Note on Note On: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper via Ex Libris Kirkland: Recently Added Notes

There’s a section on ‘patient diaries’, which are not written by a patient but written about a patient. Apparently when you are in a medically induced coma, or treacheotemized, etc, people come back and often have traumatic memories - not from the actual events themselves but from their brain trying to make sense of what happened; they think they were abducted by aliens, or their loved ones were replaced by robots, or they were molested in their incapacitated state. So some Danish nurses started a practice of keeping a handwritten diary for the patient, which their loved ones can also add to, about what’s happening - and then when the patient is back to normal, they give them this handwritten account, and it really helps ground the patient back into reality and make sense of their lost time. It’s so weird, and so beautiful an idea!

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Ex Libris Kirkland: Recently Added Notes

Note On: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

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Taking notes as medicine.

I didn’t know about this, but already I started a journal for our baby daughter like this. We leave a note for each day and have family/friends leave notes when they are with her those days. The hope was for it to be a keepsake for her, but maybe it will help ground her as a person, to have this history of her infancy.