This was a very good to-the-point post! Applies to everyone, and you only truly seem to wake up to care for your health when you lost it first.

Could honestly change the title to "Tips for stroke-surviving software engineers (or anyone trying to avoid one)". All of us need these fresh little reminders that our brains are very different than the tech we regularly interact with every now and then. Recognize and respect your organic hardware!

Wow, this article resonated so much more than I expected when I clicked on it. Mostly because I have epilepsy without the stroke, and after decades of it being stable, around 2021 it got a bit harder to control and started to interfere with my daily living for the first time.

A couple points I'd add/double down on:

1. Find yourself a team of really good folks to work with who treat you as a human - At the peak of my epilepsy acutely interfering with my life, I was at a startup that, after being devastated by lockdowns, decided to scale down from 100 employees to 6 and start over. When I told the founder I'd need a month off twice within the span of 4 months for some very invasive surgeries, I fully expected him to let me go, as he was legally permitted. He told me to take all the time I needed, and for that I'll forever be indebted.

2. Avoid the urge to "other" yourself - the only brain we're exposed to 24/7 is our own. That makes it easy to lose track of what's baseline and easy to assume every time you forget something or otherwise "glitch," it's a sign you are flawed in ways others aren't. That's not true, everyone forgets things.

3. It takes time to recover emotionally - This week marks 3 years since my last big surgery, and I'm just past 2 since things started to really stabilize. Only in the last few months have I stopped walking around constantly viewing myself through the lens of a condition and with a sense of self-doubt and "othering". So be kind and patient with yourself. It takes time.

4. Reddit has some very supportive communities to help answer questions and remind you that you're not alone (including r/epilepsy). But don't get overly involved in them for too long, because then it becomes easy to define yourself and your tribe through your medical condition.

5. If epilepsy or some other condition prevents you from getting a driver's license, there's a lot to say for living in NYC or SF. Two of the only places in America where it's completely normal to live without a car and you wont stand out or feel excluded.

Question to the OP or anyone else that has experienced something similar. Have you tried grey area or Peptide space medications like Dihexa, P-21, Semax, etc to see if there are any benefits there?

Very much self experimentation but they do work in mouse models as well as Russian medicine. I'm not encouraging anyone to experiment, just interested to see if anyone that has undergone experiences like OP's has experimented.

I have not experienced a stroke or similar but I just started a 6 - 8 week Dihexa course, low dose to test tolerance and I find I am experiencing benefits such as improved recall. I am learning guitar as my test suite. Something I have attempted multiple times before and given up on relatively quickly. 2 weeks in so far.

My intention is to drop the Dihexa at week 8 and then switch to Semax. The theory being that Dihexa improves synaptogenesis but inhibits pruning. Semax allows for pruning but optimizes the efficiency of existing used synapses. Dihexa is an experimental Alzheimer's medication and Semax is a Russian post stroke drug

Hey folks, my wife is a speech language pathologist who specializes in stroke rehab, I sent her this post and this comment section and she sent me this to share:

As a stroke/neuro rehab speech-language pathologist that is married to a web dev/engineering manager (that obviously sent me this blogpost), everyone reading needs to listen to this author's sound advice for prevention of CVA as well as for post-stroke management. We are seeing younger age strokes more frequently, especially those with jobs that are high stress and low physicality (read: you folks!). Thank you to the writer for spreading this info and awareness… I can confirm it is not as niche as one might think and for best outcomes you have to respond FAST (look at Face, Arm weakness, Speech difficulty, Time to call 911). PSA of the day!

DMSO can allegedly help some people improve after stroke, if applied soon enough.

https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/dmso-could-save-millions-...

This is applicable to far more than stroke victims. Any manner of brain interference should have the same ruleset. Reading through the comments, this ruleset should apply to everyone regardless of their medical situation. Chiming in with a +1 to fitness, and diet. It helps, massively.

I'm terrified by the possibility of a stroke that would disable me, not in a way that would let me write here about my experience with it, but leaving me dependent on the care of others. I'd prefer to shuffle off of this mortal coil, but such a sudden event may not allow that choice. So I fantasize about writing a suicide program that would take care of business if I fail to pass a bespoke Turing (delichon) test. But I doubt my ability to write that with enough nines of reliability to be willing to deploy it. I tried to implant that algorithm into my brother, but he declines to go to prison for me, the jerk. If I live long enough maybe AI tech will become reliable enough for this application, but I doubt it will be soon.

Thank you for sharing this. Keep up the good work and healing, OP! It's incredible that you've continued to be polite and to do as much as you can through your health struggle. Setting and enforcing boundaries can be difficult for some, especially when you're feeling hazy and not operating at 100%. I like that you pointed out being polite can be expensive sometimes.

This is excellent advice for anyone with knowledge based work though. Distractions, messages, pop-ups, asks, meetings, etc. are the leading reason I don't get as much done as I could. Some of your items could definitely help here.

> Let it hold state so your brain can judge rather than store and needlessly cogitate on stuff.

Isn’t that needless cogitation something that helps creating new links in your brain and helps against cognitive decline in later ages?