Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Image

White House Correspondent Tweets His Heart Attack 77

Tommy Christopher, who writes for mediate.com, has reporting in his blood, so much so that he livetweeted every part of his recent heart attack. "I gotta be me. Livetweeting my heart attack. Beat that!" and "This is not like the movies. Most deadpan heart attack evar. Still hurts even after the morphine," were among his updates as he was rushed to the hospital. Christopher is now in stable condition after recovering from emergency surgery.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

White House Correspondent Tweets His Heart Attack

Comments Filter:
  • Tweet! (Score:4, Funny)

    by morari ( 1080535 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @02:16PM (#33500942) Journal

    This one time, I tweeted that I ate a sandwich. I tweeted about every bite, described the taste and texture. Everyone cared a lot about that series of tweets, and waited with extreme anticipation as I made it to the last bite. I'm thinking about doing a similar series of tweets, describing the sandwich the next day as it leaves my body. It seems like shitty tweets get a lot of attention...

    • by Pojut ( 1027544 )

      I assume you are a twitter shitter? [penny-arcade.com]

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by DarkIye ( 875062 )
      I don't know, a heart attack from the victim's point of view as it happens sounds quite interesting.
      • Until it's your father telling you this during the ambulance ride to the hospital... Interesting, perhaps, but not *twitter* interesting.

        • by Rakarra ( 112805 )

          Until it's your father telling you this during the ambulance ride to the hospital... Interesting, perhaps, but not *twitter* interesting.

          I don't know, if I cared enough about someone to follow them on Twitter, "I'm dying" would be one of the very few Tweets I would actually care about and find worthwhile.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Member posting AC: As someone who's 33, not overweight and suffered a heart attack (family curse, most men died of them), this is SCARY SHIT! When you feel one coming on, it's death knocking on your door. First, you are having a panic attack, the pain, and then perhaps your last breath. Think of it as dry form of drowning.

        1. If you feel one, start coughing and take aspirin. Call 911 immediately. And pray you live another day.

        2. Live a vegan lifestyle. Ya, it sucks balls. I miss being an omnivore. But you wa

  • by NotQuiteReal ( 608241 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @02:16PM (#33500946) Journal
    So, I guess it gave him something to do.
  • I can't wait to see the new extreme sports that come out of this. My mind races. Bungie Tweeting, sky tweeting, base jump tweeting, etc. And for that matter, it's probably only a matter of time before someone tweets there own death ("going to the light #lifeafterdeath, pray for me @joan @Derrick @slashdot") if it hasn't happened yet.
    • He wouldn't bother to tweet out "Aaargh", he'd just say it. Which is why he really needs voice-to-text on his cell phone.

  • by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @02:31PM (#33501164)

    The Tweet reads, "Here may be found the last Tweet of Tommy Christopher. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find me in the Hospital of Aaauuuggghhh... "

    What?

    He must have died while tweeting it.

    Look, if he was dying, he wouldn't have bothered to tweet 'Aaaauuuggghhhh'. He'd just say it.

    . . . etc . . .

    What I don't understand, is why the hospital staff lets someone with a serious medical condition tweet . . . ?

  • but the real geek will figure out how to fit an ekg into 140 bytes

    • by StikyPad ( 445176 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @03:28PM (#33501962) Homepage

      #define FLATLINE 0x00

    • by arth1 ( 260657 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @03:35PM (#33502056) Homepage Journal

      With a 12-lead EKG, you can have 11 values of +-64 for each lead, which fits in 132 bytes of 7-bit ASCII, leaving 8 bytes for header identifying it as an EKG, plus the horisontal resolution (i.e. time for each measurement).

      To get more data, repeat.

      • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Better than that. The 12 lead ecg only has nine raw data points. There are 10 connections to the body - 6 intercostal electrodes and 4 limb electrodes, but one of the limb electrodes is ground (zero by definitiion, used as the reference by the other connections). This leaves you with 6 intercostals and 3 active limb connections, plus 3 calculated leads (difference between left/right arm, left arm/legs, right arm/legs) for a total of 12 leads.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by arth1 ( 260657 )

          It's even better than that. You only have to measure the five peaks, plus four intervals for each spot. So you don't need 11 sample points -- nine will do. And even better, you already know whether each of them is positive or negative, saving another bit.
          So 81 characters should be plenty. You can probably get down to even less by only recording the differences between one sample and the next.

    • It's really 280 bytes for unicode. Look, I just doubled your monthly bill.

      • by blueg3 ( 192743 )

        Not quite. It's more than that if it supports surrogate pairs and counts them as one character (instead of two). It's less than that if it doesn't. (If any Unicode character counts as a single character, it's about 2^20 bits per character. Otherwise, it's just shy of 2^16.)

    • 31 characters, all you'd need to know to schedule an angiogram.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • You are a hip celebrity & are having suicidal thoughts. Do you

    1) Call 911

    2) Call a friend

    3) call suicide prevention hotline

    4) tweet about it

    If you chose 4, you are probably faking it so you can get on gawker.

    It seems like every other day celebrities are reaching for a twitter client than hitting 911. This makes me think there isn't an actual emergency and things are a bit trumped up. "okay blood is coming out".

  • Recently I met this very nice girl. Well. I'll keep you posted.

  • by drainbramage ( 588291 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @03:44PM (#33502172) Homepage

    Worst time to have a heart attack?
    During a game of Charades.

  • by nbauman ( 624611 ) on Tuesday September 07, 2010 @03:47PM (#33502200) Homepage Journal

    I realize that people are using humor to deal with their fears and discomfort over death, but there's no way to make this funny:

    December 17, 2009, 12:29 pm
    Announcing a Child’s Death on Twitter
    By LISA BELKIN
    http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/tweeting-about-a-childs-death/ [nytimes.com]

  • 40 comments and not a single NO CARRIER jokNOCARRIER

  • How would you like those to be your last words?

    "Still hurts even after the mor"

  • I mean this reminded me of Holy Grail where they're reading that text on some wall where apparently he died while writing it.
  • There is a big difference between mediate.com and mediaite.com...
  • http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html [alternativ...tments.com]
    http://www.earthsave.org/news/03summer/eat2live.htm [earthsave.org]
    "Chapter seven is perhaps the most powerful chapter of the book. It offers compelling evidence of dietary causes for most of the common health problems faced by Americans. Then Dr. Fuhrman explains how diet can prevent and even reverse heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, chronic headaches, and autoimmune disease. He relates true stories of patients (who gave permission to be named) who have been able to sto

  • ...their 140 characters of fame.
  • I remember the first, exciting days of the internet, when there were all these incredible new possibilities: ftp, that allowed you to fetch files, even 100s of K from the other side of the world, email and usenet that let you communicate in no time with people far away - for free, almost; and then gopher and the web.

    And what has it come to now? SPAM, ever more intrusive and idiotic adverts, and even the most inconsequential crap has become the must have of the moment.

To stay youthful, stay useful.

Working...