Hooray! It’s the long-anticipated return of the stroke news digest!
There have been some interesting stroke stories in the news this week, and I’d like to share them with you…
[Read on, and don’t forget to check out the Apoplexy Newsletter.]
1. Fake News
President Donald may have told us that he would run in to foil a school shooting even if he didn’t have a weapon. But this isn’t the news I’m talking about:
Sources @WhiteHouse confirmed that “Dear Leader @realDonaldTrump wrestled the shooters to the ground after carding a stunning 38-under par at #maralago. He also had five holes-in-one in the round, which was witnessed by 17 armed bodyguards.”
Incredible. #Golf #GolfNews https://t.co/ENjbX6sI37 — Ricky Monahan Brown (@ricky_ballboy) February 27, 2018
But as trusted sources like the BBC – 🙄 – warn us about the prevalence of nasty people peddling lies, it’s good that proper media like The Daily Telegraph (long-time employer of noted serial liar Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson [1, 2] as its Brussels correspondent reporting on the European Commission) sometimes reminds us that the general public are bunch of shiftless, lying swine as well.
I’m not sure how good my ability to fake a stroke would have been prior to having a stroke. I guess that I’d be pretty good at it now, though. And I can confirm that displaying the symptoms of a stroke is a really good way to get rushed to hospital. An asthma attack is good, too. Vice-like pains in the chest work, of course. The story is pretty light on details, but at least it’s a distraction from Boris’s latest – look, I’m not going to use words like “bumbling” and “buffoon”, since they imply an endearingly Wooster-esque character – hateful bullshit about how the Irish border is basically the same as the imaginary lines that separate Camden, Islington, and Westminster.
This is *such* a revealing comment. People who live in border region don’t even register w/foreign secretary. https://t.co/bgZMW0NVOa
— Peter Geoghegan (@PeterKGeoghegan) 27 February 2018
I suppose any Boris interview where he doesn’t end up almost doubling the sentence of an innocent Brit jailed abroad is now considered a success
— tom jamieson (@jamiesont) 27 February 2018
So, let’s move on to real, hard news…
2. Sticking Plasters Aid Stroke Recovery
I know, right? Now it sounds like I’m at it. But this sub-headline isn’t far off describing a real and exciting stroke-based story. Auntie Beeb brings the facts – 😲:
Scientists in the US are developing wearable sensors to speed up the recovery of stroke patients…. They look like small white sticking plasters, but they send information wirelessly to [the patient’s] medical team.
Medics and scientists and Northwestern University in Chicago have developed sensors that allow therapists to monitor the progress of patients recovering from strokes, even when they’ve returned home from a therapy session. Lizzy McAninch, a doctor who had a stroke two years ago and could not move or speak or swallow for several weeks, described the benefits of the sensors to BBC News:
This technology to put sensors on the body to assess which muscle groups work or not can really pinpoint the areas affected by the stroke and can target therapies to specifically improve those issues.
This all fits in nicely with my series of Man or Cyberman posts, and I for one welcome the coming of our new strokey, augmented overlords.
Ah, yes. Trust Boris to take our eye off the important matters at hand. But maybe this is the answer to the issue of trying to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland – just cover every person in Northern Ireland, the UK, Ireland, and Europe with sensors that look like little white sticking plasters that send information back to GCHQ, the Home Office, and their equivalents across the European Union. And every piece of livestock, of course. Except, we wouldn’t want people transferring their sensors. So they’d have to be implantable. The ones applied to all goods and vehicles would only have to be super sticky, of course. Maybe release a dye if they were tampered with. Yeah, you’re welcome.
