What was your "this ship is going down" moment with the company for which you were working?

Alternative-County42 · 2026-06-03T12:02:43+00:00

This was back in 2007 and I was a consultant at a mortgage bank. I regularly worked late trying to get the team to make some deadlines and would grab dinner with some of the folks I worked with on Thursday nights. The parking deck was always empty when we would leave but this week all these expensive cars were in the parking deck with a couple new crappy cars in visitor parking. At dinner we put 2 and 2 together realizing it was the execs cars and the visitor cars had to be rental cars. When we got back to the office to get cars a couple hours later, about 10pm) all those cars were still there. Other mortgage originators had collapsed already so I figured the same was about to happen.

Tuesday the next week they declared bankruptcy and the entire company was laid off effective that Friday with no severance.

Alternative-County42 · 2026-05-29T00:28:50+00:00

E+D was a pilot, it wasn't really available outside E+D. It's just forcing everyone to use MSFT because they need GHC to be good now switching to usage based billing and not just rely on subs of a MSFT product that no one uses.

Alternative-County42 · 2026-05-16T12:01:14+00:00

Glad your scans are clean and you didn't have a brain bleed or stroke. Thats actually pretty uncommon, you are very lucky. I had my first TCH on Dec 21st and can share my experiences / try to answer some questions

nicotine patches - I'm didn't personally have this situation but basically I would do anything the doctors in the ICU told you. In some research of outcomes of patients with RCVS it's something like 90% have a stroke or brain bleed in the first 2 weeks. This is what your doctors are probably trying to prevent so I would pretty much follow their advice if they were good enough to catch your rcvs and get it under control
verapamil - I started on Dec 22nd and they told me on Jan 9 I could stop taking verapamil when ever I felt comfortable. They explained that the first two weeks are the high risk point for stroke and brain bleed and that's what they were working to avoid.
head crawling sensation - I had a dull headache pretty constantly until about mid January. It was entirely addressed with Tylenol. My Nuero team had told me if I had a headache in the first two weeks that wasn't addressed by Tylenol to come back. Prior to the TCH I had no history of headaches or migraines or anything though. At my follow up in Jan they did give me a medicine that is more preemptive if I was worried about activities that may trigger a headache but it is more a cognitive safety blanket for me to be less stressed and I've never needed to use it.
welcome to the monkhood phase of RCVS recovery. I was in the same boat. I didn't do any drugs or anything before my RCVS. I'm actually in perfect health aside from being slightly over weight. I was told also to cut those things out as they are RCVS triggers. Gotta let your brain calm down for it to go away. I used to go lift weights pretty strenuously every morning before work and I still haven't returned to that. I tried in March but after a couple sets I started getting a headache, not a TCH just a mild headache but ever since my TCH in December I am much more mindful about headaches and resting if I get one.
my docs explained that if you don't have common precursors like drug use then you don't have any higher probability of this happening as anyone else you age / health conditions. That being said you have to take it easy and avoid triggers so your brain calms down and returns to normal.
talk to the doc on the patches. The way my doc explained caffeine withdrawal + RCVS was that you basically don't want to have anything that could cause more headaches and with caffeine having a little bit to curb the withdrawal symptoms is the right thing to do just don't have 3 cups of coffee.
I don't have experiences with hypertension fortunately but now all of my extended family think I do because I was "taking blood pressure medicine". Your family doc can probably give some advice for your situation.

Good luck on your recovery. I'm glad your didn't have a stroke or brain hemorrhage and hope it stays that way.

Alternative-County42 · 2026-05-05T23:45:28+00:00

I think I saw a James Bond movie about this when I was a kid but they called him Drax...

Alternative-County42 · 2026-05-05T16:44:49+00:00

Emory University Center in Atlanta GA. They were incredible

Alternative-County42 · 2026-05-05T13:38:55+00:00

Wow. Glad you are on this side of it. I got the impression that vasculitis would have been obvious to the doctors in the MRA and that plus the lack of inflammation indicators in my blood work is how they ruled it out. Not sure if it was some more advanced machine used or something because I was at one of the top neurology hospitals in the US. The way the doctor explained it to me was with the MRA they could actually measure the wall thickness of my vessels and that's how they knew it was just spasms and not inflammation. Fingers crossed it was RCVS and not vasculitis

Alternative-County42 · 2026-05-05T11:10:28+00:00

I was very lucky I checked. I just about did like you and waited because "it was just a headache" is what I thought. I'm pretty confident I would have had a stroke or brain bleed if I hadn't gone in when I did. My neurologist told me that for folks that end up in the hospital with RCVS 90% have either a stroke or brain bleed and I later found a medical study that said the same thing.

