There are a few prion diseases that are absolutely horrible. I believe one of them causes you to be unable to sleep until you go mad.

Anything that makes you aware that you’re slowly losing touch with reality and control of your body or causes you to mistreat the people who love you.

There are so many things that would be fighting for last place honestly. Idk, being stuck deep in a cave Nutty Putty style for days, barely able to breathe, arms pinned totally by my side, legs all twisted, total darkness. Slowly suffocating as the blood pools in my head and I become delirous.

That terrifies me so much. But idk, there are so many horrific ways to die. There are many cases of people being tortured to death over weeks or even months if they somehow survive that long.

There are also a bunch of diseases that are all around awful and terrifying. That syndrome where you are trapped inside your own body, total unable to move anything but you are aware of everything around you, maybe would be the most horrific.

Idk, too many horrible ways to suffer and die in this world…

For me, it’s any situation where you know you’re fucked but can’t do anything to stop the inevitable.

Give me instantaneous death where idk what happened or a slow progression of disease where death would eventually be a welcome relief. It’s the in between that freaks me out.

Being wrapped tightly in untreated canvas, soaked in hot water, and then the canvas begins to shrink.

Being buried alive.

It’s easy to become desensitized to, since many of us see crosses frequently, but death by crucifixion is absolutely horrible.

Least preferred way in the disease category would be any disease that slowly erodes the mind and body. Being unable to move or know where I am, who are those around me sounds terrifying, not to mention the burden (financial and emotional) it would be on my family. No thanks.

Now for “mechanical” I’m not totally sure what this means but a similar logic applies. Of the classic methods of execution I think getting burned alive would be probably the last choice, but I’d take that before slow torture that’s for sure

Some kind of dementia. It’s a cancer of the soul which arbitrarily removes parts of you that you can’t even perceive the loss of. I had an MS patient whose vocal processing was reduced to the point that he could only say variations of “you fucking bitch”. He was totally bed-bound and dependent on a mostly female nursing staff for every single need. Most of those employees were burned out and he could only communicate to them using a wildly misogynistic slur. I’ve seen it reduce a famous AIDS researcher and a WW2 pilot to toddlers, others to cornered raccoons, for some it’s a nightmare they can never wake up from and they just spend all day/night reliving their worst memories. For a good 10% on the ward it just takes away their executive function and they can no longer control their worst impulses or recognise that they should.

Cancer and strokes are a close second for more or less the same reason, but dementia is so existentially terrifying to me.

Blood eagle, iron maiden, rat torture (method where rats were placed in a container and heated, forcing them to gnaw through the victim’s body to escape), brazen bull, lingchi.

Or anything from the spaniah inquisition

I guess the sandpaper room would be pretty far down on the list.

Being slowly crushed from the feet up by a machine that no one has the ability to stop, while everyone looks on in horror.

Or, more realistically, anything that involves mental deterioration.

Rats and a heated bucket against your stomach

Where the F are serious mental health conditions? When your appearance seems intact from the outside, but inside your reality slowly yet steadily derodes, and there’s no way to help it. Going insane. That’s for me the last one. Prefer physical pain over losing touch with reality.

fire or drowning probably