With Conduction aphasia, Todd couldn’t say his name before coming for intensive aphasia therapy. Now, he and Erica can have a normal conversation and she takes it one day at a time for recovery.
I started Googling everything and realized that there aren’t intensive therapies in every state or anything.
I found a few that seemed ok, but when I found The Aphasia Center and called, and talked to Brian, I just knew that was the place.
Todd was gung-ho, he wanted to work on things and five hours of treatment a day is what he needed. And since we’ve been here, huge huge growth, that I’m amazed.
For one thing, there’s the money factor - You think “is it worth it?” and ‘what if it doesn’t work?’ And that was one thing that I’d asked, if Todd doesn’t like it, can he come home?
And the answer was ‘yes’. I was also told that nobody’s ever left the program. And they want to stay on. And Todd wanted to stay on.
But I wanted to get home and see my girls!
I wanted Todd to feel like he’d gained something. With me, I can say that I want all this stuff I wanted to feel like he’s gained something. And that’s the real thing is, he does feel like he’s definitely grown. Vocabulary, I mean he can say his name now. I mean just little things too. Even more complex things, when we have a normal conversation I know what he’s saying now./
Obviously the writing, communicating, slowing down my speech, making sure he understands, and just realizing that it takes a little time and then he’ll get it. Although he focuses so much on certain things.
It’s one day at a time. That’s what I keep telling myself is you can only deal with one day at a time. And if it’s not one day then it’s one minute at a time.
And some days you have good days and other days you have not so good days. And so I just pray that each day I wake up and we have one more good day.
We would move down here if we had the money. Todd is ready to move down here and in a heartbeat if we could have intensive therapy and continue it. I guarantee we’ll be back.