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I Had a Stroke at 33

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Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#71

Post by mkal_tsr »

dang wrote: post #30
mkal_tsr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting How are we defining "good hacker" ? > It doesn't include most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Can a "good hacker" be curious and intellectually satisfied by political stories even if they don't include new phenomenon ? Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the ar…

I don't think "defining" captures what we can do. "Meandering around" is more like it. But here are a couple observations. A semi-objective thing about most of the uninteresting, non-HN-appropriate stories is how predictable they are, i.e. how repetitive of previous instances of the type. The more predictable a story is, the less information it adds and the less interesting it is. There's a reason we say " intellectu…

Oh absolutely, this is a really neat conversation that I was hoping could happen. You mention how predictable stories are, and we all have those moments on social media sites where we're all rolling our eyes. I think it might be interesting to look at HN from something like Google Trends, wherein tracking the topics that are upvoted/downvoted. Maybe do some penalties for topics that have a large front-page success rate and upvote/downvote ratio (and throw in comment # too, same with comment length) and you could start to probably see trends for circlejerk material. We'll always have people flagging stories for duplicates or the like, but certain topics always get through by virtue of many people submitting about that topic.

The advantage to so something like Reddit is if a topic is talked about too much or not at all, you can just add a channel and grassroots it. On HN, you only have a single timeline and front-page (yes, there's searching, but people are lazy). News sites have channels but editors which controls the stream (and most restrict who can edit). I think a more algorithmic approach to provisioning up and down channels for specific topics could be neat. Not really sure where I'm ultimately going with this, kind of free-forming based off issues I've seen with internet discussions and IRL discussions and recent controversies as of late. I think it's important to look at how HN does it's news/info vs. reddit vs. twitter etc, to me it doesn't feel like we've really 'optimized' it yet for user distributed news ... or maybe I'm not hip with the latest app.

Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#72

Post by refurb »

pcl wrote: post #59
ryanSrich wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do have health insurance but it only covers around 47% of my medical costs (at least when I go for a primary care visit, I suspect they might even cover less for a more expensive procedure). I understand that my coverage is not all that common, although most providers do an 80/20 split. So for a procedure costing $100k (an ambulance ride and a few nights in the hospital would easily run this high) you'd have to pay…

Many health insurance plans have a yearly cap on how much you pay out of pocket. So you might pay 20% up to a few thousand dollars, and then get 100% coverage after that.

Actually, with the passage of the ACA, the limit is a requirement for all health insurance plans (a few were grandfathered in, but they will disappear over the next few years).

It goes up each year (adjusted for inflation), but as an individual, your maximum out of pocket (includes everything: deductible, co-pays, co-insurance, etc) is ~$6,750.

Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#73

Post by patio11 »

My mother had a stroke. The fallout is very, very hard for the patient and their family.

Diet and exercise are, apparently, the easiest levers you have to control for stroke risk. Trust me: this is the best of all possible reasons to care about those. You do not want to go through it and you do not want your family to go through it. Specifics elided for privacy but suffice it to say that it combined elements of a heart attack, advanced Alzheimer's, and a profound war injury in a compact package that arrived on a normal sunny Tuesday.

Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#74

Post by pimentel »

camperman wrote: post #45

Her memory experience was already reminding me of Leonard in Memento and then she writes, "it's time for my shot." That hit me unreasonably hard.

I just saw Memento last night (for the first time), so reading the article felt like an incredible coincidence.

Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#75

Post by muraiki »

skierscott wrote: post #69
xtinehlee wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the writer of the story--thank you so much for reading. I'm glad to know that my experience helps people gain further understanding of strokes/brain injuries. I hope your girlfriend is in a better place, now.

> I'm glad to know that my experience helps people gain further understanding of strokes/brain injuries. After my severe traumatic brain injury, I'm trying to do the same thing. Brain injuries are so broad and so complex and dangerously invisible. I would guess this is the one unifying thread between us. This is a solid A-level piece. Good job on both the writing and content.

I've only had a mild traumatic brain injury, but it's been about 1 3/4 years and I still have some symptoms. I could emphasize with a lot of what was written in the article. You're right in saying that these injures are complex and invisible... and I would say that that is true as much for the people around you as it is for the person experiencing the injury.

Even for someone who understands the symptoms conceptually, it's a completely different matter to actually experience what it's like to be unable to speak the name of a person that you see constantly, or to experience real pain from light, or to be around people and then be utterly exhausted afterwards. It took time for my family and friends to grasp the extent of my injury, especially since it didn't occur in any dramatic or obviously horrible way.

If you are like me, you'll have moments in which you feel completely frustrated and hopeless. Be patient and merciful with yourself. Last year I wondered if I'd ever be able to have a job that required serious mental thought -- but this year I've successfully switched careers to become a full time programmer.

I apologize if this is unsolicited advice, but I guess I'm saying what I wish I would have known when I first got my concussion. And for others who read this: if you get a concussion, see and listen to your doctor -- and if your doctor doesn't take you seriously, find someone who does (especially if you have a clinic nearby that specializes in concussion / brain injury). I can't know for sure, but I think my life over the past two years would have been a lot different had I simply _rested_ in the period afterwards, instead of staying up late studying.

Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#76

Post by bshimmin »

prawn wrote: post #64
meritt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we associate BuzzFeed with bullshit clickbait spam. It makes it difficult for an article to reach the right audience when you have such a large amount of negative association with a particular brand. It'd be like if the supermarket tabloids starting include well-written and legitimate content. It's going to take a substantial amount of work to win over the millions of people who view them exclusively as a tab…

There are countless efforts to reach people with this sort of information. Official medical sources, highbrow papers, trashy sites. What's to say that this isn't the best option to reach a certain segment and that, as a bonus, it reached beyond that? Buzzfeed may well be a Trojan to get better content to those typically reading vapid junk? Or, more likely, a way of building a financially-secure publication from trash…

Do you really believe this?

If Buzzfeed can achieve financial security by creating an audience who enjoy feeble drivel ("54 Things You Probably Didn't Know About 'Gossip Girl'"), surely if they then start replacing that material with long-form, well-written, thought-provoking content (like this article), they run the risk of losing that audience? It seems to me that the people who want to see 27 pictures of Beyoncé with staccato-sentenced captions - and haven't grown sick of this type of content yet - probably don't ever want to read a long article about something more important than Paris Kardashian.

Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#77

Post by tucaz »

About 15 years ago my father had a stroke at our house. I was about 12 years old and at home at the time along with my grandmother. We didn't know what was happening. At one second he was okay and in another he was on the floor. It was almost impossible to put him back at the bed even with the help of one of our tenants.

We called my mother at work and the funny thing is that before she came home to take him to the ER he was able to ask for coffee (and drink it) and also to smoke a cigarette.

Moving 15 years forward he's still with us (62 years old) with no movement at all on the left side of his body. Had a heart attack with major surgery, is on more than 15 different medications, has diabetes and a bunch of other "minor problems".

My mother gave up her life to take care of him and everyday is a struggle because of the existing problems prior to the stroke and the ones that came after he became bitter and really mean to those who love and take care of him.

I'm not sure why I wrote about this but I felt like sharing. It's not easy when people don't recover, but for some reason I believe we have to take care of them and do our part.

Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#78

Post by omegaworks »

ohquu wrote: post #43
quintin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this. Are you in the US? If so, how much did the ordeal cost?

Yes, we are in the US. Her situation was unique in many respects. She was on her father's health insurance plan (Blue Cross and Blue Shield) and also had secondary health insurance from being a student athlete at our university. (The first of the three strokes occurred during a meet! The other two occurred within a day after being transported to the hospital.) Everything would have cost well over $100,000 had she not…

>Had he not paid attention to the way things were being billed (i.e., between primary and secondary insurance), some costs may have been pushed onto her family.

How does one pay attention to this in a time of crisis? Is there a good guide to navigating it somewhere?

Last summer I woke up with a monster headache and suddenly stopped being able to put words to thoughts. Tried calling a taxi, couldn't say where I wanted to go, so he called 911. On the way to the hospital in the ambulance I was just praying I was making the right decisions. The paramedics couldn't understand me and that frustrated them. They asked me what hospital, being an intern and totally new to the city I wouldn't know what to tell them even if I could. I was worried they'd treat me like I was on some kind of drug.

Turns out I had contracted a meningitis. The ambulance ride was $1000.

Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#79

Post by silencio »

ZeroCoin wrote: post #68

>I wandered outside the boundaries of telemetry. They lost my heartbeat. When I returned, they scolded me. The audacity of health care industry workers (those who should know what a certain disease entails) who place blame on their patients for acting normally is infuriating. I had kidney stones once at a young age. I remember barely walking into the emergency room one night after they became too painful. As soon as…

> ...was scolded like I was some drug addict just looking for a fix...

It's tough dealing with drugs and potential abuse. You know if you're really in need or not, but they deal with people wanting them for any reason just because, and so the skepticism starts to show. There's the default assumption at hospitals/pharmacies of just locking everything down so the healthcare providers themselves can't abuse them too.

My father was in the ER the other month for severe abdominal pain. He got morphine _after_ it was discovered that his blood pressure was through the roof and he wouldn't tolerate even a light touch in the area. Then multiple people were required for disposal and documentation of whatever was left over - after someone had to go get it from an automated dispensing cabinet and _then_ scan both the drugs and his bracelet QR code to verify the order (+allergies+other things). It was impressively thorough.

In comparison, my neurologist and doctor are really freehanded with nerve pain meds for my legs. Can't really recreationally abuse anticonvulsants or antidepressants or lidocaine patches, I guess. Also on the pain front, having something that can be directly tested goes a far way for the disbelief/skepticism that might otherwise be a problem. :(

Re: I Had a Stroke at 33

#80

Post by UrMomReadsHN »

morgante wrote: post #62
ryanSrich wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do have health insurance but it only covers around 47% of my medical costs (at least when I go for a primary care visit, I suspect they might even cover less for a more expensive procedure). I understand that my coverage is not all that common, although most providers do an 80/20 split. So for a procedure costing $100k (an ambulance ride and a few nights in the hospital would easily run this high) you'd have to pay…

> I do have health insurance but it only covers around 47% of my medical costs (at least when I go for a primary care visit, I suspect they might even cover less for a more expensive procedure). Actually, it's the opposite. For the vast majority of insurance plans, there's an annual limit to your copay. To be honest, if there weren't that limit there would be no purpose to insurance at all.

A few years ago there was no annual limit on my plan. Not with co-pays, just co-insurance. I ended up needing outpatient treatment almost every day for over a month. Each day was a $25 co-pay. I then moved on to a once a week treatment for close to the next year. I could afford that, many people cannot. I was also lucky to be able to collect my pay while I was getting treated because my employer provided me disability. The cost just skyrocketed beyond belief and while I already maxed out my co-insurance my treatment was billed like an office visit so co-pays are treated differently.
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