What happens when you email a stranger for help?
TL;DR: Sometimes you get a yes. In August of 2019 I went looking for the highest person I could find at Burton Snowboards, and on the eighth I sent a cold email asking for help with equipment. It turned out I had emailed Jake Burton’s assistant. I picked a...
How do you help someone without making it a big deal?
TL;DR: You do it before anybody has to ask, and then you say nothing about it. My first day of adaptive snowboarding, I walked into a packed yurt in Pennsylvania and could not find anywhere to sit. A man with white hair scooted over and made room. That is the whole...
Why does a stroke patient stop talking?
TL;DR: Usually because talking makes us feel stupid, not because we have nothing to say. After my stroke at fifteen I had word-finding trouble. I could look straight at an object, know exactly what it was, and never reach the word for it. So I went quiet at the...
Why do nurses remember what a patient is most afraid of?
TL;DR: Because somebody asks, and somebody else carries it. I was fifteen, a few months out from my second brain surgery, and I told my doctors the thing I feared most was losing my hair. I woke up with most of it still there. My nurses did that, and I did not learn...
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