
After a Stroke at 33 a Writer Relies on Journals to Piece Together Her Own Story - happy-go-lucky
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/02/11/514559596/after-a-stroke-at-33-a-writer-relies-on-journals-to-piece-together-her-own-story
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mrec
Reminds me of an old Kim Stanley Robinson SF novel called _Icehenge_ , which
as I remember it revolves around life extension without corresponding memory
preservation, so that history becomes a way of understanding your own past. I
think it did interesting things with the unreliable-narrator trope and the
idea of historical revisionism.

Definitely recommended, and I'm feeling a strong urge to dig it out and reread
it; it's been decades. It'd be pleasingly appropriate to discover that I'm
misremembering or have a drastically different response to it this time.

~~~
clort
You might also like 'Soldier in the Mist' by Gene Wolfe, about a greek soldier
who loses his short term memory from an injury. He starts each day by reading
the journal he finds beside his bed..

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mrec
I tried that not long after reading _Icehenge_ , but didn't really get on with
it. Again, that was decades ago, so maybe I should give it another look. Gene
Wolfe does tend to reward older readers; I'm pretty sure most of his Urth
books whooshed right over my head as a teenager.

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cableshaft
I started keeping a physical journal a few months ago. For some reason having
the physical journal with me as a constant reminder helps me keep up with it.

Anyway, I've gone back and reread the beginning of that and I've gone "Oh
yeah, I forgot about that," several times already. I can't imagine completely
losing my memory and needing to refer to my journals for memory. But at least
if I ever did go through this, I'll have these to refer to.

~~~
criddell
Physical journal? As in paper and pen?

I was listening to the Twit podcast once and Jerry Pournelle was on. He talked
about his life log. Basically it was a journal in which he recorded everything
- meetings, meals, phone calls, weather, along with the more usual thoughts
and ideas. I tried to do that for a while and it was a lot of work.

What do you track in your journal?

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Emc2fma
I think you'd appreciate something I've been working on and I'd love to hear
what you think!

[https://www.60secondseveryday.com](https://www.60secondseveryday.com)

It's basically the fastest way of daily journaling - you get a call each night
and record a 60 second journal entry.

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mvp
It struck me as odd, or at least made me stop, think and now write about it.
Why the doctors recommended maintaining a "Moleskine" journal. Why
"Moleskine"? Why can't it be a plain journal!!

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otempomores
Imagine a capacity sensor around the artery and a capsule of blood thinner..
This could be historic instead of gone history.

~~~
mei0Iesh
The headline made me sad but this comment made me laugh. If only all life's
problems could be handled with simple engineering. With all the machinery
you'd have to stuff everywhere, there'd be a lot more problems.

~~~
jnbiche
> With all the machinery you'd have to stuff everywhere, there'd be a lot more
> problems.

Oh, machinery like pacemakers, knee implants, cochlear implants? Seems to me
we have far too little of such machinery, rather than too much.

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echelon
Can you completely recover after a stroke like this, or is the brain
permanently damaged?

What causes these to happen? There's a photo of the author in the article, and
she appears visibly healthy. How can you reduce one's risk of having a stroke?

Strokes are scary. Aneurysms seem even more terrifying.

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TheOtherHobbes
It depends. I had a very mild stroke at the end of last year.

I was extremely lucky. The only lasting damage is occasional slight facial
tingling and a hint of numbness in one arm. For a few months I had unusual
bouts of extreme fatigue, but those seem to be fading now.

Otherwise I'm fully functional. Memory, speech, and mobility all seem fine.

I'm definitely much much luckier than some of the people I saw on my very
brief stay on the stroke ward. One person had been on the ward for literally a
year. A stay of a few months for regular rehabilitation sessions isn't
unusual. (I got pretty angry that strokes happen at all. They can be _so_
damaging that it seems unusually cruel for humans to live in a reality where
that kind of handicap/illness is even possible.)

Practically, strokes are somewhat random. There are some risk factors -
cholesterol, heart arrhythmias, smoking, alcohol, stress, high blood pressure
- but you can be low risk and still suffer the effects of a loose clot.

In fact you can have a series of very minor ischaemic events and not even
notice. They'll show up on an MRI, but you may not have any obvious symptoms
at all.

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echelon
Thanks for your response. I'm glad you were able to make an almost complete
recovery.

That's terrifying about strokes being essentially random outside of the
obvious risk factors.

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Question1101
>Days later, she learned she'd had a stroke

Don't you have to get to the ER within hours when you have a stroke?

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shagie
One might. And its not inconsistent with the sentence. There could be several
days of disorientation prior to being able to form the memory that they had a
stroke a few days ago.

Tangentially related,
[https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_strok...](https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight)
is about a brain scientist who had a massive stroke and she talks of both the
shutting down of the brain along with the starting it up again.

