Diagnosis: Sudden Unexplained Death Syndrome

by markizzo7

On September 17th 2011, I scheduled a routine check up at my family practice, with my regular physician. This is a routine check up that must occur every 3 months in order for me to be prescribed the Adderall that I, and I'm sure many of you fellow college students take. I mentioned to my doctor that every once in a while I feel faint when I take my pill in the morning. Which for him is an automatic red flag... Although, I later found that this had nothing to do with my condition, and was the result of me not eating before I took the drug, this decision to tell my doctor saved my life. He quickly noted that he was going to take me off of Adderall until I saw a Cardiologist at Swedish Medical Center. I was irritated by this immediately, because for me this meant more time at work missed, and more school work pushed back.

He ran his own EKG (Electrocardiogram) on my heart and found nothing wrong, but insisted that I go see the Cardiologist. I reluctantly wean't to the appointment 2 weeks later, at which point a nurse screened me through a series of tests that did not include an EKG. This was due to the fact that she had the EKG results from my prior visit to my normal doctor.

On her way out to grab the cardiologist she decided that because I said that my grandfather had a brother that died at birth from a heart malfunction, that she would run another EKG "Just because." She ran the test, and walked out of the room after looking at my results and saying "Huh, thats weird." To go fetch the Doctor.

I WAITED 45 MINUTES... The doctor came in and said words that I will never forget. "Mark, I believe you have a condition that I am going to take very seriously. It is called Brugada Syndrome. I know you have never heard of it before, but get used to that name because you will never forget it from this day forward." He was right. This scared me. I stood up and asked for a drink of water. The doctor opened the door, and immediately I had 8-10 nurses staring darts at me as I looked out of the room, white as a sheet. He asked one of them to grab a cup of water, to which 5 of them jumped out of their seats to say "Oh, I will." They were aware of my diagnosis before I was. The doctor told me that I would need immediate surgery to implant a ICD (Implantable Cardiac Defibrillator) into my chest to "Shock you back to life, when you go into Cardiac Arrest." To be told at 20 years old that you can/will die suddenly without warning, at any moment, is a lot to handle to say the least.

After two weeks of wearing a device that tracks my heart rate at all times, 24 hours a day, by a few people who is payed to watch it constantly in shifts across the country in Virginia somewhere. I had heart surgery to implant my defibrillator. What I was happily not aware of, was that this procedure required me to be awake and that they would have to stop my heart twice and allow the defibrillator to revive me in order to test the machine. The doctors told me that the severity of the condition was going to be based upon how easily they could stop my heart. This was after they had confirmed that I had type 1 Brugada (The most severe). When I came back to reality after the drugs wore off from surgery my doctor told me, that my first episode was likely to occur "within the next two years."

To this day, I am shocked at the sequence of events leading to my diagnosis. But what is most shocking, is that no one knows about this condition. I will live each day knowing that at any moment I can die. I also live each day knowing that because of Science and because of God/luck or whatever you want to call it, I have a device in my chest that will bring me back to life. This condition is REAL and it reeps in my thoughts everyday. It is time that we brought awareness to this condition.

I appreciate you for taking the time to hear my story and I hope for others to speak up as well.

How to learn programming

by Zeroeh (Edited; Grammar corrected)

When people ask for easy ways how to learn coding or programming, there are often the same of responses: Codecademy or similar sites where you can learn coding “really fast”. The main problem is that those sites often fail to teach the theoretical concepts or tie it up nicely with the examples.

Programming isn't just syntax and compilers, it's a whole logical thought process that shares the same process of building a home. You must have a great foundation of what computing is, how pieces work and how to really think abstractly.

Programming is great because there is never the "best" solution to a problem. Programming teaches you how to think differently. It teaches you to think abstractly. How does this work and why does it work this way? Your total thought process becomes a puzzle that you are constantly trying to solve.

To successfully learn programming you need a lot of intrinsic motivation. Programming is one of the most stressful and aggravating things you can ever do. Some people try it once and think: “What the fuck! I cannot do this!”, then give up. Others will excel at the theories behind computer science but during implementation time, they become overwhelmed and let their code "run-away" from them. They lose the complete picture of what they are trying to create and solve. Programming teaches you patience.

Learning to code through Codecademy or the like will most cerntainly benefit you. But let me show the dangers of learning it this way in an example:

You need to create a round-robin scheduling algorithm for a tournament? Your first step is: What is that? You look it up and say “Okay, cool, easy to do”. At this point, less experienced programmers will Google first ideas on how to implement it, then try to implement it. Normally they will not end up getting the problem on the first try, but that's okay! They try to see what the error or unexpected output is. Yeah, you can figure out where you're missing that “}” or “;” but what happens when your program gives you a “5” as result instead of the “3” you were looking for?

Most unskilled programmers become frustrated, start doubting themselves and search Google for more examples until they just try to copy and paste code into their program. This is what I mentioned above with “code run away from you.” They now have no clue what is what, where is this method? This is where most programmers give up, they can't figure it out.

A skilled and experienced programmer knows how to let their mind run free, they don't let problems and code run-away from them. They understand the complete picture and know what that FIFO, Queue, Stack, Binary Tree or Linked List is, how they are supposed to work and how they are implemented. How arrays work, what datatypes are best and which looping structures are better. This is something that comes with experience, not one day of googling and understanding it.

Everyone can become a "programmer". Syntax and algorithms will come with time, but patience and your thirst for success must be something you stride for.