/people/article/0, ... 50,00.html


She's dead. All but officially confirmed.

There's been too many leaks and several family friends and insiders have confirmed yesterday's reports.



http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,509586,00.html

The above is speculation on what happened to her. One doctor believes there was bleeding between her school and brain. The pressure caused by the blood build-up may have ultimately been what caused her brain-death.

Another speculation is related to her smoking. She may have had advanced arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arterioles/small arteries) -- a symptom of smoking -- and when she fell and hit her head it caused an arteriole (/arterioles) in her brain or the space between her brain and skull to break. The damage was slight enough at first that she appeared okay but got progressively worse and she started displaying symptoms of arteriole damage -- first headaches and unsteadiness, later unconscioness, then ultimately death.

I'm sure an autopsy will be done and they'll find out the exact cause...


Other than that, pray for her family.

She appears to have been a nice lady and had two kids and a husband who from all reports is a good guy, too.

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Post by Ben » March 18th, 2009, 12:05 pm

Maybe we should just have opened a "Death Watch with GeorgeC" thread?

GeorgeC

Post by GeorgeC » March 18th, 2009, 12:58 pm

I get what you're saying Ben, but I won't do that with people...

Businesses are mostly monolithic economic entities. They come and go. Remember them, but don't mourn them.

People can't be reduced to numbers and shouldn't. They're individuals and unique. I can definitely relate to that loss and understand how people can't forget lost loved ones.

I do feel bad for this lady.

What happened to her is one of these one-in-a-million freak accidents.

She was not a drug addict, horrible person, or even necessarily A-list entertainer.

Nobody deserves this but you can't predict when these accidents are going to happen.

Even if you have the best eating habits, health care, and do absolutely nothing wrong -- how many of us can claim that? -- life is so fragile and can escape from you in a split second.

Remember, Sonny Bono and that member of the Kennedy family HIT trees while they were skiing. The Kennedy fellow was playing a game of football while skiing so he really wasn't paying full attention to the environment in front of him! Natasha Richardson just hit her head on snowy ground on a Beginner's Ski Slope. Now, it's just up to an autopsy to show exactly what happened neurologically.

At least Ms. Richardson had a good marriage and a chance to start a decent family. That's more than many people in this world get.

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Post by Randall » March 18th, 2009, 10:36 pm

I'm a health care professional in "real life", and have treated people with brain injuries, strokes, etc. After hearing the news and reading the stories about Ms. Richardson, my best guess was that she likely had an undiagnosed aneurysm prior to the fall. If that's the case, a person could have died at any time in the near future, with the fall triggering an aneurysm to burst earlier. But, like I said, it's just a guess.

I'll be curious to hear the autposy results. Whatever the cause, it does sound like a freak thing.

GeorgeC

Post by GeorgeC » March 19th, 2009, 4:12 am

Aneurysms/strokes are nasty things. Even if people DO survive, they're not always the same person.

A member of one of my two sister's classes suffered an aneurysm in the Eighth Grade. She survived but had to relearn how to write with her other hand and her behavior/personality was just not the same after the incident. It was very bizarre and much less responsible than before.

One of my Dad's best friends, who is now deceased going on six years, suffered a stroke in his late sixties. While he came back from it, he was noticeably slower and not as limber as before. At least he maintained his speech and personality...

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Post by Ben » March 19th, 2009, 5:21 pm

GeorgeC wrote:I get what you're saying Ben, but I won't do that with people...
Nah...you just called the thread RIP before the poor lady had passed away! :(

GeorgeC

Post by GeorgeC » March 19th, 2009, 7:57 pm

The brain-death got called in the media the day it happened, Ben.

That wasn't me.

I wish there hadn't been the mess there was for a day or so. That is a major problem of the era we live in. Information can be transmitted so fast that it can as many headaches as resolutions. Hopefully, it gets reported well. There have been wars over poorly transmitted and misunderstood information.

The confusion that followed for 24 hours was the doing of the family AND the media. There were leaks coming from family friends and from people who understood that "private jet" back to New York does not mean airlift to a better hospital facility with a chance of recovery. They knew she was gone already in Quebec.

