Today, I will be touching on a heavy topic and yet this could concern you and I and people around us. According to the National Stroke Association, Stroke is the third leading cause of death in America and the No. 1 cause of adult disability. Fortunately, according to them, “80% of strokes are preventable.” Thus we have the POWER in us to prevent Stroke.
What is Stroke?
According to MayoClinic.com, “A Stroke occurs when the blood supply to a part of your brain is interrupted or severely reduced, depriving brain tissue of oxygen and nutrients. Within a few minutes, brain cells begin to die.” And according to the fact sheet by National Stroke Association, “Two million brain cells die every minute during stroke, increasing risk of permanent brain damage, disability or death. Recognizing symptoms and acting fast to get medical attention can save a life and limit disabilities.”
In so speaking, time is an important factor here and it can very well be the deciding factor on whether the person suffering from a Stroke attack can recover completely. Therapy with clot-busting drugs must start within three hours. Quick treatment not only improves your chances of survival, but may also reduce the amount of complications resulting from the stroke. The challenge is recognizing Stroke as most people are unaware of the symptoms.
How do we recognize the symptoms of Stroke?
The symptoms of Stroke include:
Sudden numbness or weakness of the face, arm or leg; especially on one side of the body
Sudden confusion, trouble speaking or understanding
Sudden trouble seeing in one or both eyes
Sudden trouble walking, dizziness, loss of balance or coordination
Sudden severe headache with no known cause
In recognizing these symptoms, there is an easy test to further determine if a person has suffered from Stroke attack or are having symptoms of Stroke. I received an email from a friend about this simple test and decided to Google for some information to check its validity. True enough, I found a few sources providing the same information.
This simple test will help you detect stroke symptoms and Act F.A.S.T.:
F: Facial weakness, can the person smile; have their mouth or eyes drooped? A: Arm weakness, can the person raise both arms? Does one arm drift downward? S: Speech difficulty, can the person speak clearly and understand what you say? T: Time to act, act FAST and call for ambulance or paramedics immediately
According to the email which I received, it mentioned that there is one more way to know if a person has suffered a stroke – ask the person to stick out his/her tongue (I have not been able to verify this point). If the tongue is not straight or droops or slants to one side rather than coming straight out of his/her mouth, it is an indication of a Stroke.
If the person has difficulty in performing any one of these tasks, it is more than likely he/she has suffered a Stroke and medical help should be IMMEDIATELY called for.
As the saying goes, “Prevention is better than cure.” Since it was mentioned earlier that we have the POWER in us to prevent Stroke, let us take a look at some of the deciding factors:
If we can act F.A.S.T with a person who has suffered from a Stroke, we can not only save the person’s life but also improve the person’s chance of complete recovery. You may view some statistics of Stroke from TheUniversityHospital.com. If this information is useful to you. Please pass around this F.A.S.T. Wishing everyone great health and goodness in every areas of your life.
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I am honored to be awarded an award from Kathy at Simply Abundant Living. Thank you Kathy for the award.
“These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into
the body of their award.”
Pardon me for the late post. Some of you might have already seen this speech. This is Steve Job Stanford Commencement Speech in 2005. In this speech that he gave, he told the graduates 3 stories. The first story is about ‘connecting the dots.’ The second story is about ‘Love and Loss‘ and the final story that he told was about ‘Death.’ Of the 3 stories, the one that had given me the deepest impression is the story about ‘Death.’
In the final story he told about ‘Death’, he mentioned, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” The speech had impacted my life positively and I hope it would do the same for you.
A story which I received in my email a few years back. Something very true from the story, “Getting over someone … doesn’t mean forgetting that person.” And it is very important to know that we must go on with our life in order not to disappoint them. We must also understand that it is not how we honored them after they were gone but rather how we treated them when they are with us. Never hesitate to show your care and concern to people that you love and to people around you. There might not always be a tomorrow to act.
I never thought I could ever get over the death of Julia. She is everything in my life, and she is even more important than myself. The time she spent in the hospital was the most painful moment in our life. I knew that she feels a great deal of pain incurred by the cancerous cells in her body, but she never once shown the pain in front of me; this, I have always believed that she was trying to prevent me from seeing her suffers so that I will not feel sad.
