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

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

by happy-go-lucky • 9 years ago

81 25 9 years ago

npr.org

otempomores• 9 years ago

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

mei0Iesh• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

> If only all life's problems could be handled with simple engineering.

They can't.

No, complex engineering is another thing entirely.

im3w1l• 9 years 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.

cableshaft3• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

It could also be important to your friends and relatives.

maheshs• 9 years ago

Interesting. If you don't mind can you share structure of your daily journal.

cableshaft3• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years 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

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

cableshaft3• 9 years ago

Yes, paper and pen.

First of all, it is a lot of work. I sometimes stay up for an hour and a half some nights just catching up on 3-4 days of activity. I've almost filled up the first one, though, and seeing the physical artifact and being able to look back on it and know that a lot less of what I consume and think about every day is slipping through the cracks into nothingness makes it worth it, though.

I'm a game designer by hobby (and to an extent by trade, especially in my past), so in reality the focus of the journal is more on design. If I come up with a new concept for a game, a new design for how cards or boards or levels should look (I just draw a rough sketch right there in the journal), or playtest a game and want to report feedback I received and ideas to change things, or report what I worked on in a given day, I put it in there.

I also add some life events, though, to put what I'm doing in context, explain why I was more or less active at times, and also as a gentle reminder what happened and when for events in my life. I put anything I do consume in there that might be considered an influencer and what I liked about them (board and video games, movies and tv shows mostly).

Finally, if I listen to or watch a lecture or read an article about something that could pertain to design, I write notes down separately, and then distill and flesh out the important (to me) notes into the journal later. The reason I do this is I can't really decide what's important or not while I'm in the middle of it, and I also write notes to lectures too quickly and without as much context, and I need to add that because the journal is intended for an audience other than just myself to read it (although perhaps not for a long time afterwards).

I don't record what I consider more trivial things like meetings, meals, phone calls, or weather, though, for the most part. Maybe if I we tried a new unconventional recipe and it turned out awesome, but probably nothing else.

As for structure, I just write the date, a hyphen, and keep writing until I'm done for that day. Then a blank line, and the next entry. Some days only require a paragraph, some days require 6 or more pages, so I don't try to limit or pad it or line it up with pages. I also put a few "Concept for 'game name'" in the top margins for a page if I have to find something again, but honestly if I just make sure I add more drawings of things, that's usually enough to identify where the concepts are at a glance. I've almost finished my first one and it will cover about 4 months of my life when I'm done.

mrec2• 9 years 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• 9 years 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..

mrec2• 9 years 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• 9 years ago

kind of like the movie Memento?

FreezerburnV• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years 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• 9 years 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_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.

echelon2• 9 years 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• 9 years 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.

echelon2• 9 years 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• 9 years 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!!

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

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