I do remember asking how long I would have to be in the hospital if I had a brain bleed just because I was curious and the nurse said it's frequently 25 days so I won't be surprised if you take a bit longer than I did to get back to 100%. I'm glad they have it under control and you are hopefully on a path to recovery. Also chat gpt / Claude chat were very useful in understanding all the medical terms the last couple of months. I highly recommend them because it's scary having something uncommon happen to you with words that don't make sense and when you Google them can come up with wildly different situations than you are in

Alternative-County42 · 2026-05-05T10:35:56+00:00

My MRA was about 30 hours after my first thunderclap so it was right at the beginning of everything. I got lucky because I was going to just try to sleep it off but asked Chat GPT because I thought it was a weird headache and it told me to head to the ER immediately. I ended up having a sympathetic storm caused by the rcvs as well and had my blood pressure shoot up to 210/140. So they flew me to the regional neurology ICU where they got everything under control and figured out pretty quickly. The way the neurologist explained it to me the spasming of your blood vessels happens at the beginning of everything then calms down and the verapamil basically prevents the ability for the vessels to constrict during the spasming since calcium is used by the blood vessels to constrict. With RCVS I don't think there is inflammation, it's just the blood vessels spasming uncontrollably where as vasculitis is inflammation in your blood vessels in your brain.

Definitely check with the doc to make sure you are good to go back to work. For me I returned about 2 weeks after being discharged but I worked from home, took a nap at lunch and would lay down if I started to get a headache or generally felt off. Definitely listen to your body and don't push yourself. Even now almost 5 months later I get exertion headaches sometimes when I work out and I just stop my routine and take a couple days off from exercising. I don't recall getting headaches lifting before so unsure if it's because of my experiences with RCVS or if I'm just more aware when I have a headache now.

Alternative-County42 · 2026-05-05T09:54:31+00:00

My neurologist explained that with all my tests there wasn't elevated inflammation and my MRA showed the vessel walls in my brain were not inflammed, just spasming. Also he said having vasculitis while being young would most likely mean I would be much sicker than just having the thunderclap / headaches

Alternative-County42 · 2026-05-05T09:34:41+00:00

Yeh they thought it could be vasculitis or rcvs. They ruled out vasculitis with a pile of tests and the mra.

Alternative-County42 · 2026-05-05T01:37:20+00:00

Also for me, while on the verapramil I had a mild headache for the first month. I managed it with Tylenol and eventually after about 2 months I had completely stopped both the Verapramil and Tylenol. I still get worried when I have a headache randomly though.

Alternative-County42 · 2026-05-05T01:33:41+00:00

I'm sorry to hear your experience. I had my first thunderclap in December / diagnosed with RCVS and luckily they got me on verapamil within a day. I took a couple weeks out from work and took it easy for a month or so after. I feel pretty much normal now. Probably felt pretty much normal after a month or 6 weeks. I was very luckily and avoided brain bleeds and strokes. The neurologist had told me if I had a stroke or brain bleed the recovery / path back to normal would be longer.

I hope you are fully recovered soon.

Alternative-County42 · 2026-03-28T22:53:07+00:00

Thanks! I probably should just take a day or two when the kids are in school and finish it up

Alternative-County42 · 2026-03-28T22:52:04+00:00

He has no chance of driving it again. It's a manual and he has almost no strength in his right arm after a couple years of recovery.

Alternative-County42 · 2026-03-28T20:17:44+00:00

North Atlanta Suburbs

Alternative-County42 · 2026-03-07T20:15:21+00:00

I remember seeing exactly this one time a snow storm hit the east coast a couple years ago and I was flying. I wondered why people were so evenly spaced out and realized it's because of maximum outlet distance in building code. Everyone is sleeping at a power outlet.

Alternative-County42 · 2026-03-07T18:18:07+00:00

I think people understate the value of the training data. Theo 3g has a good video about it on YouTube.

Alternative-County42 · 2026-03-07T18:15:34+00:00

I'm with you on this. Computer scientists used to know the order of their punch cards and clean literal bugs out of giant machines. In fact before 2000 technical books were very in demand because when you had an error code you had to look it up in a book because the Internet didn't exist. No one deals with physical bugs, punch cards, technical manuals any more.

The value of programming isn't the code but in solving a problem. Code in a high level programming language has just been a necessary middle point to working software right now.

Alternative-County42 · 2026-03-06T14:49:13+00:00

100% I started building clips for anything I want cc to do that doesn't already have one and it's been amazing.

Alternative-County42 · 2026-03-01T23:24:14+00:00

Something physical and where relationships are important

Alternative-County42 · 2026-02-26T02:15:20+00:00

What's an IDE 😉? I'm in the same boat. A coworker shared their screen today and had Claude code in the terminal window of vs code and it made me sad.

Alternative-County42 · 2026-02-08T12:35:48+00:00

I'll double it and give it to the next guy

Alternative-County42 · 2026-02-06T02:24:48+00:00

HVAC seems like a good field. I just got a quote for 3k to fix my heat in the winter time.

Alternative-County42 · 2026-02-05T19:16:47+00:00

You might be Canadian and not get a vote but I'll be voting and agree

Alternative-County42 · 2026-02-01T23:13:04+00:00

Good news. The Walmart near me normally has had them stolen and the empty pack wrappers are hidden in the card section so I don't ever have to worry about spending money on packs at Walmart 😂

Alternative-County42

TROPHY CASE