And the fun never ends!

A stroke of luck!

I jest of course. Right now my time is being spent sending pitches hither and yon about an item of personal impact: I have been diagnosed as having had a stroke.

This is actually both frustrating and fascinating. It is, according to the CT scan, a "hypodensity seen adjacent to the frontal horn of the left lateral ventricle/caudate."

In practical terms this is not the classic TV movie "Oh my god the entire left side of my face doesn't move" stroke, it is much more subtle, with short-term memory loss (noted first by Susan of course) and apparently personality changes (same). Maybe fatigue. Maybe caused by last year's big COVID infection?

Of course the doctor leaps from "It's a stroke" to "Here are drugs to keep it from happening again."

Meanwhile we're asking "When did this happen", "Why?", "What are the long term implications?" and of course "Am I experiencing other symptoms that I just haven't figured out yet?"

No answers for any of those.

Beyond that of course I'm looking at every typo and misplaced word and thinking "Oh no! Language skills!" Although I'm also assuming it's just my usual sloppy typing...

My thoughts right now, and what I'm pitching include:

• a lesser or small stroke and what one needs to understand.

• a possible longer term series tracking whatever is to follow (another area where there seems to be no easy answer)

• maybe explainers to take the absolutely fantastic 80 and 90 page "So you've had stroke" booklets from the likes of Harvard, and boiling them down to something maybe thousands of words shorter.

• maybe something linking it to COVID, which I've read is a real possibility.

• how do you adapt your lifestyle when you don't entirely know what your new symptoms or weaknesses are?

Honestly right now I'm doing a lot of thinking-out-loud by writing as I understand this thing, and more to the point am doing it with some kind of short term memory loss happening which obviously complicates things. I think....

Oh well, it's nice to have a project. On the weekend I was putting up Ikea window drape tracks, and was utterly baffled by the pictogram instructions. I have since been assured that it was Ikea that was the problem, not the stroke...

Oh yeah, the image at the top is an AI generated “picture” of what an AI algorithm thinks stroke victims experience.