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What My Stroke Taught Me

nautil.us

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Re: What My Stroke Taught Me

#21

Post by dotancohen »

jimmywanger wrote: post #19
plg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 yo…

> you're kind of hosed.

That's the whole idea!

Re: What My Stroke Taught Me

#22

Post by fernandotakai »

jimmywanger wrote: post #4

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…

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

heart diseases are silent killers. i had high blood pressure (my whole family has it + weight problems) for a long time and never realized.

after going to the doctor, getting diagnosed and treating it, my life is a lot better. go to a cardiologist and get checked even if you think you are 100%!

Re: What My Stroke Taught Me

#23

Post by Pica_soO »

abalone wrote: post #13
blawson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.

Re: What My Stroke Taught Me

#24

Post by 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.

Re: What My Stroke Taught Me

#26

Post by 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.

Re: What My Stroke Taught Me

#27

Post by 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.

Re: What My Stroke Taught Me

#28

Post by Senderman »

vinceguidry wrote: post #26

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…

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.

Re: What My Stroke Taught Me

#29

Post by vinceguidry »

Senderman wrote: post #28
vinceguidry wrote: post #26

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…

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.

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.

Re: What My Stroke Taught Me

#30

Post by ido »

Pica_soO wrote: post #23
abalone wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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