For me, every time I got to see her, I was worried that that might be the very last time I would be seeing her; so I treasure every moment I spent with her. Every time when I visited her in the hospital, I would hold her hand and then we would just chat and act like everything was normal.
Many would have thought that we are running away from reality. We never were. We just love each other so deeply so that we did not want to see the other party being sad. It would be very difficult for me to describe how we felt, you have to feel it yourself to know exactly what I mean by that.
The day I lost her to cancer … it still lives so vividly in my mind; I could never forget the way she struggled to breath the last breathe. The pain must be killing her. It really hurts me to see her suffered. How I wished I could bear part, if not all her pain she had to undergo. But the only thing I could do was to watch her losing her battle to death. I held on to her hand as usual until she left … without me.
The very next moment she was gone, I just didn’t know what to do with myself … didn’t know just what to do. I was so used to doing everything with her and making plan for two. Suddenly, I felt lost. There was no light to guide me. She was not only a guide but had been my closest soul companion. The first thing that came to my mind then was to leave this place with her; I can’t bear to let her go on this journey alone or should I say I can’t leave without her. And so, I tried to follow her. But I am glad that I live till today. She would never have agreed to the idea of me going with her; she would have wanted me to carry on with my life.
I am grateful to John for discovering my act of foolishness. He sent me to a psychiatrist shortly after that incident, saying that I needed professional help. I didn’t want to argue with him then, and so I just go for the therapy.
The therapy didn’t help a bit. I could not live a normal life. I could not get Julia out of my mind. Everything I do, her images would be there. Somehow, subconsciously, she seems pretty much alive to me. I could see her making breakfast every alternate morning and when it was my turn to make breakfast, I would always make an extra set for her. I could also see her cutting the grasses and tending to our garden of roses besides me every weekend.
And she would still sit by my side to watch sunset with me every evening. All this I never tell anyone; all they would say would be,” she is dead already and you are probably having illusions.” Maybe the main reason why I never tell anyone is that I can’t accept the fact that they’re right, she’s dead.
All these things carry on for two to three years. During that period, I even played the game we invented together called ‘Connection’. Whenever anyone of us wants to talk, the party whom initiated would say: “connect?” then the other party will say: “connected’. Every time, I would imagine her saying “connected” and I would start to tell her all the things I had done and how much I had missed her.
It went on for two to three years until … I not quite sure what actually hits me, but one night, she appeared in my dreams and we talked about lots of things, and I can’t wait to tell her all the things I did. Suddenly, she held on to my hand, looked me in my eyes and with tears in her eyes, she said,” Ben, please wake up, I’m dead already. It hurts me, more than you know, knowing that you are wasting your time. Please, for my sake, wake up.” I woke up crying in my bed that morning, realizing how foolish I actually am. And I started to live my life once again.
I realized that it hurts a lot to see the one that we love so dearly passed away, and it’s never easy to get over someone whom had once shared our life. But getting over someone doesn’t mean forgetting that person. We place them close to us, here in our heart to always remember them. And whenever we think of them, we will just reach into our heart for the image of them. In so doing, they live forever. But the most important things would be for us to carry on with our life so as not to disappoint them.
This is the final story that Mr. Steve Jobs shared with the graduates of Stanford University at Commencement on June 12, 2005. In this story about death, he mentioned, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” How true it is and it truly challenges you to live life differently.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that your are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish
Thank you for following these 3 stories of Mr. Steve Job which I had shared with you.
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“These blogs are exceedingly charming. These kind bloggers aim to find and be friends. They are not interested in prizes or self-aggrandizement. Our hope is that when the ribbons of these prizes are cut, even more friendships are propagated. Please give more attention to these writers! Deliver this award to eight bloggers who must choose eight more and include this cleverly-written text into
This is the final story that Mr. Steve Jobs shared with the graduates of Stanford University at Commencement on June 12, 2005. In this story about death, he mentioned, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” How true it is and it truly challenges you to live life differently.