Best speech ever

Today may have been Linda's best speech therapy session ever. By that, I mean her speech was the best I have heard it yet.

The major problem in terms of understanding Linda's speech has for some time been hypernasality. Basically, that means she loses air through her nose when she doesn't mean to. The effect is that percussive consonants are replaced with nasal ones. B and P sound like M. D and T and to some extent S and Z all sound like N. With practice, I've learned to recognize subtle differences in the way Linda actually says all of them, but many people have problems still.

Today, Linda's consonants were very good. Her Bs and Ps were all appropriately percussive. Her Ts and her Ds were excellent. She did the best hard G sound I've heard since the stroke. All in all it was a very impressive session.

I complimented her on it tonight. I don't think she really had much impression about how well it went. Just as an experiment, I pulled out some lists of hard words that I constructed specifically for her. I call them my "magic lists." Magic list #1 has 29 different words that at one point in her recovery would all have been indistinguishable from the word "nine." In the past, I've had her read words at random from the list and tried to identify them by sound. It's a pretty hard exercise, by design. Tonight we made almost no errors.

Great other therapies

Don't think her other therapies are going poorly because I go on about speech. PT went especially well today. Linda did the stairs (which she rarely does in therapy) and needed only the rail and minimal support of her other hand to do them well. She walked on a balance beam for the first time since the stroke, with help. It was challenging, but seemed to go well also.

All together, it was a therapy day you couldn't really complain about.