Apahsia

Aphasia is a crappy term for what the brain does sometimes after a brain injury and although you KNOW what you want to say, your speech comes out to listeners as word salad. It's incredibly frustrating. I only had it mildly when I was at Craig Hospital, but remember other patients having it much worse and it was SO frustrating. I have been volunteering back at Craig Hospital to get some medical experience to have more to say on my resume other than "I was a patient", and met to 2 people in the T-Zone who had had strokes (the T-Zone is a therapeutic area where you focus on playing games as strategy to get coordination back. It wasn't until after I was discharged from Craig that I saw the benefit of holding the cards in my hands, thinking about the next move, etc. as getting some of my functions back.)

At the time it was just fun times with Sandy, the OT therapist. Jill, a patient I met earlier this week, had a stroke 2 months ago, and currently has a pretty severe case of Aphasia. She said something about Shoes... and Sandy and I finally understood her to mean that she wanted to be in my shoes.. Tears welled up in my eyes. I remember that desperation. That feeling of helplessness. Of just wanting the frustration to end. Of wanting to wake up from the bad dream you currently find yourself in and be back to the way things once were. I told her that things were going to get better, but that "this" took a LOT of hard work, and I haven't gotten here overnight. It's taken 2.5 years of hard work, tears, God's intervention, and a lot of prayer. I have no idea why the Aphasia just went away. That's for a speech pathologist to figure out. There's a lot of things surrounding the stroke that I will never understand, and frankly, I am not sure I want to anymore. It happened. Knowing WHY can't do anything now. Having something to blame won't change today. I'll be on medication for the rest of my life. I'm taking care of myself and working hard to prevent anything else from happening. But I'm not letting that prevent me from living today to the fullest either. I could long or wish from things to be different, but they are not. So for now, I will pray for Jill and the other patients that I meet at the hospital that are where I was a few years ago, because I know what it is to be in the shoes, literally.
Love,
Amy Christine