Brian had conduction aphasia, and Dee missed him as her ‘best friend’. Knowing that 1-2 sessions per week wasn’t working, she found The Aphasia Center. Through a 6 week intensive course, Brian learned to text, write sentences, increase his vocabulary, improve his understanding, read, and use his computer. He could now understand her and use strategies to help them have conversations!
How did you find out about the Aphasia Center?
I wasn’t happy with the speech therapy we were getting at home. My insurance case manager had looked and looked and could not find anymore. Everybody only wanted to offer one or two days a week. There’s just not enough support in speech therapy for aphasia patients. You know, if they’ve got physical disabilities and things like that there’s an enormous amount. So I just got on the internet and started looking and then I found the aphasia center and what they offered. Five days a week, intense therapy and I read the website and I watched some of the videos of some of the other patients and I just knew that this was where we needed to come. My husband was, he was energetic, he was wanting to get better.
We wanted him to speak more appropriately. He was gaining words but they weren’t always appropriate to the conversation. He couldn’t text any of his buddies anymore. He did a lot of texting with all of his buddies, he used to do that. He couldn’t read, he could look at a sentence and pick out one or two key words and try to figure out what the sentence was. He couldn’t have a conversation. I miss my husband. He’s my best friend, and we couldn’t have a conversation anymore. We couldn’t talk about anything; the kids, even just what happened at work. We wanted to get some of that back.
So now having gone through the program, are there moments that you remember that you go “We couldn’t do that before!” or “He couldn’t do that before!”?
There’s so much that he couldn’t do before that he could do now. He can read sentence and actually read the words and say the words out loud that you know he’s reading them. He can speak in short sentences so we can have a conversation now. His memory is better, you can ask him something and tell him to do something and he can remember it versus just one task he can do two or three now. He can text short sentences, you know, three or four word sentences now. And when he writes, he can write 4 to 6 word sentences now. His comprehension is better. If we were at home at the house I would have to say his name, get him to look at me, and then tell him whatever it was I was trying to convey. Now, I can just be talking in the room and we don’t even have to be in the same room and he knows I’m talking to him and he knows what I’m saying. It’s just so much better.
There’s a big difference, his vocabulary has increased so much. And now he can look at something and if he can’t say it or doesn’t know how to read it he has the tools to figure it out. He can sit down and he can break the word up. He can do that now. He knows what a verb is now, he knows what a noun is, he knows what the sentence structure should be. They’ve re-taught him all of that. Completely taught him immensely, he can use his computer, the laptop now. He can search for things. There’s so much more that he can do now that he couldn’t when we came.
So then lastly, would you recommend intensive aphasia treatment to someone?
Oh yes, and I already have. You know, I’ve talked about it on social media and other websites. And anybody that has aphasia from whatever reason, not even necessarily a stroke, they need to come here.