Consumer stories: Bridget

Transcript

John had a stroke in 2021. It was a wake up stroke. He fell off the bed at 3:00 AM. I allowed him a little bit of time to get up off the bed, back onto the bed, and realized that when I asked him a few questions, they were weird. So I called Triple O. They came, and he was in the hospital by 4:00 AM.

CT scans revealed that he’d had a fairly large stroke, left hemisphere. And we’ve since understood that left hemisphere is mainly associated with language loss, and that became our challenge. The main challenge was something called aphasia, which very few people know about. There is no training for aphasia in medical, clinical, nursing worlds. We would love to see that happen because aphasia means that there is language loss, cognitive loss, comprehension loss, and no ability to express. The intelligence hasn’t gone, but it’s just the fact that expression can’t happen.

The global statistics are one in four will have a stroke in their lifetime, and 40% to 60% of them will have aphasia or some sort of language challenge, and yet nobody knows about it. The word is unknown. People give up on elderly people in a big way. If they had spent the time while we were in hospital, they would have understood that we were drivers, that we were wanting recovery, we were wanting quality of life still. John was playing tennis up until the stroke at 79. We’d started a new business at 79 and 73. So we were gunning for whatever we could possibly get out of the recovery phase. We wanted that quality of life.

My strong suggestion is that people take an interest in aphasia and get training for aphasia or give training for aphasia. Communication is a basic human right, and yet people with aphasia have no ability to communicate, and that makes working with anybody extremely hard. And sometimes it can be seen as a deficit that people take personally, and there can be some huge misinterpretations in that translation.