Speech Pathology Post Severe Brain Injury

Speech Pathology Post Severe Brain Injury: Lori Part Seven 

We discuss Lori’s speech pathology post severe brain injury in Part Seven and how much of a role in her recovery this played.

Tell me about the speech pathology post severe brain injury you got while you were an inpatient.

I remember when I began with speech, well, when my memory began with speech pathology – I was, we were playing games.  I’ve always loved to play games, and we were playing adult kind of games.

With an adult kind of theme?

I guess we were playing, maybe child kind of games with adult words, maybe, okay?  Words with more than four letters, I guess I could say.  And it seemed like it developed pretty quickly into that I was able to work on a computer in therapy. Not that I was able to do it properly, but in speech pathology I could start using a computer.

I learned in speech pathology, I’m sure that I learned in speech pathology, the English language better than I did when I went to school the first time.  So I learned, um, I learned, I learned how to learn, I guess.  I learned, I was learning things that I didn’t know.  If that’s clear, I was learning how to find out what I didn’t know.

So I started, watching game shows on TV which helped me learn.  I was learning that I didn’t, that I had lost a lot of words and that I didn’t understand how to describe things, or that I didn’t understand colors.  And I decided probably through having speech pathology that I would read a dictionary from the first page to the last page, which helped me.

Was that a little dictionary or a big dictionary that they used in your speech pathology post severe brain injury ?

Big Webster’s Dictionary.  And I did the same thing with the Thesaurus.  It just seems to me that I got those ideas from speech pathology.  My speech pathologist was a very appropriate business kind of person, and I just remember looking at her and thinking that she was so intelligent.  So I liked to model after her, I remember thinking I want to be as intelligent as she is.

Now you are in Michigan while getting your speech pathology post severe brain injury .

Yes.

And historically, Michigan has been one of the leading places in the country for ongoing intensive care for someone with severe brain injury.  Was that true in your case?

I had, I had ongoing intensive care when I was an inpatient, which was I’m, I’m thinking from April until about June.  Then I had outpatient therapy from June, I don’t know.  I remember seasons but I don’t remember dates and times, and I know I had outpatient therapy in the fall and in the winter and it seems like in the spring and into the summer, so that’s a long period of time.

What do you remember about your outpatient therapy and your outpatient speech pathology post severe brain injury ?

I remember that more clearly than I remember any of the other therapies.

Would you have gotten speech, occupational therapy, physical therapy?

I had neuropsych therapy also from the beginning.  So I had neuropsych, speech, PT and OT, three days a week?  Maybe five and then decreased to three.

Next in Part Eight –Treatment Overcomes Survivors Fears of Neuropsychologist