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Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

bbc.co.uk

51–60 of 152 posts

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#51

Does anyone know how dangerous a stroke is at his age? Side note, but why do older people have strokes so more often? Young people have blood clots too.

> Side note, but why do older people have strokes so more often?

In short, your circulatory system gets old and rusty and either bursts or gets blocked. If you manage to avoid CVD, heart disease, and cancer then a stroke is the next problem.

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#52

Does anyone know how dangerous a stroke is at his age? Side note, but why do older people have strokes so more often? Young people have blood clots too.

As you get older your arteries gradually narrow, a process made even more severe by the buildups of plaque. This is all accelerated by obesity, lack of exercise, and so on. Aging, high blood pressure, and various other factors also causes arteries to weaken, making a rupture even more likely.

All of this is part of the reason I think the 'search for the pill/shot of immortality' in modern times is little different than the search for the pool of immortality in ancient times. Everything breaks down over time and so to solve this, we'd need to fix everything, when we yet struggle to truly fix even a single thing.

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#53

I wonder sometimes how Steve Jobs would have ended up had he not met Woz. Would he have started a company within even an order of magnitude of Apple?

Steve would have always had the vision and the drive to see it through. My guess is that yes, Jobs would have started a company pretty similar in success to Apple but it probably would have taken him longer.

After Jobs left Apple, he had the ideal conditions to move on with another venture. Next did ok but only survived because Apple bought it. Could Jobs have done even as good as he did with Next without the Apple II/Apple IPO reputational boost Woz gave him?

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#54

Because he is intelligent, wacky, and genuinely a good human being, the Woz is one of the few figures that many of us in the tech industry look up to and aspire to be like. I hope he sticks around for many more years to come.

> the Woz is one of the few figures that many of us in the tech industry look up to and aspire to be like. Relatable. My Woz story is from junior high school (middle school) in the late 1990s. I was writing a report on him and read two different biographies that seemed to report conflicting information. So I emailed him asking what actually happened back at a childhood science fair. And he actually responded and reca…

cool sentiment, but becoming increasingly harder to do. So many people an too many to not discount that some crazies will pop in. Few public/semi-public figures can just keep their contact info around freely.

Even if it all is in good faith, they will just get so many mails about business inquiries, recruits, media reqesting interviews, academia, etc. Very hard for little Timmy to ask a quick question via email these days.

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the Woz is one of the few figures that many of us in the tech industry look up to and aspire to be like. Relatable. My Woz story is from junior high school (middle school) in the late 1990s. I was writing a report on him and read two different biographies that seemed to report conflicting information. So I emailed him asking what actually happened back at a childhood science fair. And he actually responded and reca…

cool sentiment, but becoming increasingly harder to do. So many people an too many to not discount that some crazies will pop in. Few public/semi-public figures can just keep their contact info around freely. Even if it all is in good faith, they will just get so many mails about business inquiries, recruits, media reqesting interviews, academia, etc. Very hard for little Timmy to ask a quick question via email these…

emailing famous people or their handlers is kind of a hobby of mine.

over about a hundred emails i've received about 30 replies.

the surprising thing to me is that their level of 'fame' has little to do with whether or not they reply to me. I've received replies from some famously impressive people, and have been ignored by some real 'niche' ones.

I have a suspicion that there is a bit of a bi-modal distribution between 'small enough to reply to fans' and 'so big that there is a reply crew on-staff', most of my emails that were ignored were "Famous but not that famous" types of folks that are in the middle between the two.

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#56
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone you know is showing signs of a stroke (see https://www.cdc.gov/stroke/signs_symptoms.htm ), get them to the hospital right away. Time is of the essence. Once you're there, don't let overworked personnel ignore them. My mother recently had a stroke. She had absolutely clear, textbook symptoms. She got to the hospital by ambulance right away, but busy doctors and nurses sent her home after two days, saying t…

Wow, that sounds like third-world kind of treatment. I would consider suing. Sorry that your mom had to go through this.

> Wow, that sounds like third-world kind of treatment.

My first thought was that sounded exactly like here in Canada.

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#57
post #18

Strokes suck to say the least. All the best wishes to someone so kind and smart, I’m glad it sounds like it was only minor. Something I really wish I knew immediately after my mom had a stroke is that the recovery that often happens over the days and weeks following a stroke as the brain adapts to its new normal is nothing short of amazing. My mom was nearly blind, unable to control her eyes, and mostly unable to spe…

The biggest grudge I have against 'stroke' is that it's such an amorphous diagnosis. A heart attack, a similarly ischemic (or hemorhagic) event, often produces, say, one of a couple dozen lasting distinct symptoms. Some can be extremely severe and disabling, but it's still a narrow enough concept that people know how serious it usually is. Conversely, strokes present in literally thousands of ways, from mild eye twit…

I’m sorry you had to suffer through that. My mother was a victim of amorphous diagnosis. She had sudden stroke symptoms and was immediately taken to the emergency room. She had the usual symptoms including blurred vision in her left eye and numbness on the whole left side of her body. Despite this, the hospital insisted she had glaucoma and dragged an ophthalmologist to come in on a late Sunday night only to diagnose her with a stroke. She needed an MRI and the hospital didn’t have anyone available to operate it at the time. She was transferred to another hospital 45 minutes away despite there being an excellent Level 1 trauma hospital 15 minutes away. (They were not affiliated with them so she couldn’t go there.)

I lost a lot of faith in the healthcare system and doctors that night. This wasn’t a hospital in the middle of nowhere either, it was in an upper middle class neighborhood in the suburbs of Chicago. It was amazing she recovered fully from the stroke, though sadly passed away several years later of unrelated causes.

I hope the best for Mr. Wozniak, this isn’t something I would wish on anyone.

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woz was lucky to meet Jobs, too

Why? Woz was happy working for HP and would have had a great career and still would have built computers. He might not have ended up super rich, but I am guessing that doesn't really matter to him.

Would have been interesting if HP had produced the Apple II and ushered in the personal computing era.

But if HP had been interested in doing so, then Woz might have stayed there to begin with.

Re: Steve Wozniak suffers minor stroke

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that sounds like third-world kind of treatment. I would consider suing. Sorry that your mom had to go through this.

>that sounds like third-world kind of treatment You wish you had third-world medical treatment, though. Having been many times to hospitals in several 1st world countries AND several 3rd world countries, I do not find the former much better than the latter and the 10x-100x price markup is hard to ignore.

Ya, I'm guessing you would actually get better care in a country like Thailand, the Phillippinnes, India, or China. It might make more sense to retire in a LCOL place with good affordable healthcare rather than rely on Medicare. Heck, just get a good policy with evac to the USA if anything major happens you can't handle out of pocket (and at that point, it is probably cancer or something anyways). As I get older, it becomes more appealing to consider.

I had private insurance in China and it was wonderful. I could get an appointment quickly for whatever, the waiting room was really plushy, the deductibles were like 100-400 kuai, mostly the former. The biggest problem is that private insurance in China has a payout limit (around $100k/year for the policy Microsoft gave me)...which...well...whatever.

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