A Stroke of Insight
A few years ago I was looking after an elderly woman in the emergency department who had suffered a stroke. She was aphasic — unable to understand speech or create comprehensible sentences. I explained to her family what had happened to her. Then her daughter asked me a question for which I hadn’t prepared an answer:
“What does it feel like to have a stroke?”
The answer to this question is not taught in medical school. I could call on a few vague recollections from some of Oliver Sacks‘ books, but the place I directed her to was TED.com and a talk by the neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor. Taylor wrote a book titled My Stroke of Insight based on her own experience of a hemorrhagic stroke. The fusion of her objective scientific approach with her personal, subjective internal adventure gives an incredible unique insight into the effect of an intracerebral hemorrhage on the human mind.
Watch, learn and be amazed:
Chris is an Intensivist and ECMO specialist at The Alfred ICU, where he is Deputy Director (Education). He is a Clinical Adjunct Associate Professor at Monash University, the Lead for the Clinician Educator Incubator programme, and a CICM First Part Examiner.
He is an internationally recognised Clinician Educator with a passion for helping clinicians learn and for improving the clinical performance of individuals and collectives. He was one of the founders of the FOAM movement (Free Open-Access Medical education) has been recognised for his contributions to education with awards from ANZICS, ANZAHPE, and ACEM.
His one great achievement is being the father of three amazing children.
On Bluesky, he is @precordialthump.bsky.social and on the site that Elon has screwed up, he is @precordialthump.
| INTENSIVE | RAGE | Resuscitology | SMACC
