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Comment by kempbellt | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating concept: watching your own brain have a stroke.

"Oh, there goes my control of my left arm. Oh, there goes my sense of smell. Oh, language is nextgsnghghqfnvjznv"

Also sounds terrifying

I had a migraine a couple of months ago that I thought was a stroke. I didn't even really have a headache, just suddenly had tingling in my hands, and limited vision. I pulled by bike to the side of the road and sat down on the grass, then called my wife. I realized during the conversation that I couldn't remember basic words like "library" (where I was going) and "numb" (what I was experiencing). I felt just like me, but I had like 60% vocabulary. That was one of the scariest experiences of my life -- not pain or disability, but simple loss of words.

I had a similar experience recently. It was also one of the scariest experiences of my life. Afterwards I spoke with my doctor about it, and they used the terms "anxiety attack" or "panic attack". In my case, it was brought on by a combination of eating poorly, drinking too frequently, sleeping irregularly, and letting myself become stressed out about work in my off hours. It was bad enough that I spent the following week in-patient at a hospital. That said, having three structured meals a day, sleeping regular hours, and not having my phone - I felt like a new person by the end of the week.

Not sure if this relates to your experience, but the lesson I learned was: Take real vacations. Where you are not tethered to your phone, social media, work calls, PagerDuty, social calls, etc. You can just eat, drink, sleep, breathe, and take in the moment. Even if it is just for a day, take time to remember what it means to be human.

Edited: for tone

It happens during live broadcasts on occasion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG7NuH5QTdE

I experienced this as well, a few years back.

I'd been feeling fuzzy all day at work - losing track of what I was doing, constantly searching for common words. Eventually I decided to head home.

I got to the train station and started feeling a rising sense of worry, especially once I noticed that my left arm had stopped obeying any commands, so I texted my partner. Texting was hard. The words were in my brain but my thumb wouldn't obey me. Eventually I got there. I noticed a few typos, but I couldn't find it in me to correct them and I reckoned it was understandable enough, so I sent it; partner later reported back that the text was completely unintelligible. He called me, and I couldn't get any words out except the word 'help'.

He looked up my location on Maps, called an ambulance, and told me to find a seat. By the time it came, the episode was mostly over and I was back to just feeling very fuzzy and having trouble speaking clearly.

They took me to hospital, booked me in for a CT and MRI, kept me in for a couple of days of observation. The doctor later told me that what I'd had was an atypical migraine, rather than a stroke. I'd never had a migraine in my life, and (other than a regular pain-migraine which kicked in the day I came home from hospital) I've never had one again.

Brains are really, really weird.

This sounds similarish to a psilocybin trip, not the paralyzing part but seeing mental faculties (or likewise things) being 'disabled'. "Oh there goes my ability to speak English, and there goes my ability to remember, oh reason gone, what? Yay, whoooo, huh? What's going on?"

I had a similar experience with general anaesthetic.

"10..9..oh there goes the left-hand side of my brain...8.."

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