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The Other Half

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Re: The Other Half

#71

Post by crgt »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #55
MandieD wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my husband, it was a feeling of heartburn combined with an elevated heart rate in the middle of the night. Fortunately, my reaction was, "oh my god, get up, we're going to the hospital NOW!" This was a bit over two weeks after a delayed Transatlantic flight with turbulence bad enough that we barely left our seats. The main reason I freaked out and took him to the hospital immediately instead of just saying, "that…

My wife sometimes reminds me "There's a reason married men live longer." When your wife tells you it's time to go to the hospital, it's usually time to go. Yeah, there are some stereotypes I'm repeating, but they're accurate somewhat often.

My wife saved my life by making me go to the doctor when I scoffed at it. Wear sunscreen folks.

Re: The Other Half

#72

Post by ddlatham »

lkrubner wrote: post #70

Once again, the policy on headline titles for articles on HackerNews is a bit bizarre. The original title explained that the man almost died. This current title is "The Other Half" and does not explain anything at all. As a practical matter, the policy seems to amount to "We use the title of the original article, unless it is strongly stated, in which case we regard it as clickbait and change it to something dull." T…

+1

Much of language derives its meaning from its context. In the context of this blog a title of "The Other Half" can have a very different meaning than a title of "The Other Half" on Hacker News. Lifting the title verbatim to a new context can change its meaning. Even though the intention may be good to be faithful to the original, purely by being in a new context, the title has been effectively changed. In fact, using different words for the title in the HN context can well be more faithful to the meaning than the using the same words.

Re: The Other Half

#73

Post by geoyang »

spinchange wrote: post #28

I wonder all the time why we don't have more widely available, "consumer grade" tech like handheld ECGs, etc., to help better detect stuff like this. (There are products like this, but not in U.S. markets to my understanding - at least not without a prescription) If you're unfortunate enough to suffer from something like anxiety attacks and also have heart trouble in your family's medical history it is very difficult…

We are currently beta testing a device that can take your EKG and provide some level of analysis on your phone. If you are interested, we have currently have a private beta and have a few more openings! Of course we have much more planning in our production version. Please feel free to take a look: www.grektek.com. As the other reader mentions, cardiologists are the ultimate judges and even that can be difficult, but we have found helpful information can often be gleaned using our device and App.

Re: The Other Half

#74

Post by geoyang »

spinchange wrote: post #28

I wonder all the time why we don't have more widely available, "consumer grade" tech like handheld ECGs, etc., to help better detect stuff like this. (There are products like this, but not in U.S. markets to my understanding - at least not without a prescription) If you're unfortunate enough to suffer from something like anxiety attacks and also have heart trouble in your family's medical history it is very difficult…

We are currently beta testing a device that can take your EKG and provide some level of analysis on your phone. If you are interested, we have currently have a private beta and have a few more openings! Of course we have much more planning in our production version. Please feel free to take a look: www.grektek.com. As the other reader mentions, cardiologists are the ultimate judges and even that can be difficult, but we have found helpful information can often be gleaned using our device and App.

Re: The Other Half

#76

Post by mseebach »

lkrubner wrote: post #70

Once again, the policy on headline titles for articles on HackerNews is a bit bizarre. The original title explained that the man almost died. This current title is "The Other Half" and does not explain anything at all. As a practical matter, the policy seems to amount to "We use the title of the original article, unless it is strongly stated, in which case we regard it as clickbait and change it to something dull." T…

It's not 'bizarre', it's unfortunate at best. The piece has a title that isn't very descriptive, and HN policy biases towards transparent link-sharing with no editorialising. No policy is perfect, and it has some casualties, this being one of them. But it has to be weighed against the (IMO) very strong general case benefits of avoiding editorialising.

