
What My Stroke Taught Me - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/what-my-stroke-taught-me
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Mz
This is a beautiful piece.

I was bedridden at one time and deathly ill. During that time, The Grim Reaper
often sat and wordlessly conversed with me. One day, he dramatically departed.
With that, I knew I would live.

It has never mattered to me if he was "real" or a hallucination, the product
of fever, drugs and sickness. His departure marked an important turning point:
The death watch was over.

My brain is different than it was before those months. My perceptions of the
world and thought patterns were permanently altered. I am more visual or image
oriented, less word oriented.

I find pieces like this particularly meaningful.

------
bertlequant
It's been really hard seeing my dad after he had a stroke. Someone who used to
be so physically active, now seems so fragile when he walks. The hardest part
for him is how drastically his life changed. One day he was working and had a
career he enjoyed, the next day he would never be able to work again in that
field in his former capacity (medicine). It has shown me how resilient people
are, because even though there is a perceptible lag in his speech, he is still
there as he always was.

~~~
blawson
How tragic. Does he work with a speech language pathologist? I understand they
can help meaningfully improve communication abilities in stroke patients.

~~~
abalone
Depends on the stroke. Some people fully recover, some people are left with
permanent deficits despite therapy, some die.

~~~
Pica_soO
One thing i was always amazed by was how flexible the brain is when it comes
to recovery. I saw stroke patience recover speech, although the neurons for it
where partially gone on the x-rays.

~~~
ido
Do they do brain x-rays? I thought that'd be an MRI.

~~~
abalone
They probably meant MRI, but yes, they do CT scans of brains, and this:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiography](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiography)

~~~
ido
Oh yes - didn't even realize CT scans are using x-rays...I somehow associated
the name with that kind of stuff they used to do 20+ years ago when you broke
a bone.

My recent experiences were all CTs, MRIs & ultrasounds.

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jimmywanger
Having a stroke is not a whole lot of fun.

There were two things. First, is the absolute helplessness and your forced
infantilism. The bathroom is probably the most dangerous room in the house for
you (you're not allowed anywhere close to the kitchen) and depending on your
symptoms, you're not able to situate yourself on the toilet or wipe yourself
properly. Having somebody else wipe your ass when you're an adult is not going
to appear on the highlight reel of your life. Neither is shitting yourself
because you couldn't get your pants off quickly enough before you had to go to
the bathroom.

The second thing is the cost. The purported cost of a stroke is about 500k,
and that's the negotiated cost when you have good medical insurance, and they
pay for a private room and therapy. I don't want to think about what happens
when you're indigent and forced to deal with Medicare. I don't know if you
just get warehoused in a shared room and flipped a couple of times a day to
prevent bedsores.

Guys, get that blood pressure checked regularly, and if it's high, do
something about it.

~~~
plg
re: bathroom --- what about Japanese-style auto-clean, auto-dry toilets?

~~~
jimmywanger
The way they're set up is not very useful. First, the ones I've used either
have a wireless control panel mounted somewhere you have to flip down a little
panel to use, or little controls attached to the seat, which require that you
turn your body and operate the controls with one hand. Depending on how you're
impaired, if the hand you need to control the toilet is not functioning,
you're kind of hosed.

Second, if you have any mental impairment, are you really going to go through
menus with small icons to control the temperature and pressure of a stream of
water directed to your nether parts?

Finally, the auto-clean/auto-dry toilets still generally require one last wipe
to clean up. Think about it this way, if you're baking a cake, and if you
smear frosting on your arm, are you just going to rinse your arm with water
and call it day, or are you going to rinse it and then wipe the area dry with
a towel?

~~~
dotancohen
> you're kind of hosed.

That's the whole idea!

------
nhangen
My father was living on his own (around 65 years old) and suffered through
what we discovered was a combination of 8-9 mini-strokes. What's worse is that
his doctor did not notice, and they went untreated for over a year. He's now
living with someone that is taking care of him full time, but his speech/motor
functions are permanently damaged, and as someone said below, the best
description of his life is "forced infantilism."

He's now been diagnosed with Parkinson's as well, which I've read can be
caused by strokes.

Two years ago I had an active/involved father that played golf 3 days/week.
Now I hardly recognize him. It's traumatic.

~~~
mistermann
While it may be difficult for you, if your father's perception of the
situation is similar to that of the author's, maybe it's not so traumatic
after all, in a big picture sense.

------
vinceguidry
I've done a lot of meditation work over the years. I started with simple
stillness and visualization exercises, and progressed to moving meditations.
Eventually I started doing sophisticated chakra work and could manipulate
emotion at will. I find it very easy to call up a state of profound mental
calm if I ever want one, one came to me as I was reading the piece, like
putting on an old glove.

I can see how it's easy for someone who spent much of their lives dealing with
chatter could fetishize calm once they've gotten a taste of it, but like being
pervasively, effusively happy / calm / cheerful all the time, (another thing
I've done) it eventually gets old.

Chatter is how the mind works. Staying completely in the present all the time
means you're just not exercising the part of your brain that learns. I can
turn it off if I want to. But I don't. I liken it to being a dog.

Dogs, and other animals, are excessively _present_. They don't have
intellectual thoughts because they are biologically incapable of them. They're
incapable of even having awareness that intellectualism even exists.

Being aphasic is basically erasing a part of you that makes you human. Worse,
you don't even have the awareness that you lost it. With our travails and
struggles comes our humanity, whitewashing over our mental chatter or our
emotions relegates you to a baser existence. You're "happier," but you haven't
really evolved to be better in any way.

~~~
Senderman
Yours is a point of view I've rarely heard. It's quite inspiring. I suppose
I'm encouraged that you've reduced 'chatter' and its avoidance to something
that can be managed.

~~~
vinceguidry
I'd say it's nice to have a 'baseline' that you can operate off of. Life has
never for me been so stressful and worrisome that I needed to regress back to
a base point where I feel perfectly at ease with all outcomes, honestly more
basic stuff like threat modeling at an intellectual level has been more than
sufficient.

I'm not going to say that all my meditation has been useless, but there's
definitely a diminishing point of returns there where you need increasing
amounts of refinement before you can really distinguish differences. Stoicism
is really "good enough" for most purposes.

It's like buying $500 whiskey when you can't even tell the difference between
$100 whiskey and $200 whiskey, they both taste smooth. Meditation techniques
take time and effort to perfect just like anything else, and eventually you
start needing more time to move the needle. At some point you just want to get
back to the world and accomplish things.

------
scadge
[https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_strok...](https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight)

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peteretep
I started taking an SSRI a few years ago. The sense of peace and calm that I
spent a lot of time and energy trying to cultivate before is there all the
time now, and with virtually no side effects.

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criveros
Why would anybody keep their passport in a safety deposit box?

------
elastic_church
That was a really fascinating perspective, becoming so infantile and less of a
constant conscious that cares about anything, yet emerging from that state
over years and having the recollection of it and the comparisons to a more
relatable form of humanity.

------
downrightmike
The comments on the article point out the differences between emotional vs
intellectual intelligence.

