Friday, April 11, 2014

4/11/14

Quick Write: Reflect on what you learned in detail this week in at least one well-organized paragraph.

 During this past week I have learned a great amount of things. Some of the things I learned was what locked-in syndrome is, some of the causes, and a man named Jean-Dominique Bauby with the syndrome that wrote a memoir about his life with the syndrome, which later turned into a movie. So what is locked-in syndrome? Well, locked-in syndrome is a condition in which a patient is aware and awake but cannot move or communicate verbally due to complete paralysis of nearly all voluntary muscles in the body except for the eyes. What can cause this is Lou Gehrig's disease, diseases of the circulatory system, medication overdose, multiple Sclerosis, damage to nerve cells, particularly destruction of the myelin sheath, caused by disease (e.g. central pontine myelinolysis secondary to rapid correction of hyponatremia), a stroke or brain hemorrhage, usually of the basilar artery, or traumatic brain injury. However,  the chances getting locked-in syndrome is about the about same chance as winning the lottery so it is rare but not impossible. This rare disease happened to Jean-Dominique Bauby, a well-known French journalist, author and editor of the French fashion magazine ELLE and writer of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly after catching a massive stroke. So how can a man with Locked-in syndrome write a memoir? With his left eye. There's an alphabet he uses that contains the main letters used in the French alphabet that helps him blink to the letters he wants and make sentences out of them. 




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