Re: The Other Half

#77

Post by canonic »

Zikes wrote: post #44
pmarreck wrote: post #4

I sat on a "weird pain" in my chest for a few days. Basically it was uncomfortable to sleep on my left side, and I felt a bit short of breath. Turns out I was suffering from a double pulmonary embolism , and that the only reason I wasn't doubled over in pain is because by an odd fluke of nature, the interior of the lungs do not have nerve endings (only the exterior) and had I waited any longer I could have died. At t…

I'm currently on anticoagulants for my second run-in with pulmonary embolisms, and they were fairly different experiences both times. The first one started out as what felt like a sore shoulder, which "migrated" down to my chest over a few hours, and then felt like I had a cactus in my lungs. The second instance felt more like pressure than pain, but was similar enough to the tail end of my previous encounter that I…

Just curious: how did you have shoulder/chest pain before the clot embolized to your lungs? Or did you go with a swollen leg and the rest happened after you arrived?

Also, the vast majority of people with PE survive. Depending on the size of the bastard, you can get heart dysfunction and pulmonary hypertension (which can be very severe) down the road.

Basically, unless your blood pressure tanked, your chance of dying from it was probably close to zero.

Not to say it's not a scary thing or that you shouldn't go to the hospital immediately, but we over-diagnose and over-treat PE's all the time. The latter is because we over-estimate their severity.

Re: The Other Half

#78

Post by canuckintime »

dang wrote: post #68
danjoc wrote: post #58

Why the title change? "archive.org guy nearly died" was much more direct/informative. I wouldn't take a second glace at this thread under "the other half" assuming it to be marriage advice.

Because it's the author's own title. That's significant, especially for so intimate and personal a piece. It's true that one can trade that off for immediate factual placeability, but on HN we prefer to make the opposite tradeoff. That's one of many reasons why the guidelines say "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait." ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html )

I recently saw a suggestion that there should be two titles: one that's the author's own title and a second that's the HN submission title (which could be identical if the HN submitter prefers so). Any opinion on the suggestion?

Re: The Other Half

#79

Post by tptacek »

lkrubner wrote: post #70

Once again, the policy on headline titles for articles on HackerNews is a bit bizarre. The original title explained that the man almost died. This current title is "The Other Half" and does not explain anything at all. As a practical matter, the policy seems to amount to "We use the title of the original article, unless it is strongly stated, in which case we regard it as clickbait and change it to something dull." T…

That doesn't work. The submitter of an HN story doesn't own the story; stories are community property. Submitting doesn't entitle you to choose for the whole site what is or isn't interesting about a story. If you want to do that, you write a comment, like everybody else.

This is one of the oldest meta-arguments on the site. Once or twice a month, perhaps, we get a story that isn't particularly well served by the guidelines, and people have to click one more time than they might have, or read a few more sentences than they might have. But pretty much every day, and probably more frequently than that, we see problems stemming from the guideline being broken.

Almost everybody reading these comments knows what this story is about now. It's a shame a pointless meta-complaint is bolted to the top of the thread, instead of something actually about the post itself.

Re: The Other Half

#80

Post by schoen »

smacktoward wrote: post #52
revelation wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes a high BP is just a reaction to someone measuring your BP. One side effect of a high BP is that you hear the thumping sound of your blood pulsing. I personally have my heart rate and blood pressure explode whenever anyone tries to measure them. So I was referred to a cardiologist who did some basic checks like an echo, found nothing wrong and wired me up to a device that measures BP continuously for 24h. My…

The first thing that tipped them off was looking at the blood vessels in my eyes, not measuring my BP. This is an absolutely routine part of an eye exam, so I wasn't stressed out or anything like that while they were doing it. High blood pressure will not always be accompanied by easily detectable symptoms like audible thumping. There's a reason why it's called "the silent killer." (See: https://www.cdc.gov/bloodpres…

An interesting thing I heard from my dentist and my optometrist is that dentists and optometrists often diagnose (or successfully refer for) a fairly wide variety of conditions that manifest as symptoms visible in the gums and eyes. A lot of stuff that can go wrong in the body can apparently mess up your gums or eyes in a way that an expert can notice.

Also, people who have excellent vision can still benefit from optometrist exams because they can catch early stages of eye problems, and even other kinds of medical problems.

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