3 ms·

After a Stroke at 33 a Writer Relies on Journals to Piece Together Her Own Story

81 points by happy-go-lucky 10y ago

otempomores 10y ago
Imagine a capacity sensor around the artery and a capsule of blood thinner.. This could be historic instead of gone history.
- mei0Iesh 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    > 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.
  - Eerie 10y ago
    >> If only all life's problems could be handled with simple engineering. They can't. No, complex engineering is another thing entirely.
- im3w1l 10y ago
  Yeah, I think in the future they will be surprised how we ever managed to survive without an integrated sensor array to detect problems as they arise.
cableshaft 10y ago
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.
- andai 10y ago
  That's an interesting point about finding things you completely forgot about in journals. It made me realize, if I had to reconstruct my memory from written notes, I would end up with a lot of stuff that was only important to me at the moment my thoughts were being written down.
  - happy-go-lucky 10y ago
    It could also be important to your friends and relatives.
- maheshs 10y ago
  Interesting. If you don't mind can you share structure of your daily journal.
  - cableshaft 10y ago
    I went into detail about the content and structure of the journal in my reply to criddell, who responded to me as well.
- criddell 10y ago
  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?
  - Emc2fma 10y ago
    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.
  - 10y ago
mrec 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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..
  - mrec 10y ago
    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.
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    kind of like the movie Memento?
- FreezerburnV 10y ago
  You might also give "Dancing With Eternity" a try by John Patrick Lowrie. It has a similar idea, but instead of total memory loss it's selective, and an individual can choose what they keep. I'm not done with it yet, but it does have some very interesting ideas and musings about what happens when death stops being a factor in life, or what if the process were more expensive than most could afford.
  - danneu 10y ago
    I can imagine a (tragic?) sci-fi love story where a once-couple meets again thousands of years in the future. One of them opted to keep their memories of the other on every reincarnation all those millennia, but the other didn't.
Question1101 10y ago
>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?
- shagie 10y ago
  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_stroke_of_insight https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_strok... 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.
echelon 10y ago
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.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  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.
  - echelon 10y ago
    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.
mvp 10y ago
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!!

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

mei0Iesh 10y ago
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 10y ago
  > 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.
- Eerie 10y ago
  >> If only all life's problems could be handled with simple engineering. They can't. No, complex engineering is another thing entirely.
im3w1l 10y ago
Yeah, I think in the future they will be surprised how we ever managed to survive without an integrated sensor array to detect problems as they arise.

cableshaft 10y ago

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.

andai 10y ago
That's an interesting point about finding things you completely forgot about in journals. It made me realize, if I had to reconstruct my memory from written notes, I would end up with a lot of stuff that was only important to me at the moment my thoughts were being written down.
- happy-go-lucky 10y ago
  It could also be important to your friends and relatives.
maheshs 10y ago
Interesting. If you don't mind can you share structure of your daily journal.
- cableshaft 10y ago
  I went into detail about the content and structure of the journal in my reply to criddell, who responded to me as well.
criddell 10y ago
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?
- Emc2fma 10y ago
  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.
- 10y ago

mrec 10y ago

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 10y ago
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..
- mrec 10y ago
  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.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  kind of like the movie Memento?
FreezerburnV 10y ago
You might also give "Dancing With Eternity" a try by John Patrick Lowrie. It has a similar idea, but instead of total memory loss it's selective, and an individual can choose what they keep. I'm not done with it yet, but it does have some very interesting ideas and musings about what happens when death stops being a factor in life, or what if the process were more expensive than most could afford.
- danneu 10y ago
  I can imagine a (tragic?) sci-fi love story where a once-couple meets again thousands of years in the future. One of them opted to keep their memories of the other on every reincarnation all those millennia, but the other didn't.

Question1101 10y ago

>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?

shagie 10y ago
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_stroke_of_insight https://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_strok... 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.

echelon 10y ago

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.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
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.
- echelon 10y ago
  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.

mvp 10y ago

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!!