Even though this is a made up
story, these situations do happen almost every day. Over Christmas break, as I was shadowing a
Speech Language Pathologist (SLP) at Fisher Titus Medical Center, I was
fortunate enough to be able to see the post-tests done on a stroke
patient. The tests performed made sure
that the patient did not have any droop in their facial muscles, they made sure
the patient had the ability to swallow
food of different consistencies, and was able to have normal conversation with
the SLP. The whole process was called a
bedside swallow evaluation. The SLP
asked the patient what their name was, why they were in the hospital, what year
it was, and who was the president. These
tests were performed on the patient in order to see if they were suffering from
any type of aphasia.
Aphasia is a type of disorder
resulting from there being damage done to the brain affecting the areas in
which language is controlled. Speaking,
listening, reading, and writing are different aspects of language that can be
affected by aphasia. The patient in this
situation suffers from an expressive aphasia.
How would you feel if you could understand perfectly what people were
saying to you, but you just could not get the words out to respond to
them? It would be a tough situation to
have to go through every day of your life.
Not only would this be very frustrating, but it would limit what you are
able to do because certain people may not know your condition or why you are
not responding to them.
By working with a SLP, they can
help patients correct this disorder.
Depending on how bad the aphasia is, different tactics are taken to
treat the disorder. Formal or informal
tactics are used for treatment and even computer programs can be used to help
get their brain activity working in order to use expressive language. These formal or informal tactics are
activities as simple as repeating words or reading words off a list. When the patient struggles with one, the SLP
will help them make the right movements with their mouth and lips in order for
the word to come out clearly. The word
is repeated until the patient gets it right or as close to being right as they
can!
One blog that I came across called,
Expressive Aphasia, is about a person’s experience with recovering from a
stroke that lead to an aphasia. This
person also had expressive aphasia. He
went through many sessions of therapy with a SLP and is now almost fully
recovered! Going through and reading his
experiences made me really think about how lucky I am to be able to express
myself without any troubles. It had to
have been one of the most frustrating things to go through when before the
stroke he was a normal talking person.
It is a great feeling knowing that there are people out there (SLP) that
can help people regain their ability to speak after such a traumatic experience
like a stroke, causing brain damage.
In this post, I really tried to
incorporate a story that hooked the reader and made them want to continue
reading. I also tried to keep the story
relevant throughout the whole post, that way the reader would have a connection
to what they read at the beginning. I
kept my writing at a more personable level, so it was an easy read throughout
the whole post.