I'm not sure exactly who doesn't understand this out there, but once you're brain-dead that's it. You're not coming back. It's not the same thing as a coma where there's hope a person's body (the central nervous system, brain, seat of personality/soul) will recover and you stand a chance of being able to function as an independent person and communicate with other people. It's been over 30 years of people existing in vegetative states in hospitals and homes with all the machinery hooked up to them and some people still don't understand that.

Granted, some people come out of comas years after they went in but I think medicine (thanks to MRI/CT) has advanced to the point they know who's coming back and who's not. The shorter the period of a coma, the less brain damage is done, too. A coma is not the same thing as a vegetative state.

People in the news media just aren't that generally well-educated in science, economics, politics, and about a million other things. It's unfortunate they comment on so many things they don't understand instead of just reporting the facts. That's part of the reason the world is in the shape it is.

I'm not sure what the point is in keeping someone on life-support unless A) the family and closest friends all to see see the person before the final decision to remove the machines is made; and B) the family is following requests of an organ donor in which case you keep the body connected to machines as long as possible to keep those organs healthy for the recipients prior to removal. Once you disconnect from machines, with no brain function, the organ systems will shut down and tissues will start to die from luck of nutrients and oxygen.

Speaking as someone who's had to make at least one life-and-death decision (and this was for a pet -- and it STILL hurts nearly a decade later), that kind of decision is something that stays with you for the rest of your life. Understanding about quality of life and discussing it with your significant others is very important when something like this happens...

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Post by Ben » March 20th, 2009, 9:30 am

Whatever the situation, slapping a RIP sticker on it before the fact was a little harsh, even though the outcome was inevitable. I know that although we had to let my Aunt go in much the same way, we never thought of her as gone until the last breath left her body (and <I>that's</I> a decision that never leaves you when it's another human being).

Anyway, it's a sad fact that she's gone now...let's leave it at that.

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Ken Annakin RIP

Post by Ben » April 24th, 2009, 5:23 pm

One of my favorite directors has passed away:
http://animated-views.com/2009/that-mag ... n-annakin/

I can't, as I say in my write up, recommend his autobigoraphy enough.

GeorgeC

Bea Arthur joins Estelle Getty in the Great Beyond -- RIP

Post by GeorgeC » April 25th, 2009, 6:54 pm

http://www.imdb.com/news/ni0760328/

Bea Arthur, the actress best known for playing Dorothy in "The Golden Girls" and Maude in the comedy series of the same named passed away early Saturday. She was 86 and had been suffering from an unspecified form of cancer for some time...


... And another comedy icon passes on.

RIP.

GeorgeC

Post by GeorgeC » April 26th, 2009, 2:17 am

I forgot!

Arthur also did a guest voiceover on Futurama!

She was the voice of the Femputor on the planet of the Amazons!

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Post by Sunday » April 26th, 2009, 11:39 am

Deadpool:

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Post by Ben » April 27th, 2009, 4:53 am

Don't forget the infamous <I>Star Wars Holiday Special</I>! ;)

GeorgeC

Post by GeorgeC » April 27th, 2009, 6:58 am

I thought we were honoring her....

Oh well, everybody's got things they'd wish the audience would forget! :oops:

'Sides, wasn't Art Carney in that awful special, too?

I saw the Star Wars Holiday Special when it was originally broadcast but barely remembered anything about it except that it had the Boba Fett cartoon. I certainly didn't remember the heavy mascara on Mark Hamill's face, the awful singing, and the canned comedy and "Wookie life harvest" festival.

The good things I DID remember pretty much got ruined years later when I downloaded a RealPlayer version of the entire special years later! :lol:

I understand now why Lucas wants to burn all the copies of the Special. Frankly, I'd keep the Boba Fett cartoon and re-release it with The Empire Strikes in a future home video edition as an extra and burn the rest of the "Special" footage along with the prequels... Won't happen, though, since all the "bad Star Wars" was made by other people -- at least in George Lucas' mind.

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