This may sound condescending but: you sound young, not disabled, and extremely sheltered from being exposed to disabled people.
I am in a position to be intimately familiar with illness. I will say that health is a spectrum and the mind is incredibly resilient. You will surprise yourself as you inevitably age how much your mind will adapt to always hurting. There is more to life than body discomfort. This patient sounds like he has his faculties and is making an informed decision to continue living, because his life is worth the discomfort he is going through. I am reminded of a line along the lines of every day you experience, no matter how terrible, is very likely a day that someone else yesterday would have desperately wanted.
There has been recent attention on what treatments oncologists choose for themselves when diagnosed with terminal illnesses—having seen firsthand what happens to quality of life for their patients—and what members of the general population choose.
Doctors tend to choose the treatments that bias quality of life over quantity of life. That’s all I’m getting at here. I personally hope that if it ever comes to it, I will have the strength to choose something like three months of high QoL over one year of grinding daily misery as I have personally seen others do.
Having your skin fail to regenerate, bleeding everywhere, and having skin that looks like you’ve had aqua regia poured over it seems to me like a poor quality of life. It sounded like a life of pain and one in which it would be difficult to do a lot of the things that bring me joy. Perhaps it’s not as bad as it sounds, and this is a poor example of it. I’m not judging this guy for his choices; they’re his to make. And maybe I’ve overestimated the amount of pain he’s in. But from the description above, it sounded awful.
I find both the honesty and tact of your comment a generous gift. After watching the Sasse interview, reading the parent comment and reading your comment, I’m reminded abstractly how much of the emotional and psychological work of reconciling biological mortality is built on personal cognitive context that a mind-body builds over its cycles living in the world. So much about mortality is shared. But so much of the context for interpreting mortality is radically personal.