I have my second speech therapy appointment today. The first was last week - about 5 days after my surgery - and it didn't go so well. There were two people there - the speech therapist and a student from SJSU. Normally, I would be all for supporting the educational program. I got my teaching certificate from San Jose myself, and I completely support the student teaching/mentor experience! But it seemed inappropriate at the time. I was still so emotionally raw from the previous week's experience...Not to mention the fact that I was physically healing and still struggling with about 4 seizures a day, which was sapping my strength and fucking with my mind in a major way. And yet, these two young women just seemed to be clueless about my condition and were plugging away, administering their baseline assessments, pushing me to the point of frustration again and again. Needless to say, I broke down crying a couple of times within the 50 min. appointment and really had a good sobfest once it was over.
So, I'm super excited to be returning today!
(I hope that my extreme sarcasm reads adequately on the screen?)
And yet, of course, I WANT all the speech therapy that I can get. Now that my seizures have calmed down, my speech is probably the most outwardly noticeable evidence of my condition. (If I comb my hair the right way, you can't even see the gnarly staples and stitches on the side of my head.) Every day, it seems like my speech is getting a little bit better, but it's still jumbled and slow.
The closest analogy I can think of is when I went to Aix-en-Provence, France to study for a semester in my junior year of college. I knew exactly what I wanted to say in English, but my brain/mouth/tongue didn't always cooperate to get it out the way I imagined in my head. And the result was that I sometimes felt like my true feelings/personality/meaning didn't always translate.
The brain is a weird, weird thing. I've often said that if I didn't go into teaching, I would want to have studied neuroscience. It's fascinating. in the abstract. But when it's MY brain, it sort of pisses me off. What the hell? It's not so hard. I think of something I want to say and you just ...make it happen by sending signals to my mouth to form the words and voila! Only, as it turns out, it's not that simple.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not complaining. I CAN speak - and the night before I was going in for surgery, we didn't know exactly what the outcome was going to be. There was a chance that I was going to have significant weakness on my whole left side of my body. So far, so good, as far as that's concerned.
I'll just keep plugging away, and hopefully, little by little, my brain and mouth will get more simpatico. In the meantime, please be patient with me. Try not to finish my sentences for me, although I'm sure it's very tempting. Trust me that I'm going to eventually get it right. Because, although it might not sound like it right now - this is the voice of WARRIOR! RAwwwwr